‘Anthony Samora is a predator’
Police, prosecutors lament retrial, acquittal of child rapist; a free man, Samora says he is innocent
This time last year, Anthony Samora was in state prison serving a life sentence for raping a 16-year-old boy, who had dwarf-like features and a very low IQ, in his truck after offering him a ride.
At the time of that incident, Samora was on a GPS monitor and sex offender parole for raping another boy after offering him a ride three years earlier.
In addition to those two rape cases, Samora is the subject of decades of other police reports, including a handful from small, slender teens and boys who say he harassed, sexually assaulted or outright kidnapped and raped them after offering them a ride.
Local prosecutors and detectives consider Samora to be one of the most overt and consistent sex offenders in the city.
But an Albuquerque jury last month, knowing nothing of Samora’s past and patterns, freed the 49-yearold from prison after a five-day trial before 2nd Judicial District Judge Jacqueline Flores.
In a phone call Friday, Samora said that he is “innocent” in his latest case and prosecutors and detectives are targeting him. He refused to acknowledge his previous sex offense and the existence of the additional people who are listed as victims or possible victims in police reports involving him.
Here is how in the course of a year, Samora went from high-risk offender in prison for life to living free in a tidy Northeast Heights home.
Round 1
When the boy first testified in 2013 about being raped in a stranger’s truck when he was 16, he’d already had a hard life.
His very low IQ combined with his
small size and his dwarf-life features earned him a fitting gang name, and his criminal record at that time for auto theft and other crimes reflected a less-than-stable childhood.
Still, when he told an Albuquerque jury about that May 2008 afternoon, when a man who called himself Anthony and wore a GPS monitor offered him a ride home then trapped him in his truck and raped him, jurors believed him.
That jury convicted Anthony Samora of criminal sexual penetration during the commission of a felony, in this case kidnapping. This is an important detail to remember as it set the circumstances that ultimately released Samora from prison.
The GPS monitor Samora was wearing the day he picked up the boy in 2008 was part of the sex offender probation he was on for pleading guilty to raping a 14-yearold boy in 2003.
Samora was convicted as a habitual offender in the 2008 case and sentenced in April 2014 to life in prison with the chance for parole after 30 years, plus another 18 years.
Prosecutors at the time were relieved to get the conviction, especially because of the hoops they had to jump through to avoid mentioning Samora’s history.
For example, prosecutors could not mention that Samora was on the sex offender registry and that after the incident the boy, with the help of a friend, had found Samora on the sex offender website. Instead, they could say only that Samora was on a state monitoring program and that the boy had found Samora on the internet or on a webpage.
Samora’s sex offender probation officer could be referred to only as a state employee.
The map that Samora’s GPS monitor made that corroborated the boy’s report could only be called records from a tracking device.
And a statement from Samora’s court-ordered sex offender therapy that he had “raped a midget” — remember the boy was short and had dwarf-like features — was inadmissible.
And forget about telling the jury that Samora had in 2004 pleaded guilty to offering a ride to a 14-yearold boy, driving that boy around town until he was disoriented and then taking him to his trailer and raping him multiple times.
The 16-year-old mentally delayed boy’s criminal history, however, was fair game. He was on juvenile probation at the time, and Samora’s public defender, Edward Bustamante, said that gave the teen motive to lie. Bustamante had “no comment” in response to questions about the case.
The boy’s criminal record and his challenged memory became an even bigger target in the second trial Samora secured through appeal.
Appeals, instructions
With the help of his public defender, Samora appealed his life sentence conviction twice.
The first time, he tried to say legislators had changed the law, but the court ruled the law was basically the same; it just had a new number on it, so stay in prison.
The second time, though, Samora found an argument the Supreme Court agreed with.
He argued that the jury had not been given the option to consider whether the 16-year-old boy had consented to the sex.
New Mexico law says a child younger than 13 can’t consent to any sex at all. A child between age 13 and one day shy of 16 can consent to sex with someone no more than four years older. And a 16- or 17-year-old can consent to any sex.
Because the boy was 16 at the time of the incident, he could have consented.
Also, there were some elements of the case that raised doubts about the boy’s testimony, the justices wrote in their opinion.
The boy, who was 4 feet 11 inches tall and weighed less than 100 pounds, didn’t have any injuries despite saying he had been pushed into a receptive sexual position. Samora hadn’t denied the sex. And the boy, who was in a gang and had a very low IQ, had some inconsistencies in the few interviews he was required to give to his nurses, forensic interviewers, detectives and attorneys.
“If the jury believed (the boy) was in some way unreliable or not telling the truth, the jurors could have reasonably concluded that (Samora) and (the boy) went to a remote location and engage in consensual sex,” the opinion reads. “We conclude that there was sufficient evidence presented to the jury to put consent at issue in this case.”
