A 38-year-old man with a history of sex crime convictions was sentenced Thursday to life without parole under Oregon’s three-strikes law for certain sex offenses.

Chad Pearson entered a no-contest plea last summer to rape, sodomy and first-degree unlawful sexual penetration.

A 38-year-old man with a history of sex crime convictions was sentenced Thursday to life in prison under Oregon’s three-strikes law.

The case was his third felony sex crime conviction. He has previous convictions for rape and sex abuse in 2008 and 2013. His victim in his 2008 case was underage. The victim in the latest case was 11 at the time of the assault, which took place in Gladstone.

Under a 2001 law, life in prison is the presumptive sentence for a three-time sex crime offender. Clackamas County Circuit Judge Ann Lininger presided over the case.

According to the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, a clearinghouse for justice-related statistics, a handful of repeat sex offenders are sentenced to life each year. In total, 40 people are serving life without parole sentences under the law.

Clackamas County Deputy District Attorney Bryan Censoni called the facts in Pearson’s latest case “horrific and deplorable.”

Censoni said the victim disclosed the assault to her friend’s mother within hours. The woman was dating Pearson at the time and told the girl to apologize to Pearson for making the accusation, Censoni said.

Censoni said the girl then became withdrawn and depressed.

In a sentencing memo asking for a life sentence, Censoni said the girl “found courage and her voice” in 2017, when she was 17, and disclosed the abuse to a therapist who reported the allegations to authorities.

-- Noelle Crombie; ncrombie@oregonian.com; 503-276-7184; @noellecrombie

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