A former Juneau fire captain has been sentenced to more than a year in prison for physically assaulting his stepdaughter.
A jury found Brent Clancy guilty of assault in April, and at a sentencing hearing last week, the presiding judge said he had little faith in Clancy’s ability to change.
This story contains descriptions of violence against children.
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Brent Clancy was charged with assaulting his 12-year-old stepdaughter last summer. The incident followed a water fight Clancy and his kids were having. He testified during the trial that his stepdaughter threw water in his face. He then threw her on the couch and pinned her down, while his wife begged him to stop.
His wife, Sommer Clancy, filed a protective order against him shortly after the assault. Still, he continued to send her hateful messages, despite having voluntarily gone through mental health treatment.
Sommer described the text messages at Clancy’s sentencing hearing.
“A lot of these are calling me terrible names, a lot of swear words, and then some of these are him blaming me for what is happening to him,” she said. “In some of these, I ask him. ‘You know, it sounds like you’re blaming me. This is not my fault that this is happening,’ and he says ‘This is your fault. This is all your fault.’”
After a trial in April, a jury found Clancy guilty on five counts — two counts of assault, two counts of assault when a child is present and violating a protective order.
At the sentencing hearing earlier this month, defense attorney Andrew Miller said it will take time for Clancy to change, and jail time won’t help.
“Treatment is something that it’s not an immediate fix. It’s not (like) you go there and you walk out the door and you’re a different person,” he said. “It’s a long journey. It’s a continuing journey that’s going to continue, but he’s on that path, and we don’t see how it would be anything other than a setback to impose jail time.”
But Judge Larry Woolford disagreed. At the end of the hearing, he spoke directly to Clancy.
“Your focus remains relentlessly narcissistic,” he said. “Your struggles, your needs, what you have lost, the embarrassment, shame of having your behavior exposed in this public way. And so I don’t assign much weight to rehabilitation as a goal of sentencing in this matter.”
Woolford said Clancy was a complicated man, and referenced his decades of work as a firefighter. But Woolford said Clancy’s stepdaughter needs to know that what Clancy did to her was wrong in the eyes of the law.
“Your stepdaughter got you wet during a water fight that you were participating in,” he said. “And instead of shrugging off that innocent, light-hearted, childish fun, you decided to teach her a lesson by throwing her to the couch, putting your hands on her neck.”
Woolford went on to say that Clancy did teach his stepdaughter a lesson, though not the one Clancy intended.
“You taught her that you’re a bully, and you taught her what that means. That bullies are cowards, that they’re jealous, that their insecurity makes them lash out at people who are smaller or younger, people who they think are weak,” he said. “But your stepdaughter learned that she isn’t weak. She learned that she deserves to feel safe, that she deserves to be respected.”
Woolford sentenced Clancy to one year and two months in prison, and five years of probation after his release.
Clancy will be remanded to start his sentence on Sept. 1.
