A monster former NYPD cop who raped an elementary school teacher on her way to work wants his 75-year prison sentence reduced — a scenario his victim called her “worst nightmare.”
In papers filed in a Manhattan appeals court, Michael Pena’s lawyer says the sentence is so long that it’s “an injustice” to the fiendish ex-police officer.
He “was punished more harshly than Al Qaeda terrorists, vicious killers, kingpin narcotics offenders, violent gangsters and racketeers,” wrote Pena’s lawyer, Ephraim Savitt.
He called the former NYPD officer’s sentence “politically motivated and media-intensified vengeance,” and noted in the Jan. 27 filing that the first-time offender was slapped with a prison term “three times the mandatory minimum sentence for murder.”
David Handschuh/New York Daily News
Michael Pena's victim, Lydia Cuomo, points out that the former cop 'used the service weapon the NYPD gave him to protect people and he did just the opposite with it.' Of his argument that his sentence for rape is too harsh, she counters, 'I do think the punishment fit the crime.'
The actual victim, Lydia Cuomo, 27, told the Daily News that Pena got what he deserves.
“Seventy-five years? I still have my entire life with this and I did nothing to ask for it,” she said.
Cuomo was en route to her first day of teaching at a Bronx charter school in August 2011 when a drunken Pena approached her on an Inwood street. The off-duty cop, who was in his street clothes, asked her for directions — and then pulled out his department-issued 9-mm. handgun, threatening to “blow [her] head off” if she didn’t do what he told her to.
He dragged her into a courtyard and repeatedly violated her before he was arrested by his colleagues.
Jefferson Siegel for New York Daily News
Attorney Ephraim Savitt says of his client, convicted rapist Michael Pena: 'Even in cases of rape by serial rapists, or of brutal thugs that physically beat and slash their victims, punishment has been generally considerably lower than Pena’s sentence.'
Pena was convicted at trial of forcing anal and oral sex on Cuomo — but jurors couldn’t agree on a rape charge. The verdict led to a News front page demanding to know, “What does a woman have to do to prove she was raped?”
Pena later pleaded guilty to the rape charge.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Richard Carruthers ripped Pena at sentencing for betraying the badge. In 2012 he gave the creep three consecutive 25-year sentences — one for each sex act.
Savitt, who’d asked Carruthers for a 10-year sentence, says Pena should be serving the sentences concurrently because it was all part of one criminal act. At most, he says, Pena should serve 15 to 20 years.
Jefferson Siegel
Michael Pena, pictured, 'has a shot' at getting his sentence reduced, says high-profile legal eagle Ed Hayes, who’s not involved with the case.
Giving him 75 years made for the harshest sentence “ever imposed in the modern era in this country for a first-time sex crime offender that did not result in the death, maiming or permanent physical disability of his victim,” the lawyer argued.
“Even in cases of rape by serial rapists, or of brutal thugs that physically beat and slash their victims, punishment has been generally considerably lower than Pena’s sentence,” Savitt wrote.
High-profile legal eagle Ed Hayes, who’s not involved with the case, said Pena “has a shot” at getting his sentence reduced. Carruthers “is a very well-respected judge, and it’s a horrible crime, but 75 to life is a brute of a sentence,” Hayes said.
Cuomo, who revealed her identity to The News last year as part of her bid to strengthen the state’s rape laws, said Pena’s legal move was “not entirely unexpected,” but it’s still unwelcome. She says she believes the judge followed the law.
Pena, she said, “used the service weapon the NYPD gave him to protect people and he did just the opposite with it.”
“I do think the punishment fit the crime.”
