State of Florida v. Tony Garcia

West Palm Beach, Florida criminal lawyer represented Defendant charged with arson.



On June 11, 2014, Tony Garcia's mortgage lender sent him

notice that, in a month, his home would be sold at foreclosure.



Seventeen days later, Garcia's neighbor saw the house go up in

flames and called 911. The State charged Garcia with arson for

setting fire to the place. Garcia's first trial ended in a hung jury,

and, with his second trial pending, a judge released him on bond.

As the evidence later heard by the sentencing judge would

establish, Garcia made a menace of himself while out on bond. On

one occasion, while driving with a suspended license, he left the

scene of a car crash and was arrested. Another day, shaking and

crying as he did, Garcia aimed a gun in the face of a neighbor who

had stopped by Garcia's house to pick up some tools and have a

beer; the neighbor did not call the police. Just two days after that

episode, the police were summoned to Garcia's ex-wife's house,

where Garcia had gone to retrieve guns from a safe. They found

him banging on her door, acting in a manner that to them

suggested intoxication, mental disturbance, or both. Garcia

denounced an officer on the scene with a racial epithet; the officer

deescalated the situation and gave Garcia a ride home.



No sooner had Garcia gotten out of the officer's car than he

struck up an argument with his neighbor, threatening to shoot him

and the officer who had driven him home. The officer, at that point

having heard enough, took Garcia to a mental health facility and

sought to have him involuntarily examined under the Baker Act.2

Not an hour later, Garcia had walked out of the facility and was on

the street again. Another officer, having received a tip about

Garcia's whereabouts, found him eating chicken wings and drinking

beer at a local bar and returned him to the mental health facility.

Learning all this, the trial court expressed its concern for the

safety of Garcia and of the community and revoked Garcia's bond.

He would await retrial on his arson charge in jail. While there, as

the trial court would later learn, his threatening conduct continued.

On a call with his ex-wife, Garcia said that he would break his

daughter-in-law's neck if he ever saw her again. On another call,

he told his ex-wife that he wanted to summon a gang to his

daughter-in-law's house but was hesitant to do so knowing they

would also "take out” his grandson.



Garcia proceeded to his second trial and was convicted of first-

degree arson.3 The judge ordered a presentence investigation

report. The report showed that Garcia had a 12th-grade education;

that he was unemployed due to disability; that he had a criminal

history (one conviction for battery and one for the time he drove on

a suspended license while out on bond); and that his minimum and

maximum permissible sentences were 34.8 months and 360

months, respectively. The report concluded that Garcia failed to

cooperate with the court and the law, and that despite suffering

from stomach cancer and being confined to a wheelchair, he was a

threat to himself and society.



Garcia moved for a downward departure from the lowest

permissible sentence as calculated under the Criminal Punishment

Code; he wanted a sentence of probation. He argued that he was

severely ill with terminal cancer and required significant medical

attention to maintain his current state of health. The State, for its

part, recommended a sentence of 84 months. In its sentencing

submission, it laid out Garcia's conduct while out on bond,

including his threats to witnesses, argued that the defendant's

conduct had callously endangered the lives of neighbors and first

responders, and argued Garcia had proffered no evidence that he

required specialized medical treatment.

Because we do not find fundamental error in Garcia’s

unpreserved claim, we quash the decision of the Fourth District to

the extent it requires that the Respondent be resentenced.