On Tuesday, Polk County District Judge David Porter announced that 17-year-old Pieper Lewis would not be sentenced to prison for the murder of 37-year-old Zachary Brooks. Lewis was sentenced to five years of supervised probation and a deferred judgment. According to information from the University of Iowa, a deferred judgment can lead to a person’s record being expunged upon successfully completing probation.

Porter also ordered Lewis to pay $150,000 in restitution to Brook’s family and she must also complete 1,200 hours of community service. Iowa law requires defendants convicted of homicides to pay a minimum of $150,000 to the victim’s family.

The decision by Porter comes over a year after Lewis pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the death of Brooks, who she claimed had raped her.

According to the Associated Press, in 2020, Lewis fatally stabbed Brooks over 30 times after he allegedly raped her several times. Lewis was 15 at the time of the stabbing, the Associated Press reported.

Following the case, Leland Schipper, who according to a report from the Des Moines Register, was Lewis’ freshman math teacher at Des Moines Lincoln High School, created a GoFundMe page to accept donations for Lewis.

“Today, my former student, Pieper Lewis bravely took the microphone during her sentencing hearing and told the courtroom that her voice mattered. I was incredibly proud of her. She was powerful, and she brought me to tears. The judge then studied all the evidence in Pieper Lewis’ case carefully and decided that she did not deserve to spend time in an adult prison,” the GoFundMe page said.

“Today, the judge recognized that Pieper was a victim and a child,” Schipper wrote on the page. “He, like almost everyone who knows the details of Pieper’s case, empathized with a girl with no violent history before or after this incident, who saw killing a man as the only way out of a truly horrific situation. He granted her probation and a deferred judgment—meaning if she meets the conditions of her parole, she will have the felony removed from her record. This is a compassionate outcome.”

The GoFundMe organizer went on to state that despite the judge’s decision, she thinks that “Pieper does not deserve to be finically burdened for the rest of her life because the state of Iowa wrote a law that fails to give judges any discretion as to how it is applied.”

As of publication time, the fundraiser had received over $200,000 in donations. Newsweek has reached out to the GoFundMe organizer for further comment.

Prior to the sentencing, Lewis spoke to the court and said, “I wish that never happened…But to say there’s only one victim in the story is absurd,” according to the Des Moines Register.

“My story has changed me,” Lewis continued. The events that took place on that horrific day cannot be changed, as much as I wish I could. That day a combination of complicated actions took place resulting in the death of a person, as well as a stolen innocence of a child."