LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – A Marin County jury hearing the case of a former Lake County Sheriff’s deputy accused of having sex with a minor has hung on all of the charges.
The jury ended its deliberations on Monday after deadlocking on the charges against Derik Dion Navarro, 41, whose trial began last month.
“They hung on all 16 counts,” said Navarro’s attorney, Mitchell Hauptman of Lakeport.
Navarro was on trial for allegedly having sex with a minor over the course of a year, beginning when she was 14 years old in 2005, as Lake County News has reported.
At the time of the alleged acts, Navarro was a sheriff’s deputy.
The allegations came to the attention of sheriff’s officials early in 2007, and following an internal affairs investigation Navarro was fired in April 2007 and arrested on the charges a week later.
The case encountered a number of delays, and after District Attorney Don Anderson took office at the start of 2011 prosecution of the case was taken over by the California Attorney General’s Office.
That was due to a conflict of interest that arose because Anderson – before he was elected – had represented Navarro in an administrative hearing regarding his sheriff’s office employment.
In December 2011, the Attorney General’s Office – with the support of the victim and her family – reached a plea agreement with Navarro in which he pleaded guilty to one count of felony unlawful intercourse with a child under age 16.
Had the plea been accepted by a judge, it would have resulted in a three-month jail sentence for Navarro, but he would not have been required to register as a sex offender.
However, the following month Judge Andrew Blum rejected the agreement, calling it “ridiculously lenient.”
In April 2012, Navarro won a change of venue in the case. Hauptman successfully argued that growing media coverage spurred by public comments made by Sheriff Frank Rivero – who also had approached the Attorney General’s Office and sent a letter to Blum to stop the deal – had created an atmosphere in Lake County where Navarro could not get a fair trial.
The matter subsequently was assigned to the Marin County Superior Court, where it originally had been set to go to trial late in the fall of 2012. However, there were several more delays, resulting in the trial not starting until this past June.
Hauptman said the presentation of evidence in the trial lasted from around June 10 to June 19, at which point the jury started deliberations.
Not long after deliberations started, the jury indicated it was having challenges, he said.
“They had come back within a couple hours indicating they were hung,” said Hauptman.
The jurors continued to try to come to a unified conclusion over the next few weeks, but by the time they emerged on Monday they had come to no agreement on any of the counts, he said.
The vast majority of the counts were hung 6-6 or 5-7, said Hauptman. “Nothing even close.”
Hauptman said Navarro is due back in Marin County Superior Court on Aug. 2, at which time the prosecution is expected to announce what steps it will take next.
“Their choices are, try to settle it, dismiss it or do it again,” said Hauptman.
The case, he added, has been hard on everybody involved.
Lake County News contacted the California Attorney General’s Office to find out what steps the agency would take next in the case. A response was not immediately available early Tuesday afternoon.
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