First Circuit Denies Defendant’s Appeal of 300-Month Prison Sentence, Upholding Finding of “No Medical Evidence of a Traumatic Brain Injury”
Recent Cases in Law and Neuroscience, Curated by the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior and the Shen Neurolaw Lab with support from the Dana Foundation
Defendant Edwin Jurado-Nazario appealed his 300-month prison sentence to the First Circuit, claiming the sentence was “substantively unreasonable” due to certain mitigating factors, including his alleged traumatic brain injury. Jurado-Nazario also argued that the government had violated his plea agreement.
Edwin Jurado-Nazario, aged 27, had pled guilty to two counts of production of child pornography and two counts of transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity in March 2012 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 2015, he was sentenced to a 300 months in prison by the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico.
In his appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit on October 30, 2020, Jurado-Nazario argued that he should have received a lesser sentence because he was “(1) a veteran who served abroad in the US Army, (2) his family was abusive and neglectful to him as a child, (3) during his military service, he suffered a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder that triggered his resulting crimes, and (4) the sentencing guidelines for child pornography are unduly harsh.”
With respect to the first piece of mitigating evidence Jurado-Nazario raised, the First Circuit held that the district court had taken his military service into account during his sentencing. The presentence report indicated that a sentencing range of 324–405 months would be appropriate given Jurado-Nazario’s criminal history and the offenses at issue, but because Jurado-Nazario was a veteran, the district court reduced that sentence to 300 months. With respect to his alleged brain injury and PTSD, the First Circuit upheld the district court’s finding that there was “no medical evidence of a traumatic brain injury and no evidence that proved a causal connection between PTSD and Jurado-Nazario’s criminal behavior.”
The First Circuit therefore affirmed the district court’s ruling and upheld Jurado-Nazario’s 300-month sentence.
Key words: sentencing, traumatic brain injury, PTSD, veteran, Puerto Rico
Citation: United States v. Jurado-Nazario, 979 F.3d, (1st Cir. 2020)
This post is the 30th post as part of an ongoing Center for Law, Brain & Behavior (CLBB) series tracking the latest developments in law and neuroscience cases. To see previous posts about recent cases, see the full case archive on the CLBB website. To see updates on legal scholarship, see the Neurolaw News, hosted by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience. This project is made possible through support of the Dana Foundation.
