This really makes me sick. This guy should have gotten the chair. Instead, he got 29 years.

----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: PRAYING FOR ANSWERS
Date: Sep 23, 2008 7:01 PM


Stepdad Cesar Rodriguez gets maximum sentence in Nixzmary Brown's death
BY SCOTT SHIFREL and TRACY CONNOR
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Updated Friday, April 4th 2008, 3:33 AM


Ward for News

Assistant District Attorney Ama Dwimoh successfully prosecuted Cesar Rodriguez.

He showed no remorse and got no mercy.


Confessed child abuser Cesar Rodriguez was sentenced Thursday to the maximum - up to 29 years in prison - for the sick torture death of stepdaughter Nixzmary Brown.


In an emotional hearing, Rodriguez, 29, stuck to his story that he didn't kill the 7-year-old two years ago - his wife did.


"I loved Nixzmary," he told Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Hall.


"I can honestly say I'm being accused of something I did not do . . . but I will take responsibility.
"

Rodriguez did not apologize for tethering the frail second-grader to a hard chair with duct tape or making her use a kitty litter box as a toilet.


"I'm just sorry for causing everybody any emotional pain or distorted memories about the child," Rodriguez said.


"I'm not mad at anyone and I will do my sentence.


"This life will give me another chance. If, in the end, God gives me enough life to show to this court how wrong this makes that judgment, I wish to prove that someday.
"

Unswayed by his claims of innocence, Hall slapped Rodriguez with the max of 25 years for first-degree manslaughter and tacked on 11/3 to four years for unlawful imprisonment.


It means Rodriguez could be nearing eligibility for Social Security before he walks free - but it could have been worse.


After a two-month trial, jurors acquitted him of the top charge of second-degree murder, which could have gotten him life.


Several jurors attended the sentencing in support of prosecutors.


"I wish it could have been murder," juror Janice Richardson said afterward. "He should have gotten life.
"

In asking for the harshest sentence, prosecutor Ama Dwimoh told the court she spoke with Nixzmary's brother, Javier, the night before.


"He hopes that he [Rodriguez] is so frail and weak when he gets out of jail that he can't hurt any other children ever again," he said.


"He'll miss her forever. She was his sister and he loved her and she wasn't bad. . . . He knows, as he says, she's with the angels now.
"

Pleading for leniency, defense lawyers continued to hammer at the prosecution's handling of the case and practically accused the jury of misconduct.


They said one of the jurors claimed he was threatened by his fellow panelists when he wanted to vote for a lesser charge. "I will stand by this statement until the day I drop dead - that there has been no justice in this courtroom," defense lawyer Jeffrey Schwartz said, accusing prosecutors of withholding evidence until the last minute.


"I'm not saying Mr. Rodriguez is innocent of everything . . . but Mr. Rodriguez is innocent of much of what he is convicted of today.
"

Spectators didn't see it that way.


"I hope you die in jail," one shouted as the sentence was imposed. "Murderer!" railed another.


sshifrel@nydailynews.com










----------------- Bulletin Message -----------------
From: Friends of Caylee, Praying for you, we love you
Date: Sep 23, 2008 3:57 PM


Defense Opens Its Case in Beating Death of Girl



By MARC SANTORA
Published: February 16, 2008
Cesar Rodriguez has admitted brutalizing his 7-year-old stepdaughter, Nixzmary Brown — beating her with his hands and a belt, plunging her head into cold water, lashing her to a wooden chair to discipline her, and finally leaving her, naked and starving, on a cold floor.




John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times
The defense’s first witness, Dr. Lawrence Kobilinsky.

But as his defense team began to present its case to a jury in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn on Friday, it sought to raise doubts about whether he was the one who delivered the blow that killed the girl and suggested that investigators had not paid enough attention to the girl’s mother, Nixzaliz Santiago.


Saying the prosecution resulted from a “one-sided, lopsided investigation,” Mr. Rodriguez’s chief lawyer, Jeffrey T. Schwartz, told reporters after Friday’s court session that he would keep hammering away at that theme.


“I am calling this terrible police work,” he said.


Still, nothing presented in court Friday contradicted the central thrust of the prosecution’s case. Instead, the defense used its opening witness — the only one called Friday — to try to raise questions about why investigators did not try to prepare a full DNA profile for Ms. Santiago although they did for Mr. Rodriguez.


Dr. Lawrence Kobilinsky, of the Department of Sciences at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, noted that two items analyzed by police experts — a pair of green sweat pants and duct tape — showed traces of female DNA.


“Without the profile of Ms. Santiago,” those traces were not useful, he told the jury.


Dr. Kobilinsky acknowledged on cross-examination that there was not enough DNA evidence on those two items to match an individual profile even if one had been available.


Later, the prosecutor, Ama Dwimoh, told reporters that a DNA profile of Ms. Santiago had not been prepared because there were not enough traces of DNA on any of the items to allow a match.


Dr. Kobilinsky’s testimony, she said, did nothing to undermine the case against Mr. Rodriguez.


“Nixzmary died a slow death,” she said. “And the people she called Mommy and Daddy failed to get her prompt medical attention.
”

In the courtroom, the prosecution sought to turn Dr. Kobilinsky’s testimony to its advantage, using his reference to the “passive transfer” of DNA to once again go through the catalog of evidence of Nixzmary’s dismal life and death.


The chair she was tied to with a nylon rope was hauled onto a table in front of the largely female jury, and Dr. Kobilinsky was asked if there could have been “passive transfer” of DNA to the ropes that bound her ankles.


There could have been, the witness said.


“Would it be fair to say that if someone were thrown up against the wall, their blood would end up there?” a prosecutor asked, pointing to a photo of a blood-spattered wall.


A pillow with blood stains was another example of “passive transfer,” Dr. Kobilinsky acknowledged. Same for the blood on duct tape that bound Nixzmary and the blood on the belt she was beaten with.


Finally, there was the litter box that the girl was forced to use as a toilet, the prosecution’s last example of passive transfer of DNA.


Mr. Schwartz said afterward that the defense was not likely to call character witnesses for Mr. Rodriguez but would keep raising questions about the investigation and the failure to focus on Ms. Santiago.


Ms. Santiago has also been charged with murder in her daughter’s death and is to go on trial later.


The prosecution maintains that the two acted in concert in the girl’s death.


Earlier this month, after Ms. Santiago invoked her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself, the judge ruled that she could not be compelled to testify at her husband’s trial.


Nevertheless, although she has been absent from the courtroom physically, Nixzmary’s mother has been a constant presence, invoked often by the defense and Mr. Rodriguez’s main hope in deflecting blame.