03/10/09 (CA):
Expert Testifies in Spousal Abuse Trial
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After a grueling trial involving expert witness testimony and marked by graphic evidence of domestic violence, a jury has convicted a Carmel Valley man on charges that leave him facing life in prison. The jury found Aniano Olea, 44, guilty of 25 felony counts in connection with years of abuse against his wife, including burning her face with tongs and tattooing her forehead and neck with the words "whore" and "adulteress."
The panel convicted him of multiple counts of spousal injury, stalking, witness intimidation, aggravated mayhem and torture, charges that carry a life sentence. He will be sentenced following a separate court trial on April 3 to decide if a prior felony conviction will count as a "strike" under California's three-strikes law, potentially doubling his sentence.
Among the evidence against Olea were dozens of photographs, seized by investigators in 2007, which showed his wife with black eyes and lash marks, tied up and strung from the ceiling. Olea, a tattoo artist, testified that his wife's injuries were the result of the couple's consensual sex life. He took the photos, he said, for an advertisement for three-way partners.
Olea said his wife, an office manager at a Santa Clara County Catholic church, asked for the tattoos after telling him she had had an affair with another man. And his defense attorney suggested she'd burned herself the same night she cut off her index finger to spite her husband.
Prosecutor Elaine McCleaf said Olea's victim and her family were "happy the jury believed (the crimes) happened."
"This was horrendous violence and there's always the risk that people will think this kind of thing doesn't happen in Monterey County," she said.
Jury forewoman Taci Slate said jurors decided Olea's behavior constituted a "pattern" of abuse, and that the victim's testimony was more credible than the defendant's. Slate said testimony from an expert witness for the prosecution about the "cycle" of domestic violence, as well as photos of the victim's injuries taken by the defendant, were also key components in the verdict.
Despite the fact that the jury deliberated for more than a week, and one juror had to be replaced with an alternate during deliberations late last week, Slate said the jury was "very united" in their verdict.
Defense attorney Andy Liu was not available for comment.
In closing arguments Feb. 27, McCleaf told the jury the injuries were part of a cycle of violence that escalated after the victim's 2006 admission - during a forced polygraph test - that she'd had an affair.
"This case is about power and control, it's about dominance over another person," McCleaf said. "And when that person thought he lost the control, because of the affair, it turned into revenge and violence."
The victim admitted on the stand she had willingly participated in what Liu described as "unusual sex practices" over the years, including the use of handcuffs and "breath play," intentionally cutting off oxygen to the brain for sexual arousal.
But, she said, the photos showing her bruised and bound were different.
When her husband was arrested for assaulting her in 2005, after her older daughter called 911, Olea decided he could defend himself by claiming they were practicing bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism.
He tied her up and beat her, she said, and staged the photos - in which he hung up an old calendar - so he could say it was their common practice.
The jury convicted Olea of forcing his wife and daughters to go into hiding to avoid testifying in the 2005 case, which McCleaf was forced to drop. When the victim subsequently decided not to go back to their Carmel Valley Road ranch, Olea stalked her and threatened her until she returned.
When asked on the witness stand why she didn't resist the tattoos or run from the searing tongs, the victim responded in a manner that one expert testified was commonplace among domestic violence victims.
"Where was I going to go?" she asked. "It would only have made it worse."
The expert, Alexandra McCabe, testified it is common for domestic violence victims to stay, often out of fear for themselves or their families if they leave. She said victims also feel a combination of shame and a sense that they caused the violence, often instilled by the perpetrator.
Testimony during the trial portrayed Olea as a jealous and obsessively possessive person who made his wife write notebook after notebook about her premarital sex. He also required her to take three polygraph tests.
It was during those tests that his wife revealed her affair, according to testimony. While there was domestic violence throughout the marriage, the victim testified, it exploded at that point.
She said Olea began beating and whipping her regularly, sometimes memorializing it on a calendar. He started driving his wife to work, sitting in her office all day and telling her co-workers about the affair. At night, he would disconnect her car battery.
When she tried to leave on several occasions, he placed a GPS device on her vehicle, stalked her and threatened to take their daughter.
He tattooed her face and required her to tell strangers that she was a whore. And when he decided that wasn't enough, he told her he would do other things, including crippling her foot, scarring her face and cutting off a finger.
In the spring of 2007, he started with her foot, the victim said, hammering it with a mallet as she stood barefoot on the wooden floor. The next night he came out of the kitchen with tongs he'd heated over the stove and burned her face, she said.
She said she knew what was coming next. She went into the kitchen and chopped off her index digit. "Here's your finger," she said.
In July 2007, two off-duty deputies happened upon a dispute between the couple in the middle of Arroyo Seco Road. Deputies Daryl Arreola and Cynthia Dorgan drove the victim and her frightened daughter to Soledad. They were eventually placed in a shelter and Olea was arrested.
Liu argued that most of the charges against Olea were supported only by testimony from the woman. There were no medical records of many of the injuries she claimed, he said, and her credibility was shot after she admitted on the stand that she had been stealing money from the church where she worked for 20 years.
He told jurors it was credible that the photos were part of their sex play, and that she consented to the tattoos, made up the story about her foot and, because she admitted chopping off her own finger, burned her face that night as well.
But McCleaf reminded the jury that the victim was not the only one to testify to her abuse. Her co-workers and two daughters - one now 15 and the other a college student in Fresno - also gave powerful testimony, as did a woman who said she dated Olea in the 1980s when she was 14.
In her moving closing argument, McCleaf read from the 2002 diary of the victim's younger daughter. With two jurors in tears, the girl spoke from the pages of the journal about the profane names her father called her mother, about the beatings and the bruises. She prayed that her mother wouldn't lie to her father again because he'd almost stabbed her the last time.
© X-Pro 2009
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