Attorneys for Monserrate Teron, the Palm Coast resident a jury last month found guilty on all counts of raping and molesting his 7-year-old niece, on Monday filed a motion for a new trial, what would be Teron’s third on those charges. They make several claims, most of them previously made in pre-trial motions and denied by Circuit Judge Terence Perkins. He is not likely to rule differently now. He is sentencing Teron on Oct. 11.
Teron, 59, faces mandatory life in prison. A jury of four men and two women found him guilty on three counts after a five-day trial that ended on July 28. His first trial on the same charges in May had ended in deadlock.
The motion for a new trial appears to be intended more as a strategic step–or a preview–ahead of Teron’s appeal to the Fifth District Court of Appeal, though even then the defense’s case rests more on interpretive rather than substantial arguments. The trial was largely free of procedural challenges or controversies. The appeals court will not retry the case, but focus on whether the trial was conducted properly and the law followed. In those regards, the defense is left with little to appeal.
Harley Brook and Brook O’Sullivan, who defended Teron, argue that two sisters who testified that Teron had either raped them or attempted to molest them when they were children in Puerto Rico in the 1980s should not have been allowed to testify. The sisters became aware of Teron’s case by reading news articles about it, when he was first arrested in 2021. They had not reported Teron’s assaults other than to family and friends. The defense argues that their testimony was inconsistent and lacked credibility.
One of the two women in particular, however, described predatory behavior by Teron that closely resembled the way he would end up behaving with the child at the center of the two recent trials.
The two women had not been entirely disconnected from Teron since the Puerto Rico incidents. In 2015, long before his arrest on the 2020 charges in Palm Coast, Teron had walked into a store in central Florida where the women’s mother worked, and spoken to the mother. That prompted a Facebook message from one of the women that read, as translated by a court interpreter in the first trial: “Disappear from our life, from our area, and don’t you ever come close to us again, or you’re going to go to jail, disgusting rapist. And I’m sending this message private now. Next time I’m going to make it public. Try now to abuse us, miserable.”
Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark, who prosecuted the case, had included testimony about that Facebook message in the first trial, and shown an image of the message to the jury, apparently authenticating its date. Clark did not bring up the Facebook message in the second trial. But its absence from the evidence proved immaterial to the verdict.
Based on the question it asked the court and the testimony it wanted to see again during deliberation, the jury appeared to have no doubt that Teron had attacked the girl, but wanted to be sure that the attacks had taken place in Palm Coast. Teron occasionally visited the girl and her family in Massachusetts, where they live, and the girl testified that she was abused there, too. But the jury could not convict on the Flagler County charges unless it was convinced that the attack of November 2019 had taken place here. That question had tripped up the first jury. It did not trip up the second. The girl’s own testimony proved to be the tipping point.
Now, the defense argues in its motion for a new trial, still referring to the girl as “the alleged victim,” the girl “did not indicate whether she knew right from wrong or lie from truth in her interview video with Massachusetts DCF,” the Department of Children and Families. “She made inconsistent statements and her statements were not reliable.” The claim that the DCF interviewer had not set out whether the girl knew the difference between a lie and a truth is correct, but the prosecution had established that awareness with the witness when she was on the stand. And the girl’s video interview with the therapist left no doubt about the girl’s own awareness between fact and fiction, making the motion’s claim itself more fictitious than factual.
Yet another claim in the motion for a new trial is the defense’s contention that the court was wrong to exclude a defense expert witness, psychologist Barry Crown, from testifying. That was to have been the heart of the defense. It relied on the dubious–if not possibly scurrilous–claim that the while the girl may well have been abused, Teron was not the predator. She was merely transferring the accusation to Teron, her uncle, to protect her real predator–someone closer to her. The defense dropped hints to that effect in both trials, and wanted to put Crown on the stand to make the suggestions explicit, as well as to paint the portrait of a victim who was somehow oversexualized.
Crown–who has not had a therapeutic practice for over 20 years and works mostly with stroke patients–would have testified that children “will identify someone other than the abuser as committing the acts in order to protect the abuser,” according to the state’s motion that led to Crown being excluded. “When asked whether this is based on any scientific research, again Dr. Crown indicated that it was not, but rather was his opinion based on his experience.”
The defense argues that the girl “lied because she wanted the attention and because she wanted revenge against [Teron] for chastising her” over her own sexual behavior–an argument that dovetailed Teron’s own testimony on the stand, when he portrayed the girl as the aggressor, when he made it appear as if she were the one obsessed with him. The judge didn’t buy those arguments in earlier motions, and is not about to give them credence now.
The sentencing, currently set for a 60-minute session, is scheduled for 11 a.m. on Oct. 11. Sentencing hearings can be extremely emotional and include lengthy testimony and arguments by both sides. But that’s usually when there is room in the sentence for leniency. The judge has already made clear that he has little discretion in the mandatory sentence Teron is facing.
David says
Hey lawyers give it up the guy is GUILTY.
DaleL says
Harley Brook and Brook O’Sullivan had plenty of opportunity to question the two sisters under oath on the stand. They had an opportunity to move for a mistrial when the judge would not allow their “expert” witness to testify. Instead they waited until after the jury had found Teron guilty. Unless there is some actual new evidence that might exonerate Teron, there should be no more trials. He has been found guilty and should be in prison.
I’m amazed that the Facebook post was not submitted into evidence during this last trial.
“In 2015, long before his arrest on the 2020 charges in Palm Coast, Teron had walked into a store in central Florida where the women’s mother worked, and spoken to the mother. That prompted a Facebook message from one of the women that read, as translated by a court interpreter in the first trial: “Disappear from our life, from our area, and don’t you ever come close to us again, or you’re going to go to jail, disgusting rapist. And I’m sending this message private now. Next time I’m going to make it public. Try now to abuse us, miserable.”