Laflin woman files reason for appeal in Harveys Lake stabbing

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WILKES-BARRE — A Laflin woman has appealed a decision by a Luzerne County judge who denied a request to withdraw her no-contest plea on a felony assault charge stemming from a stabbing in Harveys Lake in 2020.

Isabella Rosa Sobejano, 24, of Peachwood Drive, through her attorney Zak T. Goldstein of Philadelphia, filed the appeal with the Pennsylvania Superior Court last month challenging Judge David W. Lupas’ denial to withdraw her no-contest plea.

Sobejano in her appeal to the state appellate court claimed she received “ineffective assistance of counsel” and was pressured into signing the no-contest plea agreement to aggravated assault y her lawyer, Ruth K. Lenahan.

Pennsylvania State Police at Wilkes-Barre charged Sobejano after she stabbed Samuel Parente in the neck with a paring knife inside a boat house on June 15, 2020, according to court records.

Sobejano, at the time a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, had Parente do jumping jacks before she stabbed him in the neck, court records say.

Parente reportedly was ending a relationship with Sobejano who claimed she was pregnant with his child in order for the relationship to continue. The pregnancy was false, state police stated in court records.

During the court process, Sobejano was represented by Attorney Mark and then Attorney Lenahan, only to return to Mack before Lenahan represented her at the plea agreement proceeding.

Sobejano, through Goldstein, claims her trial lawyers during the court process were unprepared for trial that Lupas refused to continue in April 2022.

As Lupas held firm on having a trial, Sobejano claimed she was forced into signing the no-contest plea.

“The attorneys left her with no choice but to accept the deal because they were unprepared to try the case and erroneously assumed that they would be able to obtain a continuance of trial,” Goldstein wrote in Sobejano’s reason for appeal to the state appellate court.

During a court proceeding on Sobejano’s Post Conviction Relief Act held in March, she testified she was attacked in the boat house and stabbed Parente in self-defense.

Sobejano was sentenced to 40 months in the county’s Intermediate Punishment Program for the no-contest plea.