A Bristol Borough man convicted of sexually assaulting two sisters – the youngest beginning when she was no older than 7 – was sentenced today to serve 30 to 80 years in state prison.

Ronald Smith, 57, continued to proclaim his innocence, despite having been found guilty by a Bucks County jury in January of multiple counts of child rape, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and indecent assault.

“I’ll never plead guilty to this crime because I didn’t do it,” Smith told Bucks County Common Pleas Court Judge Rea B. Boylan before she sentenced him. “Whatever you put on me, I’ll take it.”

“The jury has spoken and I am bound by their verdicts, which I have concluded were supported by the facts,” Boylan responded.

“Significant scars have been left by his behavior,” she added.

Smith, who knew the victims through their mother, committed an escalating series of sexual assaults on one of the girls over a seven-year period, starting when she was age 6 or 7. The attacks began with inappropriate touching and escalated to oral, anal and vaginal intercourse.

Smith silenced the girl by threatening to harm members of her family, primarily her mother, if she told anyone.

“If I had been old enough to know better, instead of being a scared little girl when he started hurting me, I would have seen him for who he is and I would have spoken up and told someone,” the older girl, now 16, said in a victim-impact statement she read in court.

“Despite what he did to me to ruin my childhood, he did not ruin the good, caring and kind person I am and that I will continue to be,” the girl added. “I will go on to lead a productive life because I am a good person and I am stronger than he ever thought I would be.”

Her sister, now 15, was abused over a briefer period of time, when Smith forced her to perform oral sex on him several times at age 12. She was too upset to read her statement in court, and asked Deputy District Attorney Kristin M. McElroy to read it for her.

“I have so many emotions about the awful, disgusting things that he did to me, I feel like it’s going to take me a long time to get past it,” her statement said. “But honestly, I don’t want to deal with it. I wish I could just bury it way down inside me and never have to think about it again.”

She vowed “to live a good and decent life in spite of what he did to me.”

Boylan sentenced Smith to serve 20 to 40 years for his attacks on the older girl, and 10 to 40 years for the crimes against her sister. The judge ordered the sentences to run consecutively, in recognition that there were two victims.

Before the sentencing, Boylan declared Smith to be a sexually violent predator, affirming the recommendation of the Pennsylvania Sexual Offenders Assessment Board.

Psychologist Eric Weinstein, a member of the board, testified that Smith suffers from a pedophilic disorder and displays “a great deal of antisocial personality traits” and predatory behavior.

“He’s an adult who has a sexual attraction to children,” Weinstein said, and is likely to re-offend if released.

The designation means that Smith must be registered with police as a sexual offender for the rest of his life.

The case was prosecuted by McElroy, former First Assistant District Attorney Michelle A. Henry and former Deputy District Attorney Lindsay E. Vaughan, and investigated by the Bristol Borough Police Department.

Contact: Kristin M. McElroy, 215.348.6336, kmmcelroy@buckscounty.org  

Approved for release by Gregg D. Shore, First Assistant District Attorney.