Court: Error in DUI case sentencing

Monday, March 30, 2020

The 5th District Court of Appeal says a Marion County judge erred when sentencing a 27-year-old woman last year.

“We vacate (Suzana) Bici’s sentence and remand for resentencing before a different judge,” a threejudge panel from the court wrote in a ruling published Friday.

Circuit Judge Willard Pope sentenced Bici, of Fort McCoy, to a 15-year prison term in March 2019. In January

of that year, a jury had found her guilty of DUI manslaughter and DUI with serious bodily injury.

Florida Highway Patrol troopers said they were called to Northeast 245th Street and 160th Avenue in May 2016. There had been a single-vehicle wreck, and Bici was the driver.

Bici and three other people, one of them Joel Smerkers, 30, of Brandon, were going to a store to purchase alcohol. She lost control of the vehicle while trying to negotiate a curve and crashed.

Smerkers was pinned under the left side of the 2005 Dodge Durango and was pronounced dead by a Marion County Fire Rescue paramedic.

Bici’s blood-alcohol content registered at 0.123. The level at which a driver is presumed intoxicated in Florida is 0.08.

Bici pleaded not guilty and, before trial, unsuccessfully tried to suppress the results of her blood draw.

After the jury returned its guilty verdicts, Bici asked for a downward departure sentence base on two reasons: The occupants of the vehicle were “willing participants” and “her offenses were committed in an unsophisticated manner and were isolated incidents for which she had shown remorse.”

At the sentencing hearing, Bici apologized to the victims’ families, took responsibility for her actions, and told the court she was remorseful, according to the appellate decision.

The state objected to the downward departure and presented evidence that Bici had a pending DUI charge at the time when the fatal DUI offense occurred, the court record states. Bici pleaded no contest to a reduced charge, reckless driving, in that other case.

Pope, who is now retired, denied Bici’s request for a downward departure. In doing so, as the appellate court noted, he specifically said that he did not fault Bici for pleading not guilty, for arguing the motion to suppress nor for taking her case to trial.

But the judge also said this: “Those are all things that you are entitled to, but it sure seems inconsistent with coming in here and telling me that you take full responsibility for all of this.”

“Again, I don’t fault you for exercising your constitutional rights,” the judge said. “But it’s inconsistent with throwing your hands up and bellying up to the bar and saying, ‘This is my bad.’ And this has been going on for three years. And now you’re taking full responsibility when you’re looking at a lowest permissible sentence, without a downward departure, of almost 15 years in prison.”