Courtroom proceedings heated up in Georgia during the sentencing hearing for ten former Atlanta public school educators who were convicted earlier this month on an assortment of racketeering charges in one of the nation’s largest test-cheating scandals.
When one defense attorney got loud, Superior Court Judge Jerry Baxter fired back saying “there were thousands of children that were harmed in this thing” and telling him to “sit down or I’m going to put you in jail.”
Two of the educators took plea deals with one of them, a former teacher, to serve five years’ probation to include a year of home confinement and the other, a former testing coordinator, to serve six months of weekends in the country jail and five years’ probation. Both plea agreements were entered with the stipulation that they waived their right to an appeal.
Of the remaining eight, three were given 20-year sentences, to serve seven years in prison and the remainder on probation, and five were given five-year sentences with to serve two years in prison and three to serve one year and the remainder of those sentences to be served on probation.
You can watch the drama unfold in the clip, below:
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