One August night in 2008, Vidal Lopez Cortez asked his landlord's 11-year-old son if he wanted to watch cartoons together.
The boy fell asleep in Cortez's unit, awoke to the 24-year-old man beginning to sodomize him and vigorously protested.
But the tenant held the boy down, kissed him and continued to sexually assault him.
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According to court records, Cortez also tried unsuccessfully to get the 5th grader to perform oral copulation.
At the conclusion, Cortez gave the boy $5 and told him not to tell his mother.
But his mother later found him “shaking and rocking back and forth,” according to court records.
He'd suffered injuries to his anus.
Orange County prosecutors filed multiple charges against Cortez,
including lewd act on a child, aggravated sexual assault of a child,
attempted oral copulation with a child and sodomy by force.
A jury
convicted him and Superior Court Judge W. Michael Hayes sentenced him to
a prison term of 21 years to life.
Cortez appealed, claiming that he hadn't used any force and that his punishment is too severe.
But this week a three-justice panel at the California Court of Appeal based in Santa Ana
rejected
his claims. They agreed with Judge Hayes' view that stiff punishment was warranted because Cortez increased the sexual activity after the boy
began screaming in pain.
Upshot: Cortez will be in his late 40s when he can ask a parole board to let him back into society.
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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.
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