For several months leading up to early 2010, a woman on her way to work routinely dropped off her three children at her sister's house in Santa Ana where she assumed they would be safe.
One day in February, one of the kids, an eight-year-old boy, told his mother that he had been repeatedly sodomized by Santos Solano Flores, a 21-year-old man who also lived at the babysitting house.
According to court records, the boy claimed Flores liked to ejaculate inside of him.
The outraged mother contacted the authorities and two detectives got Flores to sit for an interview at the police station where they told him about the allegations.
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At first, Flores denied any sexual contact, saying he would have to “be
crazy in the head to do that.” He explained that the boy was trying to
seek revenge because he'd been caught looking at porno on a laptop
computer.
Not buying that story, the veteran cops then decided to trick the suspect by telling him that they'd retrieved a foreign DNA sample from the boy's anus.
(Police are allowed to lie during investigations.)
Panicked,
Flores told this absurd whopper: He'd been in the bathroom and sitting on
the toilet when the third grader entered, stripped, molested him and demanded anal sex.
He'd merely complied with the boy's demand, he insisted.
At
a 2010 trial, a jury found Flores guilty of two counts of sodomizing a
child under the age of 10 and Superior Court Judge Lance Jensen ordered
him to prison.
The rapist appealed, claiming that the Santa Ana
police detectives had cheated by not giving him a Miranda warning before
he confessed.
But this week, a California Court of Appeal based
in Orange County rejected the argument. According to an 11-page opinion
written by Justice Richard Aronson, Flores voluntarily entered the
police station and agreed to an interview without the cops
threatening arrest or acting with any unnecessary hostility. The justices declared that given those circumstances the detectives hadn't violated the defendant's constitutional right against self-incrimination.
Upshot: Flores, now 23, will continue to serve his 50 years to life sentence at Ironwood State Prison at Blythe.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.