Orange County Superior Court Judge Gary S. Paer read an outdated jury instruction at the conclusion of Anthony Michael Vega's trial for a 2008 kidnapping and home invasion robbery in La Habra and the Commerce man got sent away to prison.
Vega appealed the 2011 convictions and this week learned that justices at a California Court of Appeal agreed Paer had erred.
But in a 12-page ruling written by Justice Eileen C. Moore for justices William Bedsworth and Richard Aronson, the panel declared the mistake wouldn't cause them to overturn the case.
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Their rationale?
Paer had read an outdated version of a
kidnapping statute, a version that actually was “to the advantage of the
defendant” by requiring the Orange County District Attorney's office “to meet a higher burden of proof than that currently required under law.”
According
to Vega, he should have just been charged with robbery and not robbery
and kidnapping after taking a female homeowner by force from her yard to
inside her house.
Because Vega and his cohorts took the woman more than 60 feet from her garden, the justices weren't sympathetic to the argument.
Upshot: The 35-year-old will continue to serve his life plus 13-year sentence at California State Prison at Solano
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.