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With a hand holding a megaphone, aka a heavy rigid object. Beyond that, you seems to be taking the defendant's theory of the case entirely at face value, and then giving them a little bit of grace on top of that. That's maybe relevant as an understanding of what the defense might want, but it's not the only plausible or even likely read on the story.
... unless, to spell it out, the judge has taken the defense's theory of the case at face value, before the trial has begun.
If I'm reading it correctly, California Penal Code Section 1170(h)(3) says that a "has a prior or current felony conviction for a serious felony described in subdivision (c) of Section 1192.7" shall be served in prison. 1192.7(c)(8) specifically includes "any felony in which the defendant personally inflicts great bodily injury on any person, other than an accomplice," -- that's the specific enhancement on the case page twice.
Yes, the propensity for progressive groups to successfully argue that any politically-charged actions involving a Blue Tribe are just confusing the matter or an outright alleviating factor, while any politically-charged actions involving a Red Tribe matter are evidence of clear ill intent, is well-perceived, thank you for spelling it out.
Personally inflicts great bodily injury is the enhancement. It's specifically to separate where the accused did the thing themselves, rather than caused it to happen through an intermediary. (this gets goofy for duty-of-care or group-assault scenarios, but neither are relevant here.) For an example, there's a ripped from the headlines case that clearly couldn't have involved the defendant.
The enhancement is armed with or used a weapon, but more critically, Alnaji already admitted to the very requirements. The defense's theory of the case is that "Alnaji accidentally struck Kessler when he swatted away Kessler’s phone". But that "accident" in the defense's claim is only trying to separate the injury to Kessler's face; swatting at Kessler's phone does not make the megaphone phase through Kessler's hands.
That is the enhancement most likely to run into trouble with a jury, but it's still not very weak.
Kessler was an elderly and fairly frail man. Age alone can't support that enhancement if it's an element of the crime, but it's not, and Kessler is in the 65+ range where it's a common enhancement and readily supported.
Yes, lower-end cases end up at the lower end of the sentencing range. That's kinda begging the question. Involuntary manslaughter's lower-end includes some pretty far-reaching stuff! In this case, it's "hit a guy, didn't expect to kill him". That's not exactly some unpredictable consequence, even if it's an uncommon one, nor is it a low-culpability situation. And while it's not the definition of enhancement to be non-typical, it's pretty standard for a case involving several enhancements to be nontypical.
And, of course, this just ropes back to the broader point about inconsistency of the law, where you can just go and crack a man's head open, it result in his death, say oops, and then get a shorter sentence than if you had done something really evil, like attach a shoulder stock to an antique gun or buy an unlicensed barrel.
In this case, the problem I'm motioning toward is more "... whether the sentence proposed by the trial court reflected what it believed was the appropriate punishment for this defendant and these offenses, regardless of whether defendant was convicted by plea or following trial, or instead reflected what it believed was necessary to induce defendant to enter a plea."
That seems like a really detailed description to say 'the judge didn't want to sentence the guy hard, and wanted less publicity when doing it'. Which, to be fair, would make it a genuine indicated sentence rather than a judicial plea bargain!
EDIT: okay, that was unfair snark.
But it depends on some pretty strict assumptions to get to the indicated sentence, and they're pretty unfalsifiable. We can't, by tautology, know what the judge would do at the end of a trial that isn't going to happen. He doesn't know, and doesn't have the evidence! (And some of that evidence, like the relative credibility of witnesses talking about who initiated the verbal confrontation or started touching the other, probably should matter.) The evidence you're using like the multiple conferences is just, or more, compatible with a judge really not wanting a media circus in a controversial case, and slowly shaping what he indicates as an appropriate sentence to something he knows the defendant will want to take, or even outright updating his model of an appropriate sentence until the defendant takes it. There's very little chance we'd be able to prove if the judge did outright offer a bargain, not least of all because the sudden change in judge and sudden (and media-free) hearing and various procedural annoyances mean we don't know even what other judges that were on this same case would have offered, or if they did offer anything. I don't have infinite free time to figure out if this particular judge has weighed this particular way in other high-profile cases, and it's quite possible that there haven't been enough to do any serious statistics on, or even any comparable cases.
The strongest testable evidence I can motion toward is whether the judge her takes any umbrage at being misquoted to the public in a way that minimizes the guilt of a man supposedly pleading guilty -- but while that happens in some politically-charged cases, you can reasonably object that there's a million reasons it might not happen in this case or publicly.
So whether or not this is a judicial plea bargain, it doesn't matter in any realistic sense. It's not getting overturned if it can't even be conclusively demonstrated.
Which would be one thing were this is just some Pepe Silvia-style theory-from-nowhere, but we do have the stuff that would push the sentence up, and the evidence to support it, and a lot of the defense's past arguments either falling or only admitting to the elements of the charge, and then months after much of the information has been formalized -- months after the trial was first scheduled! -- then the judge announces what an appropriate sentence would be?
And, even if it gets to the presumption of an indicated sentence, it still doesn't actually provide persuasive evidence that it's just or reasonable. If the final story is that the judge just wanted to get this out of his court house, and a short sentence was the sort of appropriate that he could live with, that's kinda a problem all of its own in the "Justice is not, under present conditions, the presumed outcome of a process" sense. Again, Rittenhouse's pretrial jail time was a quarter of this guy's maximum theoretical sentence, that maximum just isn't happening, and Rittenhouse was innocent (and had a vastly higher bond). People regularly receive greater sentences for paperwork crimes.
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