The Cleveland school bus driver who abducted, imprisoned and repeatedly raped three women was sentenced on Thursday to life in prison without parole, plus 1,000 years, after one of his victims confronted him and said he had put her through 11 years of hell.
Ariel Castro, 53, apologized to his victims, but was mostly defiant, verbally sparring with the judge during a court hearing as he sought to blame his actions on a sexual obsession and having been abused as a child.
“I am not a monster,” he told the court in a rambling statement before sentencing.
Photo: Reuters
The women, along with a six-year-old girl Castro fathered, were rescued from his fortress-like house on May 6, after nine to 11 years of captivity.
“If you asked my daughter, she would say: ‘My dad is the best dad in the world,’” Castro said.
“All the sex was consensual,” he said. “The girls were not virgins. They had multiple sex partners before me.”
Cuyahoga County Judge Michael Russo described Castro as suffering from “extreme narcissism,” and said his crimes were so severe that he should never emerge from prison. Castro had pleaded guilty to hundreds of charges, including murder under a fetal homicide law for beating and starving victim Michelle Knight to force her to miscarry.
When Russo brought up the murder charge in court, Castro said he was not a violent person and had pleaded guilty to murder only to spare the victims a long legal process.
“I am not a murderer,” he said, as he stood with his legs shackled.
Knight, 32, made a dramatic appearance in court before the sentencing and read a statement that Castro had persecuted her, starting with her abduction in 2002, until May 6, 2013, the day she was freed.
“Days turned into nights, nights turned into days. Years turned into eternity. I knew nobody cared about me. He told me that my family didn’t care,” Knight said, choking back tears.
“I spent 11 years of hell. Now your hell is just beginning,” Knight said of Castro.
Earlier in the hearing, prosecutors presented graphic evidence of the crimes, including a dollhouse-size replica of the house where the women were imprisoned.
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s officially declared wealth is fairly modest: some savings and a jointly owned villa in Budapest. However, voters in what Transparency International deems the EU’s most corrupt country believe otherwise — and they might make Orban pay in a general election this Sunday that could spell an end to his 16-year rule. The wealth amassed by Orban’s inner circle is fueling the increasingly palpable frustration of a population grappling with sluggish growth, high inflation and worsening public services. “The government’s communication machine worked well as long as our economic situation remained relatively good,” said Zoltan Ranschburg, a political analyst
RSS