A man acquitted of a murder charge last year in Kanawha County was sentenced Thursday by a federal judge to spend 70 months in prison for being a felon in possession of a firearm.
U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin handed down the near six-year prison sentence to Miguel Quinones for the gun charge. Federal advisory sentencing guidelines recommended a sentence between 46 and 57 months based on, among other things, Quinones' criminal history.
Quinones, 38, was acquitted of a murder charge in Kanawha County Circuit Court last year. After a six-day trial, jurors took about eight hours before finding him not guilty in the 2013 killing of Kareem Hunter, who was beaten to death in a Marmet apartment and buried in a shallow grave in Raleigh County.
Quinones and his lawyers had asked Goodwin to hand down a sentence of "time served," as Quinones has been in jail since Dec. 3, 2013.
A sentence of time served for the federal gun charge would have amounted to a sentence of about 28 months, as Quinones served a year for violating probation.
Quinones pleaded guilty earlier this year in federal court to having two guns in Dunbar in October 2013 and two guns when he was arrested at his girlfriend's Charleston townhouse on a probation violation in December 2013.
Quinones was prohibited from possessing firearms after being convicted in 2000 in Fayette County Circuit Court of second-degree murder in the 1995 death of Christopher Reardon, a Beckley bar owner. Quinones was 16 years old at the time of the shooting.
He was released from prison in 2011, but remained on probation.
Federal prosecutors immediately filed the gun charges against Quinones after his acquittal and he was never permitted to leave the South Central Regional Jail.
Hunter's parents said that the filing of the federal case - even though it didn't expose Quinones to a possible life sentence like the murder charge did - gave them some relief.
Before sentencing Quinones, Goodwin reviewed transcripts of the trial last year in which jurors found him not guilty in Hunter's death.
Assistant federal public defenders Christian Capece and Rachel Zimarowski, who represented Quinones, had strongly opposed allowing evidence from the trial to be considered at the sentencing hearing.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Rada said the evidence in the case involving Hunter's death was admissible despite Quinones' acquittal, "so long as it is proven by a preponderance of the evidence."
Reach Kate White at kate.white@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1723 or follow @KateLWhite on Twitter.