A former Superior Court Drug Court graduate who was arrested anew for allegedly selling methamphetamine or \u201cice\u201d has pleaded guilty. <\/p>\n
Skyler James Benavente, 32, pleaded guilty yesterday to trafficking of a controlled substance\u2014a crime punishable by not more than 10 years imprisonment, along with a $5,000 fine.<\/p>\n
Benavente\u2019s lawyer, chief public defender Doug Hartig, asked that the court hold off on sentencing his client until a presentence investigation is conducted. <\/p>\n
Superior Court Presiding Judge Robert Naraja granted the request and gave three months for the presentence investigation.<\/p>\n
Benavente will be sentenced on Sept. 3 at 9am. <\/p>\n
Office of the Attorney General\u2019s Chester Hinds represented the government. <\/p>\n
According to court information, Benavente, 32, was arrested after a \u201cbuy-walk\u201d sting operation conducted by the Drug Enforcement Task Force on Jan. 31, 2019.<\/p>\n
Court information states that a cooperating source had informed task force officers that Benavente was distributing ice.<\/p>\n
Two days later, on Jan. 31, 2019, task force officers met with the cooperating source again for a sting operation to buy ice from Benavente.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A former Superior Court Drug Court graduate who was arrested anew for allegedly selling methamphetamine…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[9364],"class_list":["post-300959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-drug-court"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300959\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}