CATHERINE WILSON, The Associated Press
MIAMI (AP) -- Four Miami police officers should be sentenced to about three years or less in federal prison for planting guns after questionable police shootings or covering them up, a judge ruled Monday.
Prosecutors had been asking for sentences as long as 11 years, but U.S. District Judge Alan Gold rejected the harshest attempts to stretch out the prison terms in the city’s biggest police corruption scandal in a generation.
The judge issued a 46-page order in preparation for sentencing hearings Wednesday for shootings by anti-crime units under pressure to halt a rash of deadly tourist robberies in the mid 1990s. Two officers could face as little as five months in prison.
“The fact that he has agreed with us on the most critical issue of the sentence is a tremendous victory,” said Janice Sharpstein, attorney for two of the officers. “Obviously, I think it’s the right decision.”
Eleven officers went on trial in four shootings. Four were convicted in April, three others were acquitted, and four face retrials after the jury deadlocked. Two acquitted officers are back at work.
Defense attorneys welcomed decisions that helped their clients but promise appeals on convictions for obstruction of justice and conspiracy as well as sentencing decisions.
Prosecutor Curtis Miner and a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office had no comment.
The biggest sentencing dispute was whether the basic crime was obstruction, which carries a lighter sentence, or aggravated assault, based on deaths and injuries to the shooting victims.
In siding with the defense, the judge said anything else “would be grossly inappropriate if not unconstitutional.”
The decision put the officers at a starting point of 10 to 16 months for calculating their sentences under federal guidelines.
Officers Jorge Castello, who wounded a homeless man, and Oscar Ronda, who lied about seeing a gun afterward, would stay in that range, but they can ask to evenly split their terms between prison and either home or a halfway house.
Albert Levin, Ronda’s attorney, said he was “certainly happy” with the prospect for a five-month prison term but was disappointed that the judge rejected arguments that Castello and Ronda played relatively minor roles in the cover-up.
The judge decided fired Officer Jesse Aguero could be tied to three of the shootings, abused the public trust and twice helped organize the planting of the guns, giving him a sentence range of 2 1/2 years to three years and one month.
The judge also ruled Officer Art Beguiristain was linked to three shootings and abused the public trust for a sentencing range of 2 to 2 1/2 years.
Prosecutors also argued that the officers’ conduct substantially interfered with the administration of justice by requiring both state and federal investigations and a state trial in one of the shootings.
The judge examined the question six different ways before rejecting the prosecution position.
The judge also refused to boost Aguero’s sentence based on three incidents in his internal affairs files dating back to 1988.
Hugo Rodriguez, Aguero’s attorney, called the complex order “thoroughly thought out.”
The judge noted the case raised “novel legal issues” and a compelling human side but said “significant societal interests” could not be ignored even with records of distinguished service by the officers.
“We as a society require and need our police officers to act within the law,” he wrote. “There is no exception even if the ‘code of honor’ among some police officers fosters a different belief.”