An Iowa jury on Friday convicted farmhand Cristhian Bahena Rivera of first-degree murder in the 2018 killing of college student Mollie Tibbetts.
The panel in Davenport deliberated for seven hours over two days before coming back with the verdict against Rivera, the 24-year-old Mexican national who led investigators to Tibbetts’ body in a Brooklyn, Iowa, corn field nearly one month after she went jogging on July 18 and vanished.
The first-degree murder conviction, which carries a maximum penalty of life behind bars, didn’t surprise MSNBC legal analyst Cynthia Alksne, a former federal prosecutor.
“He led them to the body and he confessed that he blacked out down the critical time and he was on the video stalking her, circling her in his car. All those things together” made for a strong case, Alksne said.
Early in the trial, defense lawyers had tried to infer that Tibbetts’ boyfriend, Dalton Jack, was unfaithful and struggled with anger issues. But the boyfriend was working at a construction job more than 100 miles away in Dubuque when Tibbett went missing, witnesses said.
Then, in a stunning move by the defense on Wednesday, Rivera took the witness stand in his own defense and testified that two masked men were responsible for the crime but forced him to take part at gunpoint.
“It was pathetic,” Alksne said. “You can’t have a double defense like that, all that did was make the jury more want to convict. He’d been better off remaining silent than all of that goofiness.”
The case against Rivera, an undocumented laborer, drew national attention when former President Donald Trump and other Republicans said the tragedy was made possible by lax immigration laws.
Tibbetts’ family pushed back against that narrative and pleaded with politicians not to invoke the University of Iowa student’s name to advance an anti-immigration agenda.
“Sadly, others have ignored our request. They have instead chosen to callously distort and corrupt Mollie’s tragic death to advance a cause she vehemently opposed. I encourage the debate on immigration; there is great merit in its reasonable outcome,” her father Rob Tibbetts wrote in the Des Moines Register. “But do not appropriate Mollie’s soul in advancing views she believed were profoundly racist.”
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Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
