Court upholds man’s 4th parole denial
Jose Rodriguez is serving life for the 1976 rape and assault of a BU student
The third time wasn’t the charm and neither was the fourth for a man seeking parole from his life sentence for the rape and assault of a Boston University student in 1976.
Jose Rodriguez, then 59, apologized to his victim at his fourth parole hearing in March 2019 and stated that he was attending Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings, working in the prison clothing shop and is now a practicing Buddhist.
But the Parole Board, in its January 2020 decision, noted that while he had made progress, they didn’t feel it was enough to warrant his release at that time. Rodriguez appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court which, on Tuesday, upheld the parole denial.
“Mr. Rodriguez has a history of sexual assault cases. Most notably, he committed this brutal rape of a stranger and then committed two serious sexual assaults while on bail,” the Parole Board wrote.
“He has completed SOTP (Sex Offender Treatment Program), but only after several failures over the decades. He has made progress in his rehabilitation, but has yet to demonstrate a level of rehabilitative progress that would make his release compatible with the welfare of society.”
The crime was a nasty one. As the Parole Board describes it, Rodriguez, then 16, on Sept. 27, 1976, followed the BU student in Brookline, and she would later note she felt like she was being followed.
He called out to her and put on a show of asking for directions as he walked closer, only to then thrust a broken bottle under her throat. He pushed her up a driveway and into a backyard and then threw her to the ground and raped her. Rodriguez would later admit that he smoked a cigarette and took her pants so that he could buy some time.
Blood dripping from her neck from the bottle attack, the woman ran home and called police.
Rodriguez would be convicted for the crime on July 20, 1977, in Norfolk Superior
Court, but something was off and the Supreme Judicial Court reversed that decision and ordered a new trial in 1979.
Rodriguez was out on bail and didn’t show up for the new trial date and remained a fugitive for seven years, during which he lived under an assumed name in California until he was caught and extradited back to Massachusetts. He was reconvicted in the new trial in 1987 — life in prison with the possibility of parole for rape and a concurrent term of eight to 10 years for assault and battery by means of a dangerous weapon.
He was denied parole in his first hearing in 2000 and in two more hearings in 2006 and 2013.
The Parole Board said it reached its decision for factors including what it saw as Rodriguez’s “lack of maturity and an underdeveloped sense of responsibility” as well as “vulnerability to negative influences and outside pressures” and a “lack of ability to extricate themselves from horrific, crime-producing settings.”