A month after Orange County Jorge Luna turned 18 in 2007, his girlfriend ended their two-year romantic relationship and he reacted angrily by promising that if she “wasn't his, then she was no one's.”
The following day Luna confronted the Anaheim High School student when she arrived on campus, pulled her away to a nearby apartment complex where he repeatedly struck her, threatened to kill her and choked her to the verge of unconsciousness.
Fearing she was about to be thrown off a balcony, the terrorized girl apologized and promised that she would reconsider breaking up.
The words delighted him, but he wanted more.
]
Luna took the girl to a stairwell, raped her and then let her return to
school, where she quickly reported the sex crime to the authorities,
according to court records.
Prosecutors inside the Orange County District Attorney's office
charged him with kidnapping, rape and assault with a deadly weapon and
in December 2010 a jury convicted him on all counts. Using California's
“One Strike” law, Superior Court Judge M. Marc Kelly ordered prison as punishment.
But
Luna appealed, claiming that he was being punished as if he committed
the kidnapping in order to rape his victim when he says his crime was
less nasty–the kidnapping was a precursor to murder; the rape was
merely an afterthought.
He also complained that Kelly had been
too harsh by giving a future parole board complete control over the timing of
his release, if ever, from prison.
A California Court of Appeal based in Santa Ana considered the case and today issued its ruling: Too bad and so what?
In a 13-page opinion written by Justice Richard D. Fybel,
the court declared that the state legislature wrote California's
“One Strike” law precisely to impose tougher punishment for violent sex
criminals like Luna.
Upshot: Luna, now 23, will remained locked inside Calipatria State Prison and serving his 15 years to life punishment.
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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.