Man will be set free after murder conviction tossed
A man who spent nearly 25 years on Death Row for the rape and murder of a 21month-old girl, before the state Supreme Court overturned both his death sentence and his conviction last month, will be freed without a retrial, the Kern County district attorney announced Tuesday.
Vicente Benavides Figueroa, now 68, was found guilty in 1993 of the November 1991 murder of Consuelo Verdugo, his girlfriend’s daughter. Benavides had been watching the child while her mother was at work the day she was fatally injured, and was convicted based on medical testimony that the court has now discredited.
Consuelo died eight days after the couple brought her semi-conscious to an emergency room in Delano. They both said at first that the child had been running and hit her head on a door. At Benavides’ trial, his lawyers said she had been hit by a car. But a forensic pathologist testified that the cause of death had been anal penetration, and other medical witnesses said she had clearly been sodomized.
But after the state Supreme Court initially upheld Benavides’ death sentence in 2005, it agreed to hear new evidence from the Habeas Corpus Resource Center, a state-funded agency that represents condemned inmates. The center presented declarations from medical professionals, including nearly all those who had testified for the prosecution, saying they do not believe Consuelo had been sexually assaulted.
The witnesses said the girl showed no apparent signs of sexual assault when she was first hospitalized, and the genital swelling and injuries detected later were most likely due to repeated attempts to insert a catheter.
Based on those declarations, the court unanimously overturned Benavides’ first-degree murder conviction and sentence on March 12 and rejected the district attorney’s request to find him guilty of second-degree murder, an intentional killing unrelated to any sexual assault. The justices said there was some evidence supporting the defense claim that the child had been hit by a car and that Benavides was not involved in her death.
In Tuesday’s announcement, District Attorney Lisa Green said a retrial for seconddegree murder would be “difficult, if not impossible.” Without the medical testimony, there is no longer evidence of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, Green said, and even if convicted and resentenced to 15 years to life in prison, Benavides would probably be paroled almost immediately.
He has remained in prison despite the ruling, but will be returned to Kern County shortly and released from custody, Green’s office said. Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko