OTTAWA — What did a Napoleon man expect would happen when he walked into the Sheriff’s Office and admitted he’d run over his 2-year-old son 10 years ago with an all-terrain vehicle on purpose, after he’d already served time on child endangerment charges following the death?
What did attorneys think it meant when they dismissed an involuntary manslaughter charge back in 2006?
Those are the questions that Judge Randall Basinger of Putnam County Common Pleas Court must wrestle with as he decides whether the state can prosecute 30-year-old Travis Soto on murder charges in that Jan. 23, 2006, death of Julio Baldazo, or whether those charges would count as double jeopardy, being prosecuted twice for the same crime.
“The Constitution of the United States protects Mr. Soto from being subject to being put twice in jeopardy in the prosecution for these offenses,” defense attorney Joseph Benavidez said during a double jeopardy hearing Tuesday. “He’s already faced his sentence in these cases.”
Soto faces charges of aggravated murder, murder, felonious assault and kidnapping, all first-degree felony charges, as well as tampering with evidence, a third-degree felony.
Basinger said he would wait to issue a ruling until he received the results of a psychological analysis if Soto is competent to stand trial. Benavidez expressed concerns he wasn’t competent and was unable to help his own defense.
Soto, who lived in Continental in 2006, received a five-year sentence after pleading guilty to child endangerment back then. At the time, he claimed he didn’t see the child when he drove around a corner and struck him. Soto didn’t seek medical attention for the boy after the incident, and the boy died one to two hours later.
Then, back in July, Soto walked into the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office, saying he needed to clear his conscience.
The hearing focused heavily on whether Soto’s 2006 child endangerment plea, a negotiated plea that took involuntary manslaughter off the table, protected him from future prosecution.
In one suspenseful moment, Basinger asked assistant prosecutor Todd Schroeder if Soto should have believed he would be protected from future punishment. After flipping through pages of the transcript from the Sheriff’s Office interview, Schroeder read a statement from Soto that he expected future prison time after his admission.
“The investigating officer asked, ‘What do you think will happen?’ The defendant responded, ‘I guess they’ll put me back in prison,’” Schroeder said, reading from a transcript of the interview.
Benavidez said Soto’s questions about going to work showed he understood things differently.
“Mr. Soto made it clear in the events at the sheriff’s department that he found religion, and these events were weighing heavily on his mind and on his conscience,” Benavidez said. “He made a confession. He expected to be released and to go to work.”
Basinger peppered the attorneys with questions about their understanding of potentially conflicting precedents. He seemed to linger on whether people in the 2006 plea bargain negotiations believed the death was an accident or purposeful, especially because Soto was the only witness to the death.
Soto remained silent throughout the hearing Tuesday.
The court will also decide if Soto can still be charged for felonious assault and tampering with evidence. The statute of limitations of those is generally six years, meaning those charges have expired in the 10 years since Baldazo’s death.
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