Superior Court Associate Judge Joseph N. Camacho corrected yesterday the six-month prison sentence he earlier imposed on Joseph A. Crisostomo for criminal contempt in connection with a drug case.
\nFinding that the sentence is illegal, Camacho vacated the six-month prison term and imposed no imprisonment sentence on Crisostmo for the criminal contempt conviction.<\/p>\n
The judge pointed out that revocation of a suspended sentence, and not criminal contempt, is the appropriate sanction for a probation violation.<\/p>\n
In this case, he said, Crisostomo\u2019s suspended sentence in a 2007 criminal case conviction was revoked in full.<\/p>\n
Thus, Camacho said, he finds that the sentence imposed in the case last Feb. 28 was illegal insofar as it imposed six months of imprisonment for criminal contempt.<\/p>\n
Removing the six-month prison term, Crisostomo will still serve a 10-year prison term.<\/p>\n
Last Feb. 28, Camacho sentenced Crisostomo to the maximum of five years and six months in prison for possession of less than a gram of methamphetamine or \u201cice\u201d and criminal contempt.<\/p>\n
In his order yesterday, Camacho he finds it necessary to correct the sentence pursuant to Rule 35(a) of the Commonwealth Rules of Criminal Procedure.<\/p>\n
He said the conviction for criminal contempt in this case was based on a finding that Crisostomo\u2019s illegal possession of a controlled substance violated the May 8, 2008, judgment of conviction in the 2007 criminal case, which listed as a condition of probation that \u201cdefendant shall not possess nor consume alcohol or other intoxicating substances during the entire term of his probation.\u201d<\/p>\n
On March 13, 2013, a couple of weeks following the conviction in this case, Crisostomo appeared before the court again in the 2007 criminal case for a probation revocation hearing.<\/p>\n
Following the hearing, Camacho issued a revocation of probation and commitment order, which revoked the suspension of five years of the 10-year sentence imposed in the 2007 criminal case.<\/p>\n
In effect, Crisostomo was sentenced to the full maximum term of 10 years imprisonment allowed for the underlying theft conviction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Superior Court Associate Judge Joseph N. Camacho corrected yesterday the six-month prison sentence he earlier…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33832","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\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33832\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}