Laflin woman files appeal in Harveys Lake stabbing

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

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

In her appeal to the state Court of Appeals, Sobejano claimed she received “ineffective assistance of counsel” and was pressured into signing the no-contest plea agreement to aggravated assault by her attorney, Ruth K. Lenahan.

Pennsylvania State Police in Wilkes-Barre charged Sobejano after he stabbed Samuel Parente in the neck with a paring knife inside a boathouse on June 15, 2020, court records show.

Sobejano, then a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, asked Parente to do jumping jacks before stabbing him in the neck, court documents say.

Parente reportedly ended his relationship with Sobejano, who pretended to be pregnant with his child, so the relationship could continue. The pregnancy was fake, state police said in court records.

During the court process, Sobejano was represented by attorney Mark, then attorney Lenahan, then returned to Mack before Lenahan represented her during the plea proceedings.

Sobejano, through Goldstein, claims that his trial lawyers during the legal process were not prepared for the trial that Lupas declined to continue in April 2022.

While Lupas was determined to have a trial, Sobejano claimed she was forced to sign a no-contest plea.

“The attorneys left him no choice but to accept the agreement because they were unprepared to try the case and wrongly assumed they would be able to obtain a continuance of the trial,” Goldstein wrote in Sobejano’s grounds of appeal to the state appeals court.

At a Sobejano post-conviction relief proceeding in March, she testified that she was attacked in the boathouse and stabbed Parente in self-defense.

Sobejano was sentenced to 40 months in prison under the county's intermediate sentencing program for his no contest plea.