In closing arguments, attorneys spar over evidence in child sex assault case

Attorneys on Monday made their respective closing arguments in the child sex assault trial of Felipe Jesus Rios-Angulo, 33, of Fairfield.

The prosecutor told jurors a conviction in a sexual assault crime may be based on testimony from a single witness, the victim, while the defense attorney said the case “really comes down to credibility,” noting the victim admitted to lying on the witness stand.

Deputy District Attorney Kathleen McBride, who prosecuted the three-week trial in Department 9 in the Justice Center in Fairfield, began her statements by saying Rios-Angulo made “cruel, selfish and perverse choices” against a 13and 14-year-old child that “changed the life of a (now) 19-year-old” woman.

Dressed in a light blue gray vest over a light-blue shirt and dark slacks, RiosAngulo, a Mexican who does not speak or understand English, listened to his two interpreters with headphones as McBride explained the charges and the laws that apply: lewd or lascivious acts involving children; a lewd and lascivious act using force, duress, menace or fear; and committing a lewd and lascivious act with a child under 14.

“You don't have rape, oral copulation or sexual penetration,” she told the 16 jurors, including four alternates during her 70-minute statement. “These crimes have to do with touching.”

Rios-Angulo, out on bail and not in custody, in May 2018 pleaded not guilty to 18 counts, all felonies, and all involving the same child at various times between 2015 and 2017 at a family residence.

They include touching the victim's breast; kissing her; penetrating her vagina with his fingers; and placing her hand on his penis, noted McBride, standing at the lectern within a few feet of the jury box and occasionally stepping away from it.

As in all criminal cases, the defendant, under the Constitution, has the right not to testify, which Rios Angulo did not.

But, added McBride, under California law, jurors may convict a defendant in a sex crime case based on testimony given by one person.

“The reality” of most sex assault cases is that evidence comes from a single complaining witness who suffered the crimes in privacy, “with no camera, no DNA,” acts that occur between two people “alone in a room,” she said.

McBride reminded jurors they heard from the victim's friends, that Rios-Angulo wanted to continue the relationship with the victim, even going so far as to visit her school after the families discontinued seeing one another.

Calling Rios-Angulo “opportunistic,” she referred to text messages from him to the victim, calling them “damning evidence of his guilt” and a “road map to his guilt.”

McBride asserted that witnesses called by defense attorney Vincent Maher had “a motive to lie.”

In her summary, she said to jurors that, if they struggle to come to a verdict, they should ask themselves what the victim gained by testifying in public.

The victim, added McBride, was “not someone engaged in a vendetta.”

A well-known and widely experienced Fairfield attorney, Maher began his closing argument by saying that attorneys “don't deal with speculation.”

“What we deal with here is evidence,” he told the jurors. “You're going to be making a decision about the quality of the evidence.”

“Verdicts are about certainty,” said Maher, suggesting the victim's testimony was unreliable because she repeatedly asked the attorney to repeat what he regarded as simple questions, adding that her statements rose to “a certain level of disingenuousness.”

“The way I see it, you're going to find Mr. Rios-Angulo guilty of everything or guilty of nothing,” by evaluating the testimony of witnesses, he said at one point.

The victim, he said, lied to the court twice “and admitted it,” said Maher, adding, “If you lie about the little things, why should you believe about the big things?”

He called the victim “an angry teenager who's pissed off at her family most of the time,” he said, then quoted 19th-century Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott: “O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”

“You do not overcome the burden of proof with lies,” said Maher, who raised and lowered his voice for emphasis and, by turns, raised and lowered his hands and arms expansively while speaking.

Again questioning the victim's testimony and what he referred to as memory lapses, he said that when significant things happen in our lives, “We don't forget.”

He said McBride had not made her case for guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

She will offer her rebuttal argument at 8:30 a.m. today, and the jury, after hearing final instructions from Judge Carlos R. Gutierrez, will begin deliberations.

Court records show the DA filed a complaint May 2, 2018. On June 21, the court issued a subpoena for records held by the Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District. Rios-Angulo posted the $255,000 bond June 26.

If convicted on all the charges, he faces a lengthy state prison sentence.