In March 2009, Juan Manuel Rivera literally got caught with his pants down (first mistake) at a Santa Ana storage facility and, if that wasn't bad enough, he was standing beside a disrobed six-year-old female, his girlfriend's daughter (second mistake).
An outraged storage worker (obviously nobody connected to the Penn State football team and Joe Paterno) chased him, but the 28-year-old Rivera successfully fled with the youngster in a vehicle, according to court files.
Two days later, Rivera returned to the facility (third mistake) with the girl's mother (fourth mistake) in hopes of explaining (fifth mistake) “the misunderstanding”:
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He'd yanked his pants down and his member out, he claimed, only to piss
in public, not to have disgraceful, illegal sex with an elementary school student.
Rivera claimed he was guilty only of being too kind. He'd merely hugged the little girl to show her encouragement. How dare anyone think he was anything other than a hero.
But police arrived at the storage facility and Rivera decided to ignore his right to remain silent
(sixth mistake) because he believed lying detectives (seventh
mistake) that a surveillance camera had captured his sex crimes.
He
didn't just confess that he'd sodomized and raped the
youngster on a regular basis while his unwitting girlfriend was at work. He agreed
to a Santa Ana police detective's excellent, wily request for him to write an apology letter (eighth
mistake).
After prosecutors in the Orange County District Attorney's office (OCDA) secured his conviction, Rivera protested the
righteousness of his case because, he assumed (ninth mistake) his
confessions could not be used against him in court.
This week, a California Court of Appeal based in Santa Ana proved Rivera's assumptions wrong again. They rejected his appeal.
Thanks to
Orange County Superior Court Judge Dan McNerney, Rivera's future morally-corrupt stupidity will take place inside a California prison where he's serving a
50 years to life sentence.
–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.