Tag: massachusetts
Man freed from prison for rape after 30 years faces new rape charge
A Massachusetts man who spent roughly 30 years in prison for rape before being freed in 2016 is facing new charges in connection with a January sex assault, authorities said.
George Perrot, 51, was arraigned Monday in Salem Superior Court on charges of rape, assault and battery on a police officer, resisting arrest and open and gross lewdness after police said he was found unconscious on top of a partially naked woman who was also unconscious.
Perrot allegedly raped the woman orally and charged at a police officer when the cop woke him up, Essex County District Attorney’s Office spokeswoman Carrie Kimball said.
The victim, who was revived after being given Narcan, said Perrot offered her drugs during the Jan. 4 encounter in Lawrence but did not remember anything after that. She was not dating Perrot and did not consent to sexual contact, Kimball said.
Perrot, who has been held without bail since his arrest, was later arraigned in Lawrence District Court. A judge on Monday ordered him to remain held without bail pending a dangerousness hearing scheduled for June 10. He has pleaded not guilty, Kimball said.
Perrot, according to the Boston Globe, became a “symbol for criminal justice reform advocates” after his release in 2016 based on flawed testimony about microscopic hair evidence. He was convicted in 1987 and sentenced to life in prison for raping a 78-year-old woman in her Springfield home two years earlier when he was 17.
Perrot was then granted a new trial in 1990 after a court ruled that prosecutors improperly presented evidence during his trial, The Republican reported. Two years later, he was convicted a second time and was again sentenced to life in prison.
But he was later released on bail in 2016 after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that testimony during that second trial “exceeded the foundational science” of hair analysis, according to The Republican. The guilty verdict was overturned and a third trial was ordered, but prosecutors decided against it since the victim had died and other factors.
Perrot’s release at the time was lauded by criminal justice reform advocates, including those at The Innocence Project and the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism and Brandeis University, according to The Republican.
In the latest accusation against Perrot, officers suspect he gave the victim heroin and asked her to snort it. The woman knew Perrot, but was not romantically involved with him, the Globe reports.
Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni, meanwhile, said in a statement that prosecutors still maintain that Perrot was guilty as originally charged in the 1985 rape.
“We have and do continue to maintain the position that George Perrot committed several heinous offenses of elderly female victims,” the statement read. “Regrettably, there is another victim who has now allegedly suffered at his hands three decades later.”
A message seeking comment from Perrot’s attorney, Tom Torrisi, was not immediately returned.
via: https://nypost.com/2019/05/06/man-freed-from-prison-after-30-years-faces-new-rape-charge/
Photo Credit: nypost.com/AP
Teen beheaded classmate in jealous rage over girlfriend
A crazed teen beheaded a schoolmate who he thought had slept with his girlfriend, prosecutors said in court this week.
Mathew Borges was just 15 in November 2016 when he is accused of cutting off the head and hands of Lee Manuel Viloria-Paulino, 16, in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
Borges killed the Lawrence High School sophomore in a jealous rage after accusing him with sleeping with his girlfriend, causing them to split, prosecutors said in Essex County Superior Court on Monday, according to the Boston Herald.
“I think of killing someone and I smirk … It’s all I think about every day,” he texted the girl, according to Assistant DA Jay Gubitose.
“The next time you see me, look at my eyes because that’s the last time they’ll be like that. They’ll be dead,” he texted her before the brutal murder, according to the report.
The following day, Viloria-Paulino went missing and his decapitated body was later found by a man walking his dog.
A state trooper later found the victim’s head in a bag nearby.
Surveillance video showed the two teens walking toward the river, but Borges initially told police they had gone to smoke pot.
But after Borges was arrested, police found a journal at his home with a last entry to call a few friends, wear bags on their shoes and “kill him,” the prosecutor said.
“The defendant told them he stabbed him to death and cut his head and hands off so he couldn’t be identified,” Gubitose told the court, according to the Herald.
Defense attorney Edward Hayden insisted the most Borges can be accused of doing is burglarizing the dead boy’s home — not butchering him.
“Witnesses who are going to say he committed murder are not reliable,” he said.
Borges is now 17 and being tried as an adult on the first-degree murder charge.
His trial continues and is expected to take three weeks.
via: https://nypost.com/2019/04/30/teen-beheaded-classmate-in-jealous-rage-over-girlfriend-prosecutors/