Child sex abuser who had previous conviction overturned agrees to plea deal

District Attorney Lawrence Friedman thought for sure he was going to have to retry the local case against convicted child molester Sean Vickers after an appeals court overturned four of his jury trial convictions from 2014.

Vickers was back in Genesee County Court today. He was originally scheduled for a hearing on who his trial attorney would be and to clarify whether Vickers would testify before a grand jury presentment on the evidence against him this coming Tuesday.

Instead, Vickers surprised Friedman by agreeing to a plea deal that would cap his potential prison term on the charges to 40 years.

In 2014, Judge Robert C. Noonan handed down a 107-year sentence after Vickers was convicted at trial on similar charges.

The plea deal Vickers accepted today is the same one he turned down before that trial.

Since then, he's been convicted of one count in Genesee County that carried a seven-year prison sentence and of sexual abuse charges in Niagara County that resulted in a 20-year sentence.

This afternoon, Vickers was arraigned on four counts of course of sexual conduct in the first degree. He entered a guilty to plea to two counts in satisfaction of all four charges.

The four charges covered acts against two different victims, and the two counts admitted to were for sexual acts against a child under age 13 in 2001 through 2002 in the City of Batavia.

If the case had been presented to a grand jury, Friedman would have asked the grand jury to return an indictment that included two counts of predatory sexual assault against a child in the first degree, a Class A2 felony, which would have carried a mandatory sentence of 15 to life or 25 to life.

The plea deal means the victims won't have to testify in a second Genesee County trial and the 48-year-old Vickers won't likely get out of prison before the start of the second half of the century.