Ten lousy bucks was all Jorge Pacheco Hernandez thought it would take to buy the silence of a seven-year-old Garden Grove girl he molested in August 2008.
But the girl refused his money and told her mother about the molestations.
Hernandez, who rented a room in the family's house, admitted when confronted by the girl's mother that he'd “touched the little girl” and made “a stupid mistake” after a pornographic magazine aroused him.
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An Orange County prosecutor proved three sex crimes and Superior Court Judge Lance Jensen ordered prison as punishment in 2010.
An
unhappy Hernandez appealed his conviction by claiming that he'd been
robbed of a fair trial when Jensen allowed the jury to hear the contents
of the girl's original interviews with a police officer
and with a county social worker.
His point: How could anyone trust the word of a second grader?
(A much better question: What kind of scumbag wants to have sex with a second grader?)
A California Court of Appeal
based in Santa Ana this week determined
that Jensen had properly admitted the interviews after determining that the girl's statements had been reliable.
Upshot: Hernandez, 44, will continue to serve his 15 years to life sentence at the one of California's most horrific hellholes: Corcoran State Prison, home to the likes of Phil Spector and Charlie Manson.
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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.