Forget for a brief moment what he did to a little girl, Jose Luis Ledezma believes he's been terribly wronged by Orange County's criminal justice system.
Yes, Ledezma freely admitted that in August 2008 he raped, sodomized and got forced oral copulation from a 6-year-old girl when he was 20 years old.
But he thinks that he should have been allowed to plead guilty and then have some time–a few weeks or months?–to contemplate the consequences and then change his mind.
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Though he acknowledged in open court what he'd done, Ledezma believes he
was rushed into pleading guilty and didn't have adequate time to think
about the consequences.
“I had no priors or any crime history,”
he told a panel of California Court of Appeal justices in Santa Ana. “I
always follow the rules.”
The prosecutor wanted Ledezma to serve a
50 years to life sentence, but Superior Court Judge Thomas M. Goethals
gave him a term of 25 years to life because he pleaded guilty prior to a
jury trial.
After he pleaded guilty and got sentenced, he changed his mind.
“It was too much time [in prison]” he wrote to the appellate justices.
But Justice Kathleen O'Leary opined that Ledezma should feel lucky. He faced a potential prison term of 75 years to life.
“Based
on Ledezma's admission of guilt, which allowed the victim to avoid
testifying at trial, the court imposed a significantly reduced
sentenced,” O'Leary wrote in her opinion. “There is nothing in the
record to suggest this sentence was either inappropriate or illegal.”
Case closed.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
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.