Die in jail, you rapist!
Court nixes appeal, 75 yrs. OK for ex-cop
LET HIM rot.
A state appeals court on Thursday denied a bid by an NYPD cop who raped an elementary school teacher to get his 75-year prison sentence reduced.
Michael Pena’s lawyer, Ephraim Savitt, had argued that the lengthy prison term for his client was “an injustice” and “politically motivated and media-intensified vengeance” by the judge who sentenced him.
He “was punished more harshly than Al Qaeda terrorists, vicious killers, kingpin narcotics offenders, violent gangsters and racketeers,” his lawyer, Ephraim Savitt, argued in court papers.
His victim, Lydia Cuomo, said the monster had gotten exactly what he deserved — and was relieved to hear the state Appellate Division had upheld the sentence.
“It just eases any anxiety for me that I would have had if anything had changed,” Cuomo told the Daily News. “I just think it sends a pretty strong message to any other victim of a crime like this.”
The drunken, off-duty cop grabbed Cuomo off the street at gunpoint and forced her into an Inwood courtyard, where he repeatedly raped her before he was arrested by his colleagues.
Pena, 30, was convicted at trial in 2012 of forcing anal and oral sex on Cuomo, but jurors couldn’t agree on a rape charge.
That led to a Daily News front page demanding, “What does a woman have to do to prove she was raped?”
Pena later pleaded guilty to having raped her vaginally as well, in an apparent bid for leniency from the appeals court. It didn’t work. In Thursday’s unanimous ruling, a five-judge Appellate Division panel found Justice Richard Carruthers had “lawfully imposed consecutive sentences for defendant’s three predatory sexual assault convictions,” because the three criminal sex acts “were separate and distinct.”
They also declined his request to reduce the sentence “in the interest of justice.”
Savitt said, “I’m not surprised but I’m still stunned.” He said the punishment was disproportionate to the crime.
“There are murderers who get 25 to life, and he got 75 to life,” Savitt said. He said he plans to take the case to the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals. “This isn’t over yet,” he said.
Cuomo — who had been on her way to her first day of work at a Bronx school when she was raped — revealed her identity to The News in 2013, and has been publicly campaigning to get the state’s rape laws toughened.
“It’s disappointing that something that seems so simple is taking so long,” Cuomo said.