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Defense attorney Frank Lucianna, Homer Bishop (STORY / PHOTOS: CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter Mary K. Miraglia)
Homer Bishop, 41, must serve five years of probation, and remain on Megan’s Law registration and parole supervision for life following his release from the Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center in Avenel. With 215 days of jail credit, he can be out after 42 months.
“I’m very sorry for what happened,” Bishop told the judge. “This is the first time I have ever been in trouble, and I can assure you this will never happen again.”
His victim also spoke, seeking leniency for Bishop, who was found to be a repetitive and compulsive sex offender during an evaluation at Avenel.
“I know how it feels to be fatherless,” said the victim, now in her 20s. “I want to speak on behalf of my brother and sister. I don’t want them to grow up fatherless they way I did.
“Yes, I have suffered from it, but I would like the suffering to end.”
Bishop was captured by U.S. Marshals in Jamaica in February, ending seven years on the run, thanks to tips received by Bergen County Sheriff Michael Saudino’s office.
Seeking leniency for his client, defense attorney Frank Lucianna recalled in court this morning that Oscar Wilde went to jail “for two years for having a relationship.”
While there, Lucianna said, Wilde wrote “The Ballad of Reading Gaole.”
“Each man has a beast within his breast,” Lucianna told the judge. “My client made a terrible mistake, and he is so remorseful. He wants his family to be back to normal.”
Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor Kenneth Ralph said Bishop made the ordeal worse for the victim and her family by running.
“The whole experience would be in the past in he had not chosen to flee to Jamaica,” Ralph said.
“He didn’t make a mistake — he’s acting under a compulsion,” the prosecutor added.
Superior Court Judge Edward Jerejian (STORY / PHOTOS: Mary K. Miraglia, CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter)
“Many times in a case of this nature we see so-called otherwise ‘good people in the community’ — a dichotomy of good and evil — but we are here to sentence him for his conduct in this case, albeit 10 years ago.”
Superior Court Judge Edward A. Jerejian agreed with Ralph, calling Bishop “selfish” and telling him he must “bear full responsibility for what you did.”
Jerejian contrasted Bishop’s actions with those of the victim, “who is thinking of her family and even of you. But you didn’t think about her.”
“This matter has been on for a long time, and everyone else has been harmed by this,” the judge said. “You didn’t want to face what you did. Now that you’re back and in custody, you want it to be easier for you.
“Children in our society need to be protected from people who prey on them and sexually abuse them. There needs to be a deterrent for those who would seek to do that.”
The 5-foot-9-inch, 182-pound Bishop was living in Paterson and working at Frisch Yeshiva High School in Paramus when he was arrested in June 2006 and charged with sexually assaulting the girl — who authorities said wasn’t a student there — several times over the previous year, beginning when she was 12.
Separated from his wife at the time, he’d worked at the private school for roughly three years, authorities said at the time.
A judge originally set bail at $300,000 but defense lawyers got it lowered to $80,000 — which Bishop posted in October 2006, four months after his arrest, records show.
An investigation by the county Special Victims Unit and Lodi police found that Bishop “had been having forced sexual encounters over a period of approximately one year” with the girl, beginning when she was 12, before she “finally disclosed the abuse to her mother, who reported it to the police,” Bergen County Prosecutor John L. Molinelli said following his arrest.
After copping a plea to aggravated sexual assault in August 2007, Bishop skipped a November sentencing in Hackensack, court records show. Authorities said he fled to his native Jamaica, where he took the aliases “Kevin Bishop” and “Antwone Briare,” did some computer tech work and opened his own restaurant.
Bishop’s image and information were subsequently posted on the Bergen County Sheriff’s “Most Wanted” list.
The sheriff’s office received an anonymous tip in 2010 that Bishop had gone to Jamaica. It wasn’t specific enough to locate him, but another tipster in 2013 put him in Kingston, with added details, Molinelli said.
Molinelli said the arrest was the culmination of work by his detectives, the Bergen County Sheriff’s Office, the Marshals and the Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs “which was involved in the approval and submission of the warrant for extradition to Jamaican authorities.”
Despite the successful outcome, Bishop became a poster child of sorts for a local news media organization’s criticisms of the “Most Wanted” lists published by the county prosecutor’s and sheriff’s offices.
Besides his penalties, he’s on the hook for $1,825.30 in restitution for the cost of being transported from Jamaica to Bergen County, including pay and expenses for a U.S. Marshal and a Jamaican police officer to accompany him.
Defense attorney Frank Lucianna, Homer Bishop (STORY / PHOTOS: CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter Mary K. Miraglia)
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