In 2011, an Orange County jury agreed with prosecutor Cameron Talley's assertion that convicted felon Cesar Gomez savagely beat, robbed and strangled to death a female prostitute inside her room at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Garden Garden.
In February, Superior Court Judge William R. Froeberg gave Gomez a term of life in prison without the possibility of parole and the Los Angeles County resident quickly appealed in hopes of overturning his conviction for killing Ashley Lilly in August 2009.
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But Gomez's appellate lawyer studied the case and couldn't find a single potential mistake.
This week, a three-justice panel (headed by the meticulous William Bedsworth) at the California Court of Appeal based in Santa Ana announced that it too exhaustively searched the trial record and couldn't find any “arguable issues” either.
Upshot 1: Gomez, 37, will continue to live the rest of his life inside California's High Desert State Prison in Susanville.
Upshot 2: Unless you're morbid, don't rent room 322 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, a mile from Disneyland.
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.
