DES MOINES, Iowa — A decide on Monday rejected a convicted man’s request for a brand new trial within the 2018 killing of College of Iowa scholar Mollie Tibbetts, whose physique was present in a cornfield weeks after she disappeared whereas out for a run close to her small hometown.
Decide Joel Yates’ ruling cleared the best way for sentencing to proceed Aug. 30 within the trial of Cristhian Bahena Rivera, who was convicted in Could of first-degree homicide in Tibbetts’ dying. The previous farmhand, who got here to the U.S. illegally as a young person, faces a sentence of life in jail.
Yates rejected efforts by Bahena Rivera’s attorneys to implicate others, saying a lot of the proof they introduced after he was convicted was recognized to them earlier than the decision was handed down. To grant a brand new trial, any further proof must be new and revealed after the decision, he wrote.
The decide additionally mentioned lots of the new allegations conflicted with trial testimony and proof introduced by Bahena Rivera’s personal witnesses.
“In reviewing the proof and testimony supplied at trial, the courtroom finds the decision was not opposite to the load of the proof,” Yates wrote.
Throughout questioning by police, Bahena Rivera acknowledged that he encountered Tibbetts as she was working close to her small japanese Iowa hometown of Brooklyn and he led investigators to the sphere the place her physique lay hidden beneath cornstalks.
However throughout his trial, he claimed publicly for the primary time that two masked males kidnapped him at gunpoint from his trailer, pressured him to drive to the place Tibbetts was working on a rural street, killed her, put her physique in his trunk and made him get rid of it. He mentioned he didn’t inform investigators in regards to the two males earlier as a result of they’d threatened to kill his ex-girlfriend and younger daughter.
Bahena Rivera was to be sentenced final month. However towards the top of the testimony portion of his trial, two new witnesses got here ahead independently of each other and informed police {that a} native 21-year-old man informed them he had killed Tibbetts. Protection attorneys requested a brand new trial primarily based on that and different newly found data, and Yates agreed to postpone sentencing whereas he thought of their request.
At a listening to final week, Bahena Rivera’s attorneys sought to hyperlink Tibbetts’ dying to a different younger girl’s report of getting been kidnapped and sexually assaulted at an space house used for intercourse trafficking in the summertime of 2018, and the latest disappearance of an 11-year-old boy from the identical county. A 50-year-old suspected methamphetamine vendor has been investigated in each instances however hasn’t been charged in both, and prosecutors say he has no ties to Tibbetts.
Prosecutors have mentioned they had been assured that Bahena Rivera killed Tibbetts and so they identified that his personal account of what occurred didn’t align with what the 2 new witnesses informed police.
“We’re happy that the decide upheld the jury’s verdict and we look ahead to shifting to sentencing,” mentioned Lynn Hicks, a spokesman for the state legal professional common.
Attorneys for Bahena Rivera didn’t instantly reply to messages in search of remark.