Sad accounting of 150-year prison term for child-porn possession after 3-year plea deal had been offered

The Miami Herald has this extended and sad review of an 150-year state sentence imposed on a person with schizophrenia who possessed child pornography.  The case provide an example of the “trial penalty” and all sort of other factors that can contribute to extreme prison terms.  The piece is headlined “‘Extreme injustice’: Homeless man with untreated schizophrenia fights 150-year sentence.”  I recommended the lengthy article in full and here are excerpts:

The crime that Jared Stephens committed is not in dispute.  The question is whether he should die in prison for it.

On a stormy September day in 2016, Stephens — a former wrestler at Arizona State University who became homeless after years of untreated schizophrenia — walked into a Best Buy in Sweetwater.  He snatched a $399.99 laptop, stuffed other merchandise totaling $157.96 into a brown Publix tote bag and tried to walk out without paying.

Confronted by employees, he resisted, then pulled his own laptop out of a backpack and did something extraordinarily irrational. “Look, I have child pornography!” he declared.  He was telling the truth. Stephens, then 25, marched in and out of the store with his laptop playing a video of child abuse, tilting his computer screen so it was visible to a surveillance camera, according to an arrest report.  He proceeded to lie down between two sets of sliding doors at the store’s entrance, perusing illicit images as shoppers flowed by, until police arrived and hauled him to jail.

That unhinged act sent Stephens on an odyssey through the criminal justice system, resulting in a sentence that has no parallel in local courts for a similar crime: 150 years in state prison — to be followed by a 120-day stint in the Miami-Dade County jail.  The sentence — handed down by Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Veronica Diaz in 2018, with a minimum of public explanation — was 147 years longer than the three-year term state prosecutors initially proposed in a plea deal and 129 years longer than the 21-year term the state asked for at sentencing.  It was also dozens of times greater than the typical sentence for possession of child pornography….

Stephens … made outlandish claims in open court at his criminal trial, asserting he could command African armies and shut off electricity to Russia with the power of his mind.  He largely refused to talk to his lawyers, much less cooperate in his defense. Court-appointed psychologists diagnosed him with schizophrenia… He had also suffered his own shocking trauma as a child — a fact that went unmentioned at his sentencing because he never told his defense lawyers.  Fan Li, a private attorney now representing Stephens, said that courts are ill-equipped to handle people experiencing mental illness, leading to widespread “unjust prosecutions and sentences.”…

Stephens’ presumptive release date is July 4 — Independence Day — 2166, when he would be 175. He did not produce or distribute the illegal images, which would typically lead to a longer sentence…. Had he gone along with the state and accepted a plea deal when it was originally offered, he could have gotten just three years in prison, as well as treatment in a program for “mentally disordered sex offenders.”  That sentence would have been in line with those given to other, similar offenders, according to court documents submitted by his lawyers.

Instead, he chose to fight the case.  State prosecutors responded by upping the charges from one count of child porn possession — with a maximum of five years in prison — to 30 counts, with a maximum of 150 years, based on a forensic analysis that found a cache of illegal images on his computer.

Between 2000 and 2017, Miami-Dade judges decided that nearly one-third of defendants who, like Stephens, possessed child porn — without producing it or passing it around to others — should not be sent to prison, according to data from the Florida Department of Corrections.  Those sent to prison received a median term of three years, according to the data, which was submitted in a court filing by Stephens’ defense team.  Only one other local case resulted in such a lengthy sentence: Adonis Losada, a former performer on the longtime Univision show “Sabado Gigante,” received a 153-year term.  The trial for Losada was later ordered redone, resulting in a sentence slashed by two-thirds.