Tunoa Radaiga Meo was sentenced Friday, July 24, to 25 years to life in state prison for stabbing his wife to death in their Santa Rosa apartment on the Fourth of July three years ago. Judge Kenneth English handed down the term in Sonoma County Superior Court — one year plus 25 to life for first-degree murder, after a jury found he personally used a deadly weapon.
How much of that Meo actually serves before he sees a parole board is a question now sitting with the California Supreme Court.
The Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office announced the sentence Friday afternoon, and near the end of the release told the public the number was soft. Because of Proposition 57, the release says of the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, “CDCR guidelines now allow violent felons and offenders sentenced to an indeterminate ‘life’ term to reduce their sentences by 33% before first becoming eligible for parole consideration.” Counting the three years Meo has been in custody since his arrest, it goes on, “it’s anticipated Meo will first become eligible for parole consideration after serving approximately 15 actual years in prison.”
That arithmetic tracks a real regulation. Under Title 15 of the California Code of Regulations, Section 3043.2, someone serving an indeterminate term for a violent felony — a life term like Meo’s is one — earns one day of good conduct credit for every two days served, a rate of 33.3%, in place since May 1, 2021. For an indeterminate sentence those credits don’t shorten the term. They move up the date of the first parole hearing.
The regulation is the thing in dispute.
Meo was sentenced under Section 190 of the Penal Code, which sets 25 years to life for first-degree murder. Subdivision (e) of that same section says the state’s conduct-credit law “shall not apply to reduce any minimum term of a sentence imposed pursuant to this section,” and that a person sentenced under it “shall not be released on parole prior to serving the minimum term of confinement prescribed by this section.”
The Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a Sacramento victims’-rights group, sued the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation over the credit regulations. On Dec. 13, 2023, a Sacramento County Superior Court judge ruled the department had no authority to apply Proposition 57 credits to minimum parole dates. The judgment that followed ordered it to stop calculating those dates with credits, stop holding hearings on dates credits had moved up and stop releasing anyone found suitable at such a hearing. The department appealed.
On July 28, 2025, the Third District Court of Appeal came down in the middle. Proposition 57 gave the department broad power to award credits, the court held, but not to apply them to advance a minimum parole date where another statute forbids it. “Awarding credits and applying the credits awarded are two different things,” the panel wrote. The regulations are “void to the extent they conflict with existing law, such as Penal Code section 190.” Subdivision (e), the court noted, “bars a murderer from earning any postsentence conduct credit to reduce” that date.
That’s Meo’s statute, and Meo’s crime.
The state Supreme Court then granted review in Criminal Justice Legal Foundation v. Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, case S292887, which leaves the appellate ruling standing but no longer binding while the justices consider it. The court’s own list of pending criminal issues, current as of May 22, puts the question in one sentence: “Does Proposition 57 authorize the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to award and apply earned credits to advance indeterminately sentenced persons’ minimum eligible parole dates?” No decision has come down.
Meanwhile the department is running half the old system. A partial stay — a pause on parts of that order while the appeal plays out — lets it keep applying the credits and keep holding hearings on the advanced dates, according to a corrections department fact sheet on the litigation, but it “cannot release” people found suitable at those hearings on a date that credits moved up.
So the 15-year figure the district attorney’s office gave the public on Friday describes a hearing Meo might get. It doesn’t describe a release he would get.
The Proposition 57 paragraph isn’t specific to this case. The office ran the same sentence, word for word, in a Dec. 18, 2025 release announcing a life term for a Windsor man convicted of trying to kill his ex-girlfriend. But that conviction was attempted murder, sentenced under a different statute, and Section 190’s bar doesn’t reach it. Meo’s does. Neither release mentions the litigation.
Meo and Marica Mara had been married and living in a second-story apartment on McBride Lane, and on the morning of July 4, 2023, they argued — about Meo wanting to come along on a family trip to the coast, and about his being irresponsible with money. He left. Mara threw some of his clothes off the balcony. He came back, took a chef’s knife with a 7 3/4-inch blade out of a kitchen drawer, walked to the living room and stabbed her repeatedly, hard enough that the knife went into her bones. She died about an hour later. The Press Democrat, which covered the trial, reported she was stabbed 18 times, including in the head.
Jury selection started at the end of April. Jurors heard a week of testimony in early May and convicted him.
Mara’s family gave their victim-impact statements by video from Fiji — her 81-year-old mother, her sister and her five children, on what it is to lose a mother, a sister and a daughter. English, taking that in, said Meo had stolen the love of a mother from her children.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Andrew Lukas prosecuted the case. Detective Brooke Clark of the Santa Rosa Police Department’s Violent Crimes Team headed the investigation.
Meo was sentenced to 25 years to life. His prosecutors told the public to expect about 15. Which number the law actually requires is with the state Supreme Court.
“While nothing can replace the loss suffered by Ms. Marica Mara’s family, I am thankful that the defendant has been held accountable under the law,” District Attorney Carla Rodriguez said in the release. “This senseless act of violence serves as a reminder that domestic violence occurs in Sonoma County.”