In Sept. 2009, Gilberto Cruz Silva couldn't convince any women to freely give him sex and so he drove in the middle of the night from his Corona home to find prostitutes on Santa Ana's notorious Harbor Boulevard.
Silva enticed a prostitute into his van, drove to a nearby mobile home park and put a 12-inch butcher knife to her neck.
After forced sex, the semi-nude woman claimed she had to urinate but instead ran away in horror. Emergency room doctors later found a knife cut to her neck and severely chaffed genitalia.
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But Silva wasn't done. Two hours later, he got a second Harbor Boulevard
prostitute to enter his van and tried the same knife routine. His
hooker tried to immediate flee, got slammed down inside the van and
managed to gain control of his knife. During a struggle, she stabbed him
in the arm and in the back. She escaped and Silva drove away.
Police
eventually tracked Silva to his Riverside County house and found him bleeding profusely
on his back patio.
A 2010 Orange County jury convicted him of rape and Superior Court Judge Lance Jensen sentenced him to prison.
Silva
appealed, saying in part that Jensen robbed him of a fair trial by
not seriously considering his request to change criminal defense
lawyers.
This month, a California Court of Appeal agreed
and, while expressing support for the strength of the prosecution's
evidence, ordered Jensen to conduct a formal hearing on the topic.
Upshot: Silva, who is serving a 38 years to life sentence, will soon get a temporary break from California State Prison at Lancaster to attend his upcoming hearing in Orange County.
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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.
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