A former U.S. Homeland Safety agent was sentenced Monday to life in jail for violating two ladies’s civil rights by attempting to cease them from telling police he sexually assaulted them.
U.S. District Decide Jesus G. Bernal rejected arguments by John Olivas, 48, that he deserved little greater than a decade in jail and accepted prosecutors’ suggestion of life behind bars. Bernal stated on the sentencing that he deplored Olivas’ “systematic torture of girls,” prosecutors instructed The Occasions.
The choose presided over two trials that featured the ladies’s harrowing testimony about Olivas beating and sexually assaulting them in 2012 when he was a federal Homeland Safety Investigations agent and so they had been, first one after which the opposite, his girlfriends.
The primary trial led to a hung jury. Within the retrial, the jury discovered that Olivas raped one of many ladies twice and tried to rape the opposite one as soon as. He was convicted of three counts of deprivation of rights beneath colour of legislation.
“Mr. Olivas acknowledges that he have to be punished and that he’ll serve vital time in jail,” his legal professional Meghan Blanco instructed the choose in a memo. “However he doesn’t need to die in jail.”
Olivas, who served 21 months in state jail after pleading responsible to associated state expenses, will attraction his federal conviction, she stated.
Prosecutors known as Olivas a “predator who imposed nightmarish trauma on his romantic companions” and abused his energy as a federal agent by telling them he might quash any native police investigation of his violent conduct.
“In that course of, he was a terror,” assistant U.S. Attys. Eli Alcaraz and Frances Lewis wrote in a courtroom submitting.
An ex-wife testified that in 2004 she, too, was raped by Olivas. He was not charged with assaulting her, and he denied the allegation.
In a letter to the choose, the ex-girlfriend whom Olivas tried to rape stated she was nonetheless terrified to depart house alone even a decade after the assault.
“I received’t go anyplace at evening alone,” she wrote.
“The straightforward issues like getting gasoline at evening or going to the shop when it’s darkish are gone. I really feel like I’m consistently wanting over my shoulder.”
