CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Anthony Charles Ramon was sentenced Monday in the 2020 Meuly Street shooting death of David Sanchez.
It's a day Sanchez's sister, Maria, told the 148th District Court said she has been awaited, and dreaded, for more than 1,000 days.
"You will get to grow older," she said. "My brother will not. He had more life to live. While you're in jail, you'll get the chance to get out."
Judge David Klein sentenced Ramon to 12 years in prison after he accepted a deal to plead guilty to a manslaughter charge. He originally was charged with capital murder in Sanchez's death, but little witness cooperation and conflicting accounts of what happened led to the plea.
"When you go into court and have these kinds of problems, it raises reasonable doubt with the jury, and sometimes I have to make the decision," said Nueces County ADA Joe Mike Pena. "I'm not happy, sometimes, with the decisions that I make, but with my 30-plus years of experience of what the evidence is and what I can prove and what I can't prove, we reach some kind of resolution that I thought was in the best interest for everybody with what I had."
"No, I'm not happy with the outcome. Anytime a human life is taken I'm not happy when I don't get something that I think is more meaningful."
Defense attorney Nathan Burkett said that he and his client aren't happy with the outcome, either, but because of the witnesses concerns,
"Sometimes you have cases where all the witnesses on the case are not perfect people, and sometimes they have their own issues, and sometimes they've given two or three different statements before we even get involved," he said. "On that, it's just a question of credibility for the jury, and you never known if a juror's gonna believe one thing, no things, or everything from any and all of those witnesses.
"So even though we thought we had a good chance to win this case at trial, sometimes it comes down to a risk analysis. You never know which 12 people from the community are on that jury."
The shooting happened in the 600 block of Meuly Street, near Port Avenue and Agnes Street, in January 2020, when Corpus Christi Police Department officials said Ramon shot the 52-year-old Sanchez following a disturbance. A 26-year-old man also was shot, but survived.
Police found Ramon in the 7000 block of Francesca Street that night, also having been shot.
Pena said though this wasn't an ideal result, it was a way to make the city safer.
"What I try to do is do the best I can to make sure I them away from the public, where he won't harm the public in the future, because there's no way you can make the family whole," he said. "I'm not happy anytime a lost life happens, but we do the best we can to make sure it does not happen again."
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