Friday April 4, 2008, 5:59 am
Don't call it Justice for Nixmary, but it's the most the law allows for what the jury convicted him of doing.
Thank you Maria Vasquez for writing the petition on behalf of Nixzmary, and thank you to the 282 signers. We seldom know if what we do makes a difference but we know a butterfly matters!

Someone said, anyone who doubts the power of the smallest thing hasn't been in a dark room with a mosquito.

The story follows:
As he faced the judge about to sentence him for causing his 7-year-old stepdaughter’s death, Cesar Rodriguez said he was sorry. He said he loved his stepdaughter, Nixzmary Brown. He said he would serve his time. Still, Mr. Rodriguez said Thursday before a packed courtroom in Brooklyn, “I can honestly say that I’m being accused of something I did not do.”

Mr. Rodