Federal Judge Suggests Sterilization Before Woman’s Sentencing

OKLAHOMA CITY, OK — A federal judge in Oklahoma City told a 34-year-old woman with long rap sheet and seven children she should consider getting herself sterilized — and she did in a case that has alarmed civil rights advocates who say the judge’s unusual suggestion harkens back to a time when sterilization was used to control so-called “undesirable” populations.

Summer Thyme Creel, 34, pleaded guilty to a single count of counterfeiting in January 2017, but Senior U.S. District Judge Stephen P. Friot postponed sentencing several times over the past year because Creel was either in jail or tested positive for crack-cocaine or methamphetamine use, court records show. When she didn’t show up for sentencing last June, Friot said in a written order that he would consider it if she chose to have the procedure.

In an order setting sentencing dates last summer, Friot wrote that Creel had “a series of relationships with various sires over approximately the last 14 years” and that, given the birth dates of her seven children, “it appears highly likely” that some of her children were “conceived, carried and born” while she was a habitual drug user.

In 2012, The Oklahoma Department of Human Services terminated Creel's parental rights on six of her seven children — the last was born in 2016 — after an investigation “for failure to protect the children from harm,” he wrote.

At sentencing, he wrote, “Ms. Creel may, if (and only if) she chooses to do so, present medical evidence to the court establishing that she has been rendered incapable of procreation.”

Creel underwent the sterilization procedure in November, The Oklahoman reported. Her court-appointed defense attorney, Brett Behenna, told the newspaper that he spoke in detail with his client about it, but she “voluntarily wanted it.”

Behenna told The Washington Post he “was surprised” when Friot called him and the prosecutor into his chambers last June and said he was going to include the suggestion in a written order setting sentencing dates.

“I was surprised,” Behenna told The Post. “That’s a very serious thing to bring up in the context of a criminal case, and I’ve never seen it before.”

In her sentencing memo, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jessica Perry, who prosecuted the case, urged Friot not to consider Creel’s sterilization, writing that she has a “fundamental constitutional right to procreate” and that her decision on whether to have additional children was irrelevant to the facts of the case.

On Thursday, Friot sentenced Creel to a year in prison. Perry had recommended a term of six to 12 months.

A habitual offender, Creel’s rap sheet includes multiple convictions for passing bad checks, embezzlement, grand larceny, forgery, obstructing an officer, and false impersonation — all charges handled in state courts. Creel landed in federal court in 2016 in the counterfeiting scheme after she and a friend were indicted on charges they stole bank statements from mailboxes and used the account numbers to create phony checks.

Though the judge cited Creel’s history of drug abuse, Deborah A. Reid, senior health policy attorney for the Legal Action Center, told The Post a substance abuse disorder should be considered a “disease, not a character flaw to be used against somebody in sentencing.” Courts should never be involved in a person’s reproductive choices, she added, and “sterilization should never be a consideration in sentencing.”

Eesha Pandit, a longtime women’s rights advocate and managing partner of the Center for Advancing Innovative Policy, told The Post the case “harkens to a long legacy of coercive reproductive policies and practices.”

“For decades,” Pandit said, “sterilization was used as a way to control populations considered ‘undesirable’ — immigrants, people of color, poor people, those with mental illnesses and disabilities. Tying Ms. Creel’s sentencing to her sterilization formalizes the coercion — the threat of a harsher sentence is manipulative and dangerous, and aligns with a legacy of eugenic practices through the U.S.”

Friot was appointed to the federal bench in Oklahoma’s Western District in 2001 by President George W. Bush. He assumed senior status — a form of semi-retirement — in December 2014.

In 2013, he sided with religious conservatives in a ruling exempting four universities from including coverage for contraceptives in their insurance plans, as required at the time by the Affordable Care Act, because they are “Christ-centered institutions” that believe birth control is sinful. The ruling was overturned by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, Colorado.

Lynn Paltrow, the founder of the National Advocates for Pregnant Woman and a former senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, told The Post “the irony is not lost on us that this federal district court judge sided with religious organizations resisting Obamacare’s mandate to cover contraception but believes it is appropriate to wield his enormous power to punish a woman for procreating.”

She also said it is “highly unlikely that this judge has asked any man how many children he fathered and used that in his sentencing determination.”

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