Jonathan Talamantes stands in front of the Mower County jail’s computerized money deposit system at about 8:30 p.m. on Aug. 8, 2014. Wearing a black shirt and jean shorts, he pushes buttons on the machine inside the jail lobby for more than a minute while a friend looks on.

A woman steps into the lobby to check on the pair. Talamantes turns and charges the woman, who tries to put her hands up in defense.

Talamantes grabs her by the hair and moves her against a nearby garbage can. He shakes her roughly, tries to slam her against the garbage can lid.

That’s when he fires off a right hook.

The punch Talamantes throws knocks her out on her feet. By then, Talamantes’s friend tries to break up the scuffle and doesn’t notice the woman fall to the ground head-first. She would later learn she suffered a concussion from the blow.

Talamantes walks out in a slow, deliberate manner — the same way he walked into the jail lobby.

The entire attack lasts about 8 seconds from the time she walks in to the time he walks out. Long enough for the victim to suffer heavy bleeding from her mouth, and inside her ear.

And it was all caught on the jail’s surveillance camera.

“A lot of people are just simply appalled by what they’ve seen,” Mower County Attorney Kristen Nelsen said. “They would be, because it’s an absolutely brutal assault.”

Talamantes was sentenced on July 30 to 14 months for third-degree assault for knocking the woman unconscious.

Yet his case has spurred renewed attention from area residents concerned with how little jail time Talamantes received for such a brutal attack. The Mower County Attorney’s office released footage of the attack last Tuesday in response to several media requests, which left several people wondering: How did he only get a little more than a year in prison?

The short answer? State sentencing guidelines.

Talamantes could have received more time in prison, had he not been sentenced to 125 months in prison earlier this summer for a drug-related offense. County attorneys wanted Talamantes to receive the most prison time possible, which meant he had to be sentenced separately with a different sentencing guidelines score than the one he previously built up over the years.

His case is illustrative of how complex Minnesota’s sentencing guidelines can be.

A history of crime

When he was 16, Talamantes was sentenced to 48 months in jail for first-degree aggravated robbery. From there, court records show Talamantes came back to court for a variety of crimes, from fifth-degree drug possession to fleeing from police officers.

He came back to court in 2010 on a domestic assault by strangulation charge and was sentenced to 21 months in 2011. He was in court again in 2012, where he was sentenced to three years’ probation for fifth-degree drug possession. Talamantes would later violate his probation and was sentenced to 19 months in prison.

Talamantes was already high on the sentencing guidelines score sheet, but he was about to get into much more serious trouble.

On May 7, 2014, Talamantes was spotted driving erratically through Albert Lea at about 8:37 p.m. Officers found him driving a white Volkswagen on Interstate 90 heading eastbound, just past the Hayward exit.

Talamantes stopped the car at first, but he tried to outrun cops by moving off of I-90 and onto County Road 26. Eventually, Talamantes drove the car into a ravine and tried to run away from the scene. Officers stopped him at gunpoint.

Police found three large bags filled with what later turned out to be 90 grams of meth, as well as a digital scale underneath the driver’s seat of the van.

Talamantes was charged with first-degree drug possession, which automatically bumped his sentencing guideline score up to near the top of the chart once he was convicted, according to Mower County Assistant Attorney Jeremy Clinefelter.

Under the guidelines, Talamantes could have gotten 30 months for the assault against the woman inside the Mower County jail.

Yet the guidelines also presented a problem: Those 30 months would have to be served at the same time as his 125-month sentence in the meth case. That’s why Clinefelter and Mower County prosecutors chose a different tack.

There are times when prosecutors can try to get exemptions to the guidelines, or “depart” from the guidelines as they call it. There are specific qualifications for each departure, but in Talamantes’s case, those qualifications were met for a consecutive sentence, or a sentence to be served on top of his 125 months.

Yet this consecutive sentence couldn’t take his previous crimes into account under state law.

Though Nelsen believes personal attacks should be punished more severely than drug crimes, she praised Clinefelter and the attorney’s office for their work on the case.

“I don’t always agree with the guidelines, but we’re required to follow them,” she said. “We have to follow the sentencing guidelines, so we do. Even when we don’t like it, because that’s just how our system works here.”