Orange County's Francisco Rodriguez told a compelling story to gain sympathy in the criminal justice system: His buddy Ismael Sierra (a.k.a. “Whisper”) died in his arms after being shot and killed by Stanton gangsters in July 2003.
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on marijuana–to participate in the ambush killing of a rival hoodlum
and the serious wounding of a second man outside a Red Roof Inn.
Orange County Sheriff's Department deputy arriving at Whisper's death
scene found him face down. The corpse had not been moved after the the
fatal blast, and Rodriguez–in reality, a gangster who used the moniker
“Trigger” since at least the age of 15, had no blood on his clothing.
prosecutors, who despised Rodriguez's fake sympathy tale and lies on
the witness stand, wanted a term of life, but acknowledged that U.S.
District Court Judge James V. Selna was unlikely to agree. They
ultimately requested a punishment of 24 years in prison.
A
taxpayer-funded defense lawyer argued that a term of 10 years was
adequate especially considering the likelihood that Rodriquez will face
an additional consequences after he's released from prison: deportation.
month inside the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse in Santa Ana, Selna
rejected the government's view that the defendant, who has already been
incarcerated in pre-sentencing lockup for almost eight
years, is a hopeless gangster.
Rodriguez's “youth and difficult upbringing” as well as his “pursue of
educational opportunities” while locked up, Selna sided closer to the
defense request and issued a term of 14 years.
is lucky; if he'd been sentenced in Orange County Superior Court under
California's severe anti-gang laws, he would likely be locked up for at
least the next 40 or 50 years.
to determine which federal prison is now home for this defendant because
the U.S. Bureau of Prisons presently has 17 inmates with the name
Francisco Rodriguez.
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.