California sentencing getting the finger after Cunningham

Thanks to this post by Kent Scheidegger at Crime & Consequences, entitled “Cunningham, Chili, & Fingers,” everyone can catch up with various post-Cunningham issues playing out in California court by reading about the sentencing appeal of Anna Ayala, the woman who infamously tried to defraud Wendy’s by putting a human finger in her own chili.  Kent points to this newspaper account of the ruling, which provides this summary of the latest legal developments:

A Las Vegas woman could get at least two years shaved off her nine-year prison sentence for planting a severed finger in a bowl of chili at a San Jose Wendy’s restaurant, under a state appeals court ruling issued Friday.  Anna Ayala, 41, who said on national television that she had bitten into a fingertip at the Wendy’s in March 2005, and husband Jaime Placencia each received nine-year prison terms for the scam from a Santa Clara County Superior Court judge last year.

In her appeal, Ayala argued that the judge shouldn’t have sentenced her to the maximum of five years in prison on a felony count of presenting a false insurance claim, one of three counts of which she was convicted. In an opinion Friday, the Sixth District Court of Appeal agreed, saying Judge Edward Davila’s decision to impose five years for “aggravating circumstances” was based on his own fact-finding and not by a jury’s conclusions.

As Kent rightly notes, various post-Cunningham developments in California means that Ms. Ayala should not to quickly count on receiving a lower sentencing on remand.