That was enough for the justices, in an opinion written by Justice Edward Chavez, to order a new trial for Samora.
Jury instructions
When a jury is ready to consider guilty or not guilty, it is given instructions about what elements have to be met for someone to be found guilty of a particular charge. The instructions are crafted by prosecutors and defense attorneys and approved by the trial judge.
In Samora’s case, the jurors were instructed that they should find Samora guilty if they agreed that he had “unlawful” sex with the boy.
“For the act to have been unlawful it must have been done with the intent to arouse or gratify sexual desire or to intrude upon the bodily integrity or personal safety of” the boy, the instruction said.
It was a standard instruction form that many rape cases used. The standard form also included various modifications for variations of cases.
In a rape case between two adults, the instructions could, for example, include the words “without consent” as an additional description of “unlawful.”
But this jury was not given instructions that included the “without consent” even though the boy was old enough to consent.
That was enough to warrant a retrial, the Supreme Court said.
Round 2
So the case was sent back for another trial.
A jury was convened, and the boy, now 24 and still with the 70 IQ, was called back eight years after the incident to testify.
But those years had turned him even harder.
Suffering from a drug addiction that ramped up after the incident, he committed additional crimes and was sent to prison. There he got a gang tattoo across his forehead. His appearance, a bit sallow after years of drug addition, melded with his slow demeanor and his desire to put the incident behind him.
“Ultimately, having a special needs victim who had not thought about the case in nearly three years and who has worked to try to forget what happened resulted in some difficulty on the stand. Juries often have high expectations for a victim’s ability to recall a traumatic event and judge their credibility negatively when victims are not able to easily articulate what they remember,” the office of District Attorney Kari Brandenburg said in an email statement.
That, and prosecutors in this case faced the same limitations on addressing Samora’s history.
“Because of prior Court orders, the State also had to be very careful to not speak about or elicit testimony regarding the Defendant’s prior conviction and the several prior investigations by law enforcement. … These limitations made it difficult to develop testimony through witnesses in a natural and thorough manner,” DA’s Office spokesman Phil Sisneros said in the email.
But parts of the boy’s criminal history — even that which happened after the incident — were presented to the jury.
The criminal history of witnesses is usually fair game in trials because it establishes trustworthiness — even if the witness is the victim.
And Samora was retried only on the charge he was convicted of, which was rape during the commission of kidnapping.
This jury decided it did not believe the alleged victim.
Jurors found Samora not guilty of kidnapping.
Because the rape charge was linked to the kidnapping, the rape charge basically disappeared.
And Samora was found to be an innocent man.
The young man decided he didn’t want to pursue any further charges — and be forced to testify a third time — so the case against Samora is over.
Samora said Friday that the verdict shows he is innocent and the “conviction was unlawful.” He would not comment about how he characterized the sex with the boy. “If I would have committed this crime (I was) accused of and in consideration of how persistent the DA prosecuted this case, I would have taken one of the 10 plea bargains offered to me over the 8½ years. For over 8½ years I stood by my innocence, and I was found not guilty by the people of New Mexico,” he said.
Released
Samora was released from prison in Lea County on Dec. 20 and put on a bus to Albuquerque. He told prison officials he planned to live with his mother in Sheldon, Iowa, but the O’Brien County Sheriff’s Office told the Journal he was not allowed to because her home was across from a school.
So on Tuesday, he registered as a sex offender in his brother’s comfortable home near Juan Tabo and Interstate 40.
But Bernalillo County sheriff’s detectives who worked on the most recent and some of the older of Samora’s cases worry that sex offender registration won’t keep him from hurting other people and could alert others who might want to hurt him to where Samora is living.
After a man’s body was found recently behind a Northeast Heights Wal-Mart decapitated and with mutilated genitals, some people close to Samora’s case wondered if it might be Samora fallen victim to revenge or other circumstance.
It wasn’t, but the thought shows the place Samora holds in the mind of local law enforcement and criminal justice officials.
“Anthony Samora is a predator, and that was rarely seen by the court,” said Sgt. Amy Dudewicz, who handles special victims cases for BCSO.
She laments the restrictions prosecutors have on bringing up a defendant’s criminal history and patterns, though she acknowledges the importance of a balanced trial.
“If you sit on a jury, you know you’re only getting an iceberg version,” she said.
Jurors in this case did not return the Journal’s phone calls.
Dudewicz said the defense attorney picked apart the mentally challenged man’s statements and talked about his criminal past, including the crimes he committed after the first trial ended, a fact she felt was unfair considering none of Samora’s criminal history was presented to the jury.
“If you are a juror, don’t you feel slapped in the face?” she asked.