UPDATED WITH SENTENCING CLARIFICATION . . .
The Orange County District Attorney's Office originally announced the sentence for Robert Andrew Moran–the 43-year-old Buena Park resident and veteran Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy who drove a department SUV while under the influence last year and plowed into another car, injuring two people–as six months in jail and three years of informal probation.
The Orange County Register's follow-up by veteran courts reporter Larry Welborn, who was in the courtroom where the sentence was read, reported that the judge ordered six months of home detention, much of which had already been served. That's also how Moran's attorney characterized the sentence in the Welborn piece.
A call to the DA's office for confirmation of the sentencing produced the same answer as the first one: six months in jail for Moran. A call to Welborn produced the same answer as his story: six months of home detention almost all previously served. Welborn even added the standard “I stand by my story” line you've heard in the movies.
Turns out, both versions are technically correct.
]
Moran's official sentence, the one that will be on his permanent record, is six months in jail. At the request of his attorney, the judge allowed the defendant the option of serving it at home with a monitoring device. He'd been doing that already since pleading no contest on Feb. 27, 2009, to one misdemeanor
count of driving under the influence causing injury and one misdemeanor
count of driving with a blood alcohol level of .08 percent or more
causing injury.
Here's one thing that was not in Welborn's original piece: It was the impression of a witness at the scene of the crash that
Orange County sheriff's deputies who rolled up aided Moran by quickly
giving him water and trying to delay as long as possible a test of
their LA comrade's blood.
The inappropriate intervention did not
work. Moran tested positive for being impaired while under the
influence of alcohol and having a blood alcohol level above
California's legal limit of .08 percent, the DA revealed in announcing Moran's sentence,
which also included mandatory completion of a three-month first
offender program and a face-off with a Mothers Against Drunk Driving
panel.
Moran was driving south
on Beach Boulevard in a Los Angeles County Sheriff's
Department issued Chevrolet sport utility vehicle shortly before 5:30 a.m. on June 29, 2008, when he crashed into the driver's side
door of a Mazda sedan at Beach and Garden Grove Boulevard in Stanton.
The Mazda driver, who the DA's office only identified as 33-year-old Elias A., and his female
passenger, named as Savanah K., 20, were both knocked unconscious and
had to be hospitalized. It was later determined that Elias A. tested positive for opiates, methamphetamine and benzodiazepines and was still holding meth.
An eyewitness at the scene previously told the Weekly's R. Scott Moxley that some unnamed Orange County sheriff's deputies arrived at the scene and tried to help their LA County colleague by quickly giving him water before any field sobriety tests could be given by other officers working the accident.
The local deputies also tried to prevent for as long as they could the blood test that would ulimately seal Moran's fate, Moxley was told.
The deputy was placed on unpaid leave from his force when charges were filed against him, but his lawyer told Welborn that Moran will
seek reinstatement.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.