[***UPDATE with court correction at end of article] After more than a week of his criminal trial involving alarming allegations of domestic violence while he was a Huntington Beach Police Department (HBPD) cop, James Roberts decided it was in his best interests to admit partial guilt and seek a plea bargain this afternoon.
A male-dominated jury was excused after Roberts' lawyer, legendary Southern California cop-defender John Barnett, lobbied the prosecutor to drop more than a dozen charges of violence against two women in exchange for his client pleading guilty to two counts: felony vandalism and forced sodomy***.
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The outcome inside Orange County Superior Court is a definite victory for Roberts' ex-wife, Shannon, who says in a pending civil lawsuit against HBPD that numerous, veteran officers were callous to the wild violence committed against her (and another women), and repeatedly protected their colleague in the department.
It is expected that Roberts will have to pay several thousand dollars in restitution for a temper tantrum that destroyed his wife's personal property.
No sentencing date has been scheduled in Judge Patrick Donahue's Santa Ana courtroom, according to court record. Historically, dirty cops convicted of committing crimes in Orange County received extremely light punishment.
Hey, what do you know?
The Orange County Register reported on March 6 that Roberts will get probation for his crimes.
But, as they feel obligated to do in third-world-type corruption, city officials in OC cities always insist with all the sincerity they can muster that all of the cops in their departments are the purest, most innocent folks on the planet.
For example, Huntington Beach government lawyers continue to pretend, with the support of a willingly ignorant city council, that Shannon Roberts' horrific tale of abuse was imaginary and are fighting her contemptuously in court.
***UPDATE, 10:15 a.m., March 6, 2013: The court clerk corrected yesterday's official record and changed Roberts' forced sodomy guilty plea to an admission of domestic violence. The ex-cop did not admit to the sodomy count.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
