Mail Tribune News - Shooter gets added prison time

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Shooter gets added prison time A former Medford insurance agent got another 2 1/2 years in prison Wednesday for shooting an ex-lover in the arm in 1995. James Ricky Watson, 51, was originally sentenced to five years by now-retired Jackson County Judge Loren Sawyer, who rejected a mandatory 7 1/2-year minimum as unconstitutional. The state appealed, and the state Supreme Court upheld the law. Judge Ray White on Wednesday resentenced Watson to the mandatory 90-month term. The difference adds 2 1/2 years. He has been in prison since June 1996. Watson was convicted of first-degree assault and six lesser charges for shooting Susanna Wyatt and holding her and two boys hostage in a dispute at his Griffin Creek Road property on Mother's Day 1995. The two had an affair, and then the relationship soured. The shooting was the culmination of a dispute over Wyatt's eviction. Jurors acquitted him of attempted murder. Watson was the latest of a string of defendants to be resentenced after Sawyer ignored Measure 11 in their original sentences. The law, passed by Oregon voters in 1994, established mandatory minimum sentences for more than 20 violent crimes and treats juveniles as young as 15 as adults. The law sparked an unprecedented prison-construction boom. Critics say Measure 11 shifts power from judges to prosecutors and treats all defendants the same, regardless of prior history. Sawyer rejected the law at least eight times in 1996 and 1997. The state Court of Appeals has since reversed four of Sawyer's cases and sent them back to Jackson County for resentencing. Four other cases are pending. Mail Tribune Copyright �  The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA