The attorney for Lindsey Whiteside, a former youth minister with Getwell Church in Hernando, Mississippi, has pushed back against an effort to resentence his client on allegations that she produced two fraudulent letters of support to reduce her punishment after pleading guilty to child sexual abuse.
Whiteside’s attorney, Tony Farese, dismissed the allegation as false, according to a report Wednesday from local news outlet WMC.
Earlier this month, Desoto County District Attorney Matthew Barton called for Whiteside’s resentencing after alleging that two of the 49 letters of support she submitted to mitigate her sentence were coerced.
In the court filing pushing for Whiteside’s resentencing cited by Fox 13, Barton’s office argued that Whiteside “even moved the Court to seal the letters from the public in order to solicit ever more supporters to write on her behalf.”
Barton’s office alleged that Whiteside “procured this mitigating evidence through means of coercion and deceit.”
Two individuals who wrote letters of support for Whiteside allegedly contacted Barton’s office, requesting that they recant their letters because she had led them to believe she was innocent. One former supporter also “described being under constant pressure to submit a letter of support.”
Whiteside was sentenced in state court last month to just three years of house arrest and seven years of additional probation after she pleaded guilty to child sexual abuse. The controversial sentence led to public outcry, and she was rearrested on federal charges for two counts of transporting a minor across state lines for illicit sexual purposes and one count of enticement of a child.
She remains in jail, where she will stay until her trial next year, after legal wranglings over bail.
The former youth minister is facing the possibility of spending the rest of her life in prison for the federal charges to which she has pleaded not guilty.
Last month, a federal magistrate judge had ordered Whiteside released on a $60,000 unsecured bond. Her schoolteacher mother, Gale Whiteside, had testified that she was not a danger to society, according to court documents reviewed by The Christian Post.
After an evidentiary hearing, Chief Judge Debra Brown reversed the 26-year-old Whiteside’s bond decision. She said she considered, among other things, Whiteside’s previous bond conditions, GPS monitoring and the relationship between her and her then-15-year-old victim, WMC reports.
During Whiteside’s fiery detention hearing for the new charges in federal court in Oxford, last month, her defense attorney argued that her prosecution was “retaliatory.”
Whiteside had previously been ordered to 24/7 house arrest, where she would only be allowed to leave her mother’s house to be in the yard or attend church and doctor’s appointments before her trial. She was also required to find a new home by Nov. 16 because her mother’s house is near a local school.
If she had remained there, she would have been out of compliance with the requirements of her status as a registered sex offender. Whiteside was also required to have all her electronic devices inspected, take random drug tests and prohibited from having drugs and guns and consuming excessive alcohol.
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