Man gets 34-year sentence for human trafficking conviction

Graves’ conviction stems from December 2015 when a 16-year-old victim arrived at the Mills-Peninsula Medical Center in Burlingame with bruising to her eyes, arms and shoulder. When police were called to the hospital, she said Graves was her boyfriend and pimp, according to prosecutors.

Because Graves has a prior robbery conviction in Alameda County, his was a second-strike case, meaning the 15-year sentence he faced for human trafficking was doubled, with an additional four years in prison added for dissuading a witness, said Steve Wagstaffe, San Mateo County district attorney.

Wagstaffe said Graves would also be required to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life, and that the sentence was appropriate for the evil acts attributed to him.

“It’s a good heavy sentence for this trafficker,” he said. “There’s a phrase some people say that this is modern-day slavery and it really applies here.”

Though Graves’ defense attorney Paul DeMeester made a motion for a new trial Friday to consider new evidence found on his client’s phone, a judge determined the evidence was not relevant to the case.

DeMeester said he has tried almost all the strategies he can think of to contest Graves’ charges, hoping to reverse his convictions on the basis of his innocence. Having already been dismissed and refiled by prosecutors, the case is likely be reviewed again once DeMeester files an appeal of Graves’ conviction arguing that Graves was wrongly made to appear in court shackled in chains during one of his preliminary hearings.

“He should have been freed from restraint but he wasn’t,” he said.

DeMeester said a previous motion he made to dismiss Graves’ charges on this issue should have been granted since the case was dismissed once before, and that if his appeal is successful this time, Graves’ case would be barred from future prosecution.

He said he’s found recently passed pieces of legislation aimed at cracking down on the crime are more likely to push the political agendas of those proposing them than deter criminals from perpetrating them.

“It was really sort of a political expedient,” he said. “Now we’re stuck with a bad piece of legislation.”

Several years ago, law enforcement and prosecutors began to ramp up efforts to alert the community that San Mateo County isn’t immune to human trafficking.

A $150 billion global industry, an estimated 60,000 individuals are annually trafficked in the United States — and the Bay Area is a major hub for these criminals, according to the 2014 Human Trafficking in Silicon Valley report published by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Between 2012 and 2013, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services reported 1,628 victims of human trafficking received services from federally funded state task forces and the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office estimated nearly 43 percent of the state’s human trafficking cases are in the Bay Area, according to the report.

A survey revealed 232 trafficking victims received support services between 2011 and 2013 in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties alone, according to the report.

Between 2013 and 2014, San Mateo County prosecutors initiated about a dozen human trafficking cases, but it wasn’t until last year that a conviction for the charge was landed.

Although Graves’ jury decision is the first for local prosecutors, it wasn’t the only time someone has been convicted of human trafficking in San Mateo County.

In January 2016, San Francisco resident Sate Jones pleaded no contest to two counts of human trafficking for pimping two teenage girls he brought to a South San Francisco motel from Sacramento in 2013.

It was the county’s first conviction, which was secured through the plea deal. At the time, police credited in part an alert hotel clerk at the La Quinta Inn on Airport Boulevard who notified law enforcement about Jones and the girls.

In recent years, a collaborative effort by faith leaders, lawmakers, prosecutors and law enforcement has sought to raise awareness about human trafficking and how it can often be difficult to recognize. In November 2013, the San Mateo County Police Chiefs and Sheriff’s Association created a multi-jurisdictional task force.

Efforts include training hotel staff on how to recognize human trafficking, as well as implementation of a state requirement that informative posters with a toll-free hotline where victims and those who suspect human trafficking can call are hung at transit centers and certain businesses.

anna@smdailyjournal.com

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