Orange County parolee Raul Moreno Rios robbed at least eight Anaheim, Santa Ana and Fullerton taco trucks during a two-month period in late 2008.
Crime apparently came naturally to Rios, a veteran robber, burglar and kidnapper.
In 34 years, he compiled a criminal history that took 21 pages to describe.
]
But the massive length of Rios' rap sheet also demonstrated that he wasn't very good at avoiding detection and capture.
So how did he win “Stupid Criminal of the Day” honors?
During
one of the taco truck robberies, he stole the vendor's cell phone and .
. . wait for it . . . took it to the Anaheim apartment he shared with girlfriend/accomplice Angela Christina Cordoso and used it.
Police detectives arrived shortly thereafter.
In Judge James Edward Rogan's court, the Orange County District Attorney's office had no problem winning a jury conviction in 2010.
Rios
appealed, claiming that he had invoked his right to an attorney before
questioning and that his post-arrest statements to police should have
been excluded from his trial.
This week a California Court of Appeal
based in Santa Ana determined that Rios invoked
his Fifth Amendment privilege.
But, according to justices Kathleen O'Leary, William Bedsworth and Richard Aronson, Rios waived the constitutional right by continuing to talk to police after invoking his demand for a defense attorney.
Two incredibly stupid criminal mistakes helped he win another trip to a California prison.
Rios now has a whopping 596 months of confinement to figure out his errors.
(Cordoso, his girlfriend, got a four-year prison 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.