For three months beginning in July 2005, Orange County's Brandon Lamar Brown, 19, babysat his young sisters, ages 10 and 7, and couldn't resist his sexual urges.
Brown digitally penetrated their vaginas and rectums, forced them to masturbate him and sodomized his youngest sister, according to court records.
In January 2011, a jury agreed with a prosecutor that Brown violated 10 sex crimes and Superior Court Judge Patrick Marion sentenced the pedophile to prison.
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This week, a California Court of Appeal based in Santa Ana reviewed the case and gave Brown great news. According to Justice Raymond Ikola,
Marion incorrectly applied a new, altered sex crimes statute to the
sentencing. The judge should have made several, technical determinations
about the defendant's lack of probation eligibility before sending him to
prison for a term of 15 years to life.
Upshot: Brown, now 26, will enjoy a bus trip from Wasco State Prison back to Orange County so that he can be re-sentenced in coming months.
California now has a One-Strike Law that can allow government officials to keep certain sex offenders locked up forever after just one conviction.
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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.