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SAN JOSE — A former San Jose police officer who gained notoriety in 2022 after he was caught masturbating while working a family disturbance call has pleaded no contest to indecent exposure, along with separate instances of groping women both on- and off-duty, and a subsequent road rage episode while he was out of custody for the previous charges.
Matthew Dominguez, 35, entered the plea to Judge Benjamin Williams in a San Jose courtroom on Tuesday. Under the terms of a plea agreement with the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office, he will be technically sentenced to three years and two months in prison, though because of credit for the year and nine months he has spent at the Santa Clara County Main Jail, he won’t spend any additional time in custody.
Dominguez was granted supervised release pending his scheduled Sept. 25 sentencing, and in the intervening weeks is expected to resolve two sets of misdemeanor DUI charges in San Mateo County before returning to Santa Clara County court. As part of the plea agreement, Dominguez will voluntarily surrender his police certification with the state Commission Peace Officer Standards and Training, which had temporarily suspended his licensing pending the outcome of the criminal case.
He also pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor stemming from a Palo Alto traffic stop in which he reportedly refused to submit to alcohol screening. That occurred just a week before his Nov. 17, 2023 road rage arrest, and those cases and the San Mateo County DUI arrests all occurred months after his four-year stint with the San Jose Police Department ended under the cloud of the sexual misconduct charges.
“A police officer’s presence should ensure safety and care. Matthew Dominguez abused that notion to harm his victims and he undermined the badge he wore by doing so,” Deputy District Attorney Jason Malinsky said Tuesday. “Today he is being held accountable for his crimes in and out of uniform.”
Dominguez’s attorney, Daniel Mayfield, said his client’s mental health began suffering after joining SJPD in 2018 and that he received counseling and medical treatment while in jail. Dominguez was the subject of court hearings to evaluate his mental competence that ended with him being deemed fit for trial.
“This was a very sad situation,” Mayfield said in a statement. “We believe that a settlement in this case was in the interest of all parties, and Mr. Dominguez has expressed his profound condolences to the victims in these cases.”
Dominguez was first charged following an April 2022 allegation that while working a domestic disturbance call, a resident saw him, away from the police interview, masturbating with his penis visible outside his pants. After a May 2022 misdemeanor indecent exposure charge was filed against Dominguez, a 25-year-old Menlo Park woman told this news organization that she was groped by Dominguez at a 2021 Memorial Day party at the home of another San Jose police officer. Prosecutors initially declined to charge Dominguez, but changed course after she went public, and added a misdemeanor sexual battery count against the officer.
Then a second woman came forward to report that in December 2021, Dominguez squeezed her breast after arresting her on suspicion of DUI. The woman said Dominguez groped her under the guise of undoing her seat belt, and the claim resulted in a second misdemeanor sexual battery charge. Those battery counts were filed in July 2022, and a month later Dominguez was no longer with the police department.
Dominguez was charged in San Mateo County with misdemeanor DUI related to separate arrests on Jan. 1, 2023 and April 9, 2023, court records show.
On Nov. 8, 2023, Dominguez was cited in Palo Alto after a traffic stop revealed he was driving without a license, and he refused an alcohol screening. Nine days later, Dominguez was arrested by his former police department after an hours-long sequence in which he is alleged to have accosted, rammed, then chased a car full of people that he claimed narrowly avoided colliding with him. The chase spanned from South San Jose to downtown before the reported victims lost his tail, but police allege that Dominguez surfaced an hour later in North San Jose and confronted a different motorist, yelling and throwing a bottle at the driver, who called 911.
He had been in county jail since that arrest, until Tuesday. As part of the plea agreement, two related felony charges, assault with a deadly weapon and reckless driving while evading a peace officer, were downgraded to misdemeanors.
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Robert Salonga
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