When Mohammed Ali Mohammed was a young teenager living in Utah, he did what he describes as “very, very horrible things.” What any person would describe as very horrible things.
The Somali refugee, then 14, raped two women he had never met on back-to-back nights in Salt Lake City. He pleaded guilty and spent seven years in a juvenile detention center, working to rehabilitate himself. Along the way, he won allies who considered him a changed man.
A Utah judge decided he was worth taking a chance on, and instead of sending him to an adult prison as his victims wanted, she ordered him put on a strict probation.