How to resolve AdBlock issue? LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – After six years of working its way through the courts, the case against a Lake County man who was accused of having sex with a teenage girl was dismissed on Friday in Marin County Superior Court.
The California Attorney General's Office dropped its case against Derik Dion Navarro, 41, due to lack of evidence, according to Navarro's attorney, Mitchell Hauptman of Lakeport.
Navarro was prosecuted for allegedly having sex with a minor over the course of a year, beginning when she was 14 years old in 2005.
The decision not to continue pursuing the case came nearly a month after the jury deadlocked on all 16 counts, which had included lewd and lascivious acts with a minor, sodomy and having sex with a minor under age 16.
Attorney General's Office spokesperson Lynda Gledhill confirmed on Friday that the case had been dropped.
Gledhill said that with half the jurors having decided Navarro was not guilty, the Attorney General's Office – which continued to believe the case had merit – decided not to retry it.
Navarro was arrested in April 2007, a week after he was fired from his job as a Lake County Sheriff's deputy.
After Don Anderson took office as Lake County's district attorney at the start of January 2011, the case was taken over by the Attorney General's Office.
Anderson, before his election, had represented Navarro in an administrative hearing regarding his sheriff’s office employment, giving rise to a conflict of interest that necessitated moving it out of the District Attorney's Office.
The case encountered continual delays but in December 2011 appeared to have neared a conclusion when the Attorney General's Office reached a plea agreement with Navarro.
The agreement required Navarro to plead guilty to one count of felony unlawful intercourse with a child under age 16.
While the agreement had the blessing of the alleged victim – now in her early 20s – and her family, Sheriff Frank Rivero publicly denounced it, putting out a press release in which he called it a “travesty of justice” and asking the Attorney General's Office to withdraw the deal.
Rivero also had a sealed letter left on Judge Andrew Blum's desk in chambers at the time the judge was considering whether or not to accept the plea agreement. Such ex parte communications with judges about ongoing cases are strictly forbidden.
Blum ultimately rejected the plea agreement in January 2012, saying the three-month jail sentence Navarro would have received – with no requirement to register as a sex offender – was “ridiculously lenient.”
As the result of an April 2012 change of venue motion – which the Attorney General's Office did not oppose – Navarro's case was moved to Marin County, where his trial began this past June.
Hauptman said at the time that the change of venue was necessary due to concerns that Navarro could not get a fair trial in Lake County, a circumstance the defense said resulted from Rivero politicizing the matter.
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