Filner completes home confinement sentence

SAN DIEGO (CNS) – Former Mayor Bob Filner's three-month term on house
arrest ended Sunday.

The period of home confinement and GPS monitoring was the result of his
guilty pleas last fall to false imprisonment and battery, stemming from
allegations of sexual harassment by at least 20 women.

The improprieties led the 71-year-old former Democratic congressman to
leave office last Aug. 30.

He was sentenced Dec. 9 in San Diego Superior Court, but his GPS
monitoring system was set up a week after it was supposed to have been, lawyer
Earll Pott told U-T San Diego.

Filner remains on three years probation.

Eighteen months after his sentencing, Filner can apply to have his
probation reduced to informal probation. He can also petition to have his
felony conviction reduced to a misdemeanor. Filner was required to undergo
mental health treatment while under court supervision. He also was fined
$1,500.

According to a sentencing memorandum submitted by his defense team,
Filner — once he became mayor — failed to keep up “with his longstanding
exercise regimen and course of psychiatric counseling and medications that had
been prescribed by congressional doctors to help stabilize his mood and
safeguard his mental health.

“The sudden disruption in his medications, coupled with longstanding
issues of anxiety and the stress of assuming a new, intensely political
executive position substantially contributed to conduct, described in the
probation officer's report, which has brought Mr. Filner before this court,”
according to the defense memo.

Supervising state Deputy Attorney General Melissa Mandel told Presiding
Judge Robert Trentacosta in October that Filner, while attending a fundraiser
on March 6 of last year used “greater force than necessary” to restrain a
woman against her will and used additional force to overcome her resistance, in
a move that became known as the “Filner headlock.”

Mandel said he used force and kissed another woman on the lips without
her consent at a “Meet the Mayor” event on April 6, 2013.

Filner also admitted grabbing a third woman on the buttocks after she
asked to take a picture with him at a May 25 rally at Fiesta Island.