Welcome back to between bells colorado Governor Jared polis
has officially reduced the sentence of a truck driver who
originally received 100 and 10 years in prison after
a fatal crash back in 2019 to 10 years.
The truck driver, his name is Rochelle Aguilera Mederos.
He was convicted on 27 charges as a result of killing four people in this accident.
The reduced sentence came after a boycott by truck drivers
as well as the most signed a change dot org petition
really of all time joining us now to
discuss Morris constitutional attorney at Gillian law firm.
A pc dan Gillian
dan, Welcome back to the show. Always a pleasure to talk to you. How did,
of course, how did we get here so quickly? He went from life in prison
to 10 years and maybe even less with good behavior. Can you break this down for us?
Well, I'll tell you what, 10 years for this is still outrageous.
Um, 110 years was just stupid.
Um, you know, it's,
it's a sad situation and I think the reason why we've
gotten here so fast is because of really only one reason.
Um, and that's because of the
public's attention and the media's
willingness to report on this story.
Unfortunately, you pronounced the driver's name a whole lot better than I could.
So I'm just going to call him the driver, but you know, he's a 26 year old young man,
a father and a husband.
Um, you know,
there's a lot of him sitting in prisons right now and he's within this class of people
that I refer to as
the people who aren't, they just don't care about them.
I mean our society a lot of times just don't care about certain types of people.
And you can see,
I've seen time and time again that it's this
class of people who just aren't cared about.
They're the ones that pay the price is like this and
Man, you know, you know, great.
I'm glad that the governor got around to uh, commuting this thing and to 10 years.
But I've done so many cases of injury with involved
deaths where people, you know, have done, you know,
they weren't they weren't driving as part of their job.
They weren't
um, you know, doing a difficult operation with a very complicated vehicle.
They're just driving to work texting whatever speeding they kill somebody.
Yeah, they get brought up on charges of felony and then, you know,
they always given a plea deal now here by the way.
And one of the most interesting things about this case to me is
that it sounds like he was offered a plea deal, I don't know where,
but he said something about I'm not going to take
anything more than a traffic ticket that if that's true,
I blame his attorney at that point for not taking
him down there and forcing him to accept that,
you know, a deal that if it was anywhere close to a traffic ticket or above.
Um, but, you know, it's just a, it's just a, this is,
this is a sort of case that unfortunately kind of makes it
embarrassing to be a lawyer because there's nothing that makes sense about this
dan.
I have to ask you because there are reports that even
the judge said his hands were tied due to colorado law.
So our viewers that might be unfamiliar with colorado law,
I actually had to familiarize myself last week because of this case.
How did the driver initially end up with 100 and 10 years?
Well, it's because of the number of counts.
So, uh, most states and that allow the,
the judge to when a person is convicted of multiple counts,
even their felonies that the judge can say you're going to serve uh,
these sentences concurrently.
So in other words,
If you get sentenced to 10 years for 10 different crimes, judge,
most of the time can say, I'm going to send you to to send you to prison for 10 years.
Uh, but for each, each crime, but you're gonna serve these concurrently.
So that means they're all being served starting at the same moment.
So in 10 years you get out
at some point along the way colorado colorado legislature decided, you know,
we're going to um take the make the person who's
best and most informed and best capable of making a decision
whether or not to allow uh concurrency versus consecutive terms,
which who's the judge, we're gonna remove that power from him
and we're gonna give it,
we're gonna say he has no power whatsoever and we're
going to give all the power to the jury.
Uh And I don't know why legislatures do this.
Um Normally it's because of some crazy anomaly case that hits the news
and there's a reaction in these politicians a lot of times politicians
they will pass laws because they think that man,
I can I think this bill can pass right now and I want to
get my name on a bill and so they passed these stupid bills,
you should never take away the discretion of a judge because he's the
one that's sitting there and she's the one sitting there and she knows best
dan I have to ask you,
do you think this kind of discussion will spur
change when it comes to the sentencing laws?
Probably you know the pendulum is going to probably go back the
other way but then it's sure not gonna come back our way.
So um Yeah I mean colorado is I think the colorado legislative system
and probably the colorado judicial system um is probably embarrassed right now.
And I think even the D. A.
Um is probably a little embarrassed because I you know,
I cannot imagine I just do not think that that judge
um issued,
You know said 110 year sentence
when he did
you know when the D. A. Hadn't asked for that.
I mean it just doesn't make any sense that the D. A.
Asked for anything less than 100 and 10 years. So now you have the D. A.
Coming out and saying okay well let's do this emergency hearing to fix this.
The you know the governor comes in, reduces it down to 10 years,
which itself is outrageously long.
Um And now the D. A.
Is saying well I'm going to release a bunch of information
about this guy that I was ethically prohibited from doing so.
You know before
I have no idea why the D. A. Would do that other than for her own political um concerns.
Because you know, unfortunately in our country
D. A. S. Are elected officials and that brings all sorts of
problems to our criminal justice system.
Constitutional attorney at Gillian law firm, abc dan Gillian.
We always appreciate your time. Happy new year sir, I'm sure we'll see you soon.
Thank you so much for your time today.