Buhl man to spend at least 15 years in prison for domestic battery

Times-News - 9/22/2018

Sept. 22--TWIN FALLS -- A Buhl man will spend at least 15 years in prison for causing what a judge described as the most severe domestic battery injury he'd seen in his career.

Leon Cazier, 41, was convicted in June of domestic battery inflicting traumatic injury in the presence of a child. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison Friday afternoon; after 15 years, he'll be eligible for parole.

"It is a tragedy. There just isn't any other word for it," Judge Thomas Ryan said. "Your wife...is an invalid. She cannot speak. She cannot take care of her children.... It's the worst injury from a domestic violence incident that I've ever seen in my career."

Police began investigating Cazier after he called 911 in August 2017 and reported that his wife had fallen in the shower and was having trouble breathing.

Cazier first told police that he found his wife face down in the tub. Later, he admitted that he had sat on his wife, put her in a choke hold and covered her mouth with his hand earlier that morning, but said he did it because his wife was threatening to kill their 2-year-old daughter while holding a knife. He also claimed to have found his wife in the bathtub with a belt around her neck later that morning.

Since that day, Cazier's wife has been unable to speak, roll over, sit up, or use the bathroom by herself, according to the prosecution and court documents.

A sentencing hearing for Cazier Friday lasted nearly four hours and included testimony from one of Cazier's ex-wives and several men who worked with him during his time with the Heyburn Police Department in the mid-2000s, all of whom testified for the state. Prosecutor Suzanne Ehlers also showed the court photos of bruises on Cazier's wife's body spanning a period of several years leading up to the incident, as well as a video Cazier's wife made in October 2016 documenting what she described as ongoing abuse from her husband.

"He's not nice to me," Cazier's wife said in the video, after describing a pattern of "rough sex" and physical and verbal abuse. "He doesn't treat me like he values me."

At the sentencing hearing Friday, as in the jury trial in June, defense attorney Daniel Brown argued that Cazier acted in self-defense that morning last August. He read aloud from a report taken by investigators looking into possible child abuse roughly one year before the incident, in which one of the couple's children described his mother chasing him with a knife.

"Mr. Cazier did not intend for these injuries to occur," Brown said. "He felt the actions he took were necessary to save the life of his daughter...and that's why this occurred."

Regardless of whether Cazier's wife threatened their daughter, Ehlers told the court, the amount of force used by Cazier "far exceeded what was necessary" to protect the child.

The state asked for a fixed sentence of 20 years in prison with no possibility of parole. The defense requested a fixed sentence of five years.

The sentencing concluded with comments from Cazier himself that lasted more than an hour and touched on childhood experiences, his relationships with his three ex-wives, and his motivations for becoming a police officer years ago. He also addressed some of the injuries his wife sustained in the months and years before the incident; he said she ended up with two black eyes after he hugged her while she was upset and she shook her head back and forth hard enough that her glasses caused bruising to her face.

"I would love to be able to do some good in this world still," Cazier told the court.

Ryan noted that Cazier's allocution was the longest he'd heard in his career. It wasn't until the end of the defendant's remarks, the judge said, that he sensed Cazier felt "any remorse" for what happened that day.

"Most of everything I listened to today was about you, and about how it was always somebody else's fault for the situations you got in," Ryan said.

Cazier will serve a 20-year sentence, with 15 years fixed and five indeterminate.

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