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Judge may reject attempt to withdraw guilty pleas in San Bernardino terror case

by in News

Riverside resident Enrique Marquez Jr. likely has lost his attempt to withdraw the guilty pleas he made two years ago to charges related to supplying the AR-style rifles used to kill 14 people and wound 22 others in the 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino.

U.S. District Court Judge Jesus G. Bernal said Friday, Jan. 31, that he was inclined to deny Marquez’s motion. Bernal said he would issue a written ruling on an unspecified date.

Bernal’s statement came after two days of testimony from two psychiatrists who examined Marquez, 28. They concluded he has Autism Spectrum Disorder, which affects how a person acts, and Bipolar Disorder 2, which causes cyclical depression. The doctors also said Marquez is high functioning, is capable of showing insight, has digested Dostoevsky novels and has an IQ in the 97th percentile.

Defense attorney John Aquilina, in his closing argument, said he was not relying exclusively on mental illness as a reason to withdraw the plea, but a belief that Marquez was acting impulsively. Marquez had told Bernal at the time of the February 2017 plea that he was aware of the consequences of that action — a maximum 25-year sentence — and was mentally fit to make that decision.

“He pled guilty because he felt a moral guilt. He wanted to end the process. He wanted to repay the victims,” Aquilina said.

But in early 2018, a change in Marquez’s medication allowed him to think more clearly, Aquilina said. “Clearer in the sense that I am going to assert my innocence.” The motion to withdraw was filed in May 2019.

Prosecutor Melanie Ann Sartoris described the maneuver to Bernal as “a change of heart and a change of mind” that did not meet the legal standard.

Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said factors that Bernal can weigh include the amount of time between the plea and the motion, whether Marquez had legal representation during the plea, whether the consequences of Marquez’s plea were misrepresented, whether there is new evidence and whether he was coerced into the admission.

“Courts will often say a mere change of heart is insufficient,” Levenson said Friday.

Marquez sat silently in the Riverside courtroom Friday as psychiatrist Daniel Martell described him as a man who wants to make friends but has difficulty doing so because of a lack of eye contact and an inability to read facial expressions, among other failings. In place of face-to-face relationships, Marquez would often retreat into booze and books, and make friends in online chat rooms, Martell said.

“He met up with some of them, and he learned they were as odd as he was,” Martell said.

See also: Enrique Marquez Jr. wants his guilty pleas in San Bernardino terror attack tossed; prosecutors object

Thursday, a doctor testified that Marquez said he was feeling suicidal, hopeless, depressed and even catatonic around the time of his guilty pleas to charges of providing material support to a terrorist and making false statements on a federal firearms-purchase form.

Prosecutors countered the claims made in Marquez’s motion to withdraw the pleas by presenting evidence showing that instead of being suicidal, he’d told people that he was doing well in jail and hopeful for his future.

“That’s as opposite as you can get. Both can’t be true,” psychiatrist Saul Faerstein told prosecutor Julius Nam.

Prosecutors said Marquez bought the guns for an attack on the Riverside City College campus and the 91 Freeway by him and Syed Rizwan Farook. That plan was aborted. Marquez told FBI agents that Farook wanted him to buy the guns because he believed it would deflect suspicion that might be raised if a Middle Eastern-looking man bought them.

Prosecutors have said Marquez was unaware of plans by former Riverside neighbor Farook and Farook’s wife, Tashfeen Malik, to commit the massacre at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino on Farook’s co-workers from the San Bernardino County Division of Environmental Health during a combined training session and holiday party.

The Redlands couple who carried out the attack died the same day in a shootout with law enforcement.