A convicted child molester is back in prison more than a year after the state Court of Appeals reversed his 2022 conviction and remanded him for a retrial.

But instead of facing a trial again, 56-year-old Coy Bozeman accepted a plea bargain and pleaded guilty in Island County Superior Court to three counts of child molestation in the second degree.

Earlier this month, Judge Carolyn Cliff agreed with the sentence recommendation from both the prosecution and defense and sentenced Bozeman to five and a half years in prison. He reported to prison this week.

In 2021, a jury in Island County Superior Court found Bozeman guilty of three counts of child molestation in the first degree. The jury found he molested a 7-year-old and a 10-year-old girl after he and his wife took three young girls into their home and cared for them over about six months, from the fall of 2018 to spring of 2019.

The jury found him not guilty of molesting the third girl, who was 6 years old at the time of the allegations.

After the trial, the judge sentenced Bozeman, a retired Navy man, to an indeterminate sentence of 98 months to life.

After he was sentenced to prison, Bozeman appealed his conviction. The Appeals Court found that the trial judge abused her discretion in excluding evidence that the girls may have read pages from a journal written by an older stepdaughter that detailed instances of sexual abuse in another home. The defense argued that the girls got ideas for making up sexual abuse allegations from the journal.

Shortly after the ruling, Bozeman was back in Island County and then was released after posting a $75,000 bail bond.