Attorney seeks review of ruling involving local case

Yuma attorney Jeremy Claridge has filed an expedited petition to the Arizona Supreme Court asking it to review a Court of Appeals decision that has denied his client’s right to have exculpatory evidence presented to the grand jury.

Claridge represents now 23-year-old Jose Adrian Agundez-Martinez, who has been charged with three counts of molestation of a child and two counts of sexual conduct with a minor.

He has been in custody at the Yuma County jail on a $500,000 cash-only bond, which his family cannot afford to pay, for nearly a year now.

In his seven-page petition, Claridge wrote that when the case was initially presented to the Yuma

County Grand Jury, the prosecution did not include that his client was only 12 years and nine months old at the time he allegedly committed the offenses.

By not doing so, Claridge argues that it mislead members of the grand jury to believe that the person being accused was an adult, not a child, which he contends was highly prejudicial to his client.

“The question is whether this intentional misdirection by the prosecution was preclusive of a proper indictment,” he wrote.

He further contends that the grand jury did not receive a proper explanation of the law when the case was presented to it, because if it had, it would have been included in the transcripts of the proceedings, and it was not.

Claridge tried to have the case remanded back to the grand jury last year for a new determination of probable cause, based on these two issues, but the Yuma Superior Court Court judge presiding over the case denied the request.

He then filed a motion with the Arizona Court of Appeals for a Special Action to reverse the Superior Court’s decision, but it ruled neither issue amounted to what was a reversible error.

Agundez-Martinez, who is a San Luis resident, was arrested on June 3, 2019, after three individuals who are now ages 16, 18, and 20 came forward and told San Luis police that when they were children, and being babysat by his mother at their home, he would sexually molest them.

His trial in Yuma County Superior Court is set to begin the second week of June.

This is not the first time Claridge has filed a motion with the Arizona Supreme Court on his behalf of his client in the case.

One of the major disputes he raised in a previous pleading was whether the Yuma County Attorney’s Office could prosecute his client as an adult, more than a decade after the crimes were allegedly committed as a child.

“In other words, if the state prosecutor cannot prosecute a child while they are still a minor, can the state wait until the child reached age 18 to prosecute,” Claridge wrote in that petition.

The other issue he raised centered on the matter of whether the Yuma County Superior Court even had jurisdiction over the case in the first place, writing that under Arizona law a juvenile judge determines during what is known as a transfer hearing, if minors under the age of 15 are to be tried as adults, not the prosecution.

Because that didn’t happen, Claridge argued that it constituted a violation of his client’s rights to due process.

Since his client was a minor at the time of the alleged offenses, Claridge was seeking to have the case to be before the Yuma County Juvenile Court, where the laws pertaining to children involved in sexual acts are much different, as opposed to Superior Court, where he is now facing lengthy prisonmandatory sentences.

It is not known when Claridge’s most recent motion will be heard, but it was filed as an expedited request in the hope a ruling will be made before the start of his client’s trial.