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On Monday, for a second time, a former Crystal Lake man convicted in March of sexually assaulting a child was sentenced to 60 years in prison.
Juan Cheverez, 41, was convicted on three counts of predatory criminal sexual assault of a child younger than 12, Class X felonies. In May, He was sentenced to 60 years in prison. But he was granted a new sentencing hearing after Assistant Public Defender Kim Messer filed a motion to reconsider saying Judge Tiffany Davis erred when she “improperly emphasized the defendant’s silence in allocution at his time of sentencing.”
Allocution refers to a step before a sentencing when the judge addresses the defendant, and often the defendant will give a statement of contrition.
“The Court in its ruling noted that the defendant had not made a statement in allocution,” Messer said in the motion. “The Court noted that defendant had offered no ‘explanation’ nor had he displayed ‘accountability’ reflective of remorse.”
Messer said Cheverez’s “constitutional right to remain silent extends through sentencing, and the Court may not draw a negative inference from the exercise of this right. The Court may not consider the defendant’s silence in allocution as aggravation in determining an appropriate sentence.”
At Monday’s resentencing hearing, Assistant State’s Attorney Ashur Youash again asked for a prison sentence of 90 years. The charges Cheverez is convicted of carry a sentencing range of 18 to 180 years in prison.
Youash reminded Davis that she had read the victim impact statement, seen the photographs of the child during the time of the assaults. The judge, Youash said, knows how the impact the assaults will have on the child “the rest of her life.”
Cheverez was accused of assaulting the child multiple times between about 2007 to 2012, when the child was about 6 to about 10 years old, prosecutors and the judge have said.
Messer said the new sentence could not exceed the original 60 years and asked for a reduced prison term. She said that “too much weight may have been given” in that he did not make a statement of allocution at the previous sentence.
Davis asked Cheverez if he wanted to make a statement of allocution Monday to which again he said no. She noted that Cheverez has a daughter living with her grandfather in Mexico whose mother is deceased. Cheverez has said his daughter needs him. But Davis said the risk he poses to the community outweighs the loss to his family.
The assaults were “ongoing,” Davis said. She recalled the girl testifying during trial and saying Cheverez did “whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted.” Davis said she and the jury found the alleged victim credible and Cheverez “not credible.”
“He denied every single thing down to every detail,” Davis said.
She was a little girl “with a backpack on her back, hair in pigtails, going to school. The defendant’s actions robbed her of her childhood. [She] said he threatened her and her family’s life [if she told] and she did tell ... “with credibility,” Davis said.
Cheverez is required to serve 85% of his prison term, which will work out to be 51 years. He then will serve mandatory supervised release from three years to life. He also is to register as a sex offender for life. Cheverez is getting credit of 960 days in the county jail since his arrest.