Altered jury verdict leads to six-year prison term

<p>A Sonoma County judge Thursday sentenced an Occidental man to the maximum term of six years in prison in an attempted sexual assault, capping a controversial case in which the judge had earlier modified a jury’s verdict that would have mandated a life prison term.</p><p>Jaime Hernandez-Gonzalez, 24, was convicted in March of assault with the intent to commit a sex crime during a burglary, a charge that carries a mandatory term of life in prison with the possibility of parole.</p><p>But after the verdict, Sonoma County Judge Gary Medvigy substituted a different version of the same charge without the burglary element, saying a life sentence was cruel and unusual punishment for a crime in which the victim was never actually sexually touched. </p><p>By comparison, a rape of a woman not inside a house carries a maximum of eight years in prison. The substituted charge carried a top term of six years.</p><p>The law requiring a life term, dubbed Jessica’s Law, was enacted in California in 2006 in response to a the rape and murder in Florida of a 9-year-old by a repeat, violent sex offender. Medvigy said Thursday that prosecutors improperly applied the law against Hernandez Gonzalez, who has no prior criminal history.</p><p>In December 2007, Hernandez Gonzalez went inside an unlocked Cotati-area house around 3 a.m., disrobed and confronted a 21-year old woman in her bed as a friend of hers slept on the floor. Clutching a wad of his clothes in one hand, he pulled off the woman’s pajama bottoms with the other as she screamed and kicked.</p><p>Both women fled, as did Hernandez Gonzalez, without further incident.</p><p>The judge’s order modifying the verdict sparked robust public debate, with critics saying he minimized the assault and supporters calling him courageous for making a ruling he believed was just despite its potential unpopularity. Medvigy, a Republican and brigadier general in the U.S. Army Reserve, is a former deputy district attorney who prosecuted dozens of sexual assault cases.”</p><p>This case shouldn’t have been a typical “throw the book at him,” Medvigy said.</p><p>“It really was an issue of which book to throw. In that regard, the wrong book was selected,” he said.</p><p>Medvigy apologized to the two women for any perceived minimization of their trauma and read statements submitted by several jurors who said they agreed that a life sentence was too severe. The mother of one of the women expressed a similar sentiment in a letter to the judge.</p><p>In addition to the six-year term, he ordered Hernandez Gonzalez to register as a sex offender. He also sentenced him to a year in jail for resisting police, time that will run consecutive to the prison term. Hernandez Gonzalez must serve 85 percent of his term before becoming eligible for parole.</p><p>Prosecutor Tashawn Sanders again objected to Medvigy’s reduction in the primary charge and urged him to reinstate the jury verdict.</p><p>“This is an attack that is unfathomable to the two women inside the home,” she said.</p><p>Hernandez Gonzalez earlier offered to plead guilty to charges that would have sent him to prison for 12 years. But prosecutors declined and went to trial on the life-term charge.</p><p>After Medvigy reduced the verdict, prosecutors said other California counties have successfully prosecuted the life charge and judges have imposed the mandated term.</p><p>But Medvigy said his research showed only two instances in which the charge has been successfully prosecuted, and both of those were violent repeat offenders, not first-time offenders like Hernandez Gonzalez. In both cases, the defendants were sentenced under the Three Strikes law, not Jessica’s Law, he said. </p><p>In a third case, the Stanislaus district attorney reduced the charge as Medvigy did, and in another — in Sonoma County — a jury acquitted the defendant of the most serious charge and convicted him of attempted oral copulation. He was sentenced to four years in prison, Medvigy said.</p><p>“That’s in 58 counties,” Medvigy said. “It shows this court that the charge is being very rarely and judiciously used.”</p><p>Hernandez Gonzalez’s attorney, Lynnette Brown, asked Medvigy to order the middle term of four years, given her client’s youth and lack of criminal record. But Medvigy said it was clear Hernandez Gonzalez had a sexual intent and that he deserved prison time.</p><p>The victim, identified in court only as Jane Doe, didn’t speak in court and declined to comment afterward.</p><p>District attorney spokesman Spencer Brady said his office is consulting with the state Attorney General’s Office about a possible appeal of Medvigy’s ruling.</p>