Neither Fullerton police nor any other witness saw Samuel Fausto Uribe try to sell illegal narcotics but that didn't stop government officials from charging the 28-year-old Fullerton resident with possession of methamphetamine for sale in the summer of 2011.
Though Uribe had been sitting in the driver's seat in a legally parked car, suspicious officers decided to stop and search his vehicle. They reportedly found a scale and a baggie with 13 grams of meth worth at least $1,100 on the street.
The defendant, who didn't own a driver's license, insisted that the drugs were for personal use to support his nasty, teeth-rotting habit.
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But a Dec. 2011 Orange County jury concluded beyond a reasonable doubt
that he had intended to sell the meth and, following the conviction, Superior Court Judge Steven D. Bromberg, a former Republican mayor in Newport Beach, sentenced him to jail.
Uribe appealed and a three-judge panel at the California Court of Appeal
based in Santa Ana appointed the appellate counsel who reported that
Bromberg may have been mistaken by not granting a defense trial motion
supporting the notion that possession didn't equate to an intention to
sell.
Lead by Justice William Bedsworth, the appeals court
ruled on Aug. 31 that the jury could have reasonably guessed that the
scale and the size of the drug cache likely meant narcotic sales.
“Trial
court testimony established that a heavy user could go through about a
gram a day,” wrote Bedsworth in the opinion. “While that did not compel a
conclusion of the intention to sell some of the drug, it was certainly
enough to support a conclusion it was possessed for sale. That, and the
jury's opportunity to observe Uribe when he testified it was possessed
only for personal use, was enough to support their verdict.”
Upshot: Uribe served a sentence of 212 days in the Orange County Jail and the conviction will remain on his rap sheet.
Police are looking for fugitive Daniel Aguado Vasquez, who was with Uribe at the time the drugs were recovered, according to court records.
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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.