John L. Adamoli isn't happy that he's serving an eight year prison sentence for committing lewd acts on his friend's 10-year-old autistic daughter in Huntington Beach during a party.
Adamoli, 50, thinks that he'd be a free man if Orange County prosecutors had been banned from telling a jury that he blurted out, “I give kids candy,” to arresting police officers.
The DA's office used the statement to undermine Adamoli's credibility that he was clueless about why cops detained him after the May 2006 incident involving the girl.
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In Adamoli's mind, the candy statement inflamed the jury and prevented him from having a fair trail.
“It invokes a certain image . . . in the jurors mind of . . . you're a
creepy guy driving a windowless van handing out lollipops to the
neighborhood kids,” observed one of Adamoli's defense lawyers.
But the prosecutor argued that the statement demonstrated he “had the presence
of mind to lie” and knew “exactly” why police approached him after the
incident.
On May 25, a California Court of Appeal based in Santa Ana considered Adamoli's claims and in a terse seven-page ruling dismissed them.
According to the justices, there was “overwhelming evidence” of his
guilt, including that eyewitnesses saw him pants-less and erect on top of the girl, who said, “Johnny, hurt me.”
The girl's father found Adamoli committing the crime, beat him but couldn't prevent him from escaping the apartment.
–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.