The estranged wife of former Osceola County Sheriff Marcos Lopez rejected an plea deal to avoid prison time as her trial for her role in her husband’s illegal gambling scheme was delayed until at least December.
In Lake County court on Thursday, Assistant Statewide Prosecutor Panagiota Papakos noted that Robin Severance-Lopez, 50, had been offered a deal to resolve her charge of conspiracy to commit racketeering as well as a separate case of lying in order to have her ankle monitor removed by having her plead guilty to two counts of money laundering. Her charge of racketeering, originally among the accusations following her June 23 arrest, had been dropped in recent weeks.
In exchange for her plea, she would have been sentenced to 24 months probation and would have had to “give a truthful statement” about the illegal gambling ring involving Lopez. That offer was nixed however, after her lawyer’s offer to withhold a conviction was rejected by prosecutors.
“The only thing that hung up the course of the negotiation was the adjudication, and so I was informed late yesterday that Mrs. Lopez was going to reject the offer entirely,” Papakos told Circuit Judge Brian Welke.
“Is that what you understood, Mrs. Lopez?” Welke asked. Severance-Lopez, standing at a podium near the jury box in shackles and an orange jumpsuit, replied, “Yes.”
Michelle Yard, Severance-Lopez’s attorney, supported her decision while speaking to reporters outside the courtroom, calling the deal that would have made her a convicted felon “inappropriate given the facts.”
The racketeering case, she previously noted, hinges on a single email containing a W-9 tax form sent to one of Lopez’s alleged collaborators, who funneled money to him through a business owned by Severance-Lopez for his work on the multi-county gambling operation that led to the couple’s arrests.
That collaborator, former realtor Ying Zhang, is one of several co-conspirators indicted for racketeering. Zhang is the sole suspect in the case to evade arrest, as she is believed to have fled to China.
“They simply don’t have a strong case against [Severance-Lopez], and there’s no reason she should have to live the rest of her life as a convicted felon,” Yard told reporters. Although Yard told Welke she was prepared to take the case to trial on Monday, she asked for more time after prosecutors handed over new evidence in the last week, “much of which arrived yesterday afternoon.”
Among other items, they include property and construction records and text message threads between her client and the wife of unindicted co-conspirator Krishna Deokaran, charged with money laundering in a separate but related case. Welke agreed and set a new trial date for Dec. 8.
Severance-Lopez has pleaded not guilty to all the charges. Yard seeks to resolve both cases before Christmas and is confident her client will emerge victorious.
“She wants to make sure she doesn’t remain in jail any longer than necessary,” Yard said after the hearing, noting that she will miss Thanksgiving with her family. “The only reason that we aren’t ready for Monday is because the state just dropped a bunch of new discovery on us.”
In the meantime, Severance-Lopez will remain in the Lake County Jail. If convicted of conspiracy to commit racketeering, she could face up to 30 years in prison.
Her husband, additionally charged with racketeering as he’s accused of setting the groundwork to establish and protect illegal casinos in Osceola and several other counties, faces a 60-year sentence.
The additional charge that Severance-Lopez lied about having thousands of dollars in undisclosed personal bank accounts while arguing she couldn’t afford the ankle monitor as a condition of her bail, a third-degree felony, carries a five-year bid behind bars.
