A 13-year-old California girl was handcuffed and placed in the jury box by a federal judge, who is now under investigation for trying to intimidate her off the witness stand.
As her father voiced anxiety that she would meet the same fate, defendant Mario Puente’s 36-year-old daughter was restrained in February by Roger Benitez, 72.
Girl Was Humiliated, Traumatized
In according with court documents, Benitez then summoned a US Marshal and demanded that the crying 13-year-old be handcuffed and placed in the jury box.The girl’s father was then asking for his probation to be canceled in front of US District Judge Roger Benitez.
Benitez warned the girl that if she ever started using narcotics, she would also find herself in handcuffs.
The encounter, according to the father’s attorney, was mentally harmful. The girl’s father, who was not identified, had served a five-year prison term for narcotics distribution charges, according to the Los Angeles Times.
On February 13, he appeared in Benitez’s federal courtroom in San Diego to request the cancellation of his supervised release.
In his testimony before the court, the father expressed his concern that his daughter was following in “my footsteps and running into circumstances that might push her down the same route that I did.”
Benitez instructed a US marshal to put cuffs on her in response to the remarks. Then she started to sob. The girl was described as an awfully cute young lady in the incident’s transcripts, but Benitez warned her that if she started using drugs, she would probably spend most of her life in and out of jail and that she might even die. Back then, her father received a 10-month prison term.
The “Above the Law” blog broke the story about the courtroom incident on February 27.
Although complaints against judges are often kept private, the top judge of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals stated in response to the news that making a review of the incident public was required and in the public’s best interest.
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom Fumes
The father’s counsel stated in a court document on February 23 that the act was “psychologically destructive and injurious” and that handcuffing youngsters can be “severely traumatizing.
Later, a different judge took over the father’s probation case and decided that because of the “distressing circumstances that happened,” no longer serving a prison sentence was necessary.
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom expressed his disdain with Benitez’s strategy for frightening the little girl straight in a tweet on Wednesday.
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