The City of Dallas and the Police Department let this beast back out on the street, when he was a fugitive alien.


Man receives life sentence for raping 23-month-old

08:33 PM CST on Thursday, February 5, 2009
By JENNIFER EMILY / The Dallas Morning News
jemily@dallasnews.com

In the end, jurors did not care that the man who raped a little boy was himself molested when he was young. They didn't care that he lived on the streets as a child. And they didn't care that the man admitted what he did.

All that mattered, jurors said Wednesday, is that they could not face the little boy or his mother if they gave Santos Rivera less than a life sentence for raping a 23-month-old.

So, after just 40 minutes of deliberations Wednesday, that's exactly what they did. There were no dissenters.

"This kid has a life sentence," Tommy Newton, 36, said he told his fellow jurors. "If I ran into this kid when he was 20 or 30 or 50, I could not look him in the eye, unless I gave [Rivera] a life sentence."

Rivera pleaded guilty Wednesday to assaulting the boy and then asked a jury to hear evidence and decide his punishment.

The victim, now almost 4, was molested in March 2007 when Rivera raped him while baby-sitting him at an Irving apartment complex. Testimony showed that Rivera regularly baby-sat the boy on weekends while the child's mother worked waiting tables.

The mother's roommate came home one day and found a partially unclothed Rivera in the bathroom with the child, who was sobbing uncontrollably. Authorities used DNA found in the baby's diaper to definitively link Rivera to the crime.

Rivera testified Wednesday that he could not recall hurting the child. "I can't remember," he testified through an interpreter. "I feel bad."

Rivera told jurors that he, too, was a victim of sexual assault. He said he was raped by a stranger when he was 7 on the way home from school in El Salvador.

One of 12 kids, Rivera said he did not tell his parents about the attack because he thought he would be punished. He left home six months later. He said he lived on the streets, collecting cans and bottles for cash. He was jailed for three months in El Salvador for trying to extort money from people when he was 17.

Rivera, 26, came to the U.S. in 2003. He was ordered deported in 2005 but remained in the country illegally. He was charged with misdemeanor assault in 2006 in Dallas County.

If Rivera is paroled in 30 years when he is eligible, he will be sent to El Salvador.

Defense attorney Donna Winfield did not ask for probation in her closing arguments, though Rivera was eligible because he did not have a felony conviction. She told jurors she knew he wouldn't get less than 20 years.

She asked them to take into account his own abuse as a child and that he took responsibility for hurting the boy.

Dallas County prosecutors Justin McCants and Dewey Mitchell had asked jurors for the life sentence.

"That mother's gift from God was desecrated," Mitchell told jurors in closing arguments. "It happened because of the evil that lies in that man's heart."

The boy's mother told Rivera during a victim impact statement after the trial that she could not stop thinking about the horrors he put her son through.

She spoke in Spanish to Rivera. Unlike the trial, however, no one interpreted her words because victim impact statements are not part of the official court record.

Because Rivera wasn't looking at her as she spoke, the mother told him "look at me." Rivera, who was breathing heavily, looked up but closed his eyes for most of the time she spoke.

"I'm glad you won't be able to go out because you won't be able to do that to another kid," she said tearfully. "Why did you have to do that to [my son]? He was just a baby."

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