Benito Evaristo Rayo, Sr. isn't a happy man.
The onetime Santa Ana father and current California prison resident doesn't believe that his sexual relationship with his 11-year-old daughter was substantial and deserving of tough punishment.
What did Rayo do to his daughter after getting drunk?
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He showed her a pornographic movie, sucked her breasts, digitally penetrated her vagina, stripped himself and then raped her, according to court records.
Rayo performed these types of deeds during several weeks until one of his other daughters caught him and summoned police.
He told the cops that he “accidentally” might have fondled his daughter's breasts while adjusting a blanket on the bed.
Rayo later confessed that he'd raped her–including ejaculating in her, but insisted the illegal sex hadn't been “substantial.”
An Orange County jury disagreed. A prosecutor won guilty verdicts on four felony counts. Superior Court Judge Dan McNerney sentenced Rayo to a term of 23 years to life in prison.
An unhappy Rayo appealed his conviction and his week learned that he
couldn't sway a three-justice panel at a California Court of Appeal
based in Santa Ana.
The justices determined that there was “overwhelming evidence” that supported a tough punishment.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.