The Harvard-educated orthopedic surgeon who initiated a physical altercation at a popular island establishment in the wee hours of New Year’s Day was sentenced last week to 30 days in jail on a misdemeanor battery charge.
That wasn’t supposed to happen, despite the fact that the bar-room scuffle at Grind + Grape ended in a disturbing attack by the doctor’s father, who viciously stabbed his son’s victim in the back and inflicted a potentially life-threatening punctured kidney.
State prosecutors and Vero Beach defense attorney Andrew Metcalf had negotiated an agreement by which Michael Gaudiani would – in exchange for his no-contest plea – be sentenced to 12 months of probation, enter a 12-week anger management program and have no contact with Mason Haynes, the victim of his bar-room blitz.
The most impactful part of the deal, though, was the assurance the judge would withhold adjudication of guilt, which would allow Gaudiani, now 31, to go back to Detroit, where he works at Henry Ford Hospital, and tell the Michigan Board of Medicine’s licensing arm that he has not been convicted of a crime.
He still can.
But he’s also going to spend time in jail here.
While County Judge Robyn Stone accepted Gaudiani’s plea, she wasn’t satisfied that the punishment provided in the negotiated agreement fit the crime. She wanted more. She wanted her sentence to sting.
So, as a condition of Gaudiani’s probation, Stone also ordered him to spend 30 days in jail.
Metcalf was flabbergasted.
“I’m greatly surprised and disappointed a jail sentence was imposed,” Metcalf said after the sentencing. “The State Attorney’s Office did not recommend jail time. In fact, they made it clear they would not recommend jail in cases of this nature, especially when the defendant has no prior criminal record.
“No one objected to the agreement – not the state, not me, not even the victim,” he added. “We negotiated a fair resolution that was agreed up on by experienced attorneys who litigated the case. The agreement should’ve been honored.”
We can only speculate as to why Stone was determined to put Gaudiani behind bars, even though prosecutors rarely seek jail time for first-offenders in misdemeanor cases.
Surely, Stone is fully aware that this case, because of the stabbing and the setting in which it occurred, has received extensive coverage in the local news media. She knows the community is watching. She knows people here expect our judges to be tough on crime.
Was that a factor?
We don’t know.
We do know, however, that prosecutors, despite reviewing surveillance video of the incident and interviewing witnesses, could not uncover enough evidence to connect Gaudiani’s aggression to his father’s cowardly deed.
“This matter was carefully evaluated by our office,” said Bill Long, who heads the State Attorney’s Office in our county, “and the only charge we could bring against the younger defendant was battery.”
That might bother some of you, given what happened after Gaudiani grabbed the 27-year-old Haynes, bent him over and twisted him into a position where his shirt was slightly pulled up and his back was exposed.
But as much as the stabbing resembled a prison shanking – at least as it played out on the surveillance video – prosecutors could not prove that Gaudiani knew his father would seize the opportunity to plunge an as-yet undisclosed object into Haynes’ back.
Indeed, if Gaudiani’s case had gone to trial, he could’ve argued: “Some drunk guy was in my dad’s face, trying to intimidate him, so I stepped in to protect him. I didn’t know my dad would stab him.”
Haynes, after all, has admitted he had several drinks that night, and that he didn’t realize he had been stabbed until he was outside the bar, where other patrons noticed he was bleeding profusely.
However, witnesses who testified last summer at a hearing where Stone rejected Gaudiani’s stand-your-ground defense corroborated Haynes’ testimony that he never threatened or physically assaulted either of the Gaudianis and did nothing to instigate a confrontation.
That makes it hard for Gaudiani to portray himself as a victim of circumstance and claim he was merely rushing to his father’s defense, especially since courts records state that he made physical contact with Haynes three times.
So does the video, which clearly shows Gaudiani wasn’t cornered and didn’t need to get physical with Haynes – that he had ample opportunity to walk away from trouble and take his father with him.
Instead, Gaudiani, who should have known better, allowed a dispute over a table to escalate into a schoolyard-type scuffle and an entirely unnecessary stabbing.
But should he go to jail?
For a tussle in a bar?
Remember: Prosecutors did not link the misdemeanor battery case against Gaudiani in County Court to the felony case against his father, also named Michael, in Circuit Court, where the elder Gaudiani has been charged with aggravated battery with a deadly weapon.
They couldn’t.
“In my opinion, he absolutely does not deserve to go to jail,” Metcalf said, adding that he would have taken the case to trial if he had known Stone would impose jail time on his client. “The only reason the plea was entered was because everyone was OK with it.”
Everyone except Stone.
She watched the surveillance video. She saw Gaudiani tussle with Haynes. She also saw Gaudiani’s father jab something into Haynes’ back.
It wouldn’t be preposterous, then, if Stone were unable to totally separate the two incidents that involved the same cast of characters and happened within seconds of each other.
We don’t know that she didn’t.
And based on her performance on the bench thus far, there’s no good reason to not give her the benefit of the doubt – no reason to not trust she saw something that made this misdemeanor case different from others involving first-time offenders.
“I respect Judge Stone,” Metcalf said. “I think she’s a good judge. I just disagree with her in this case.”
That’s understandable.
For those who don’t know: Metcalf is also representing Gaudiani’s 67-year-old father on the felony charge, and you can be sure prosecutors, armed with damning video evidence, will bring a strong case.
They, too, know the community is watching. If they get a conviction, they’ll be pushing hard for prison time.
And they’d probably get it.
The younger Gaudiani, who almost certainly would not have been charged if his father hadn’t stabbed someone, got jail time for a routine misdemeanor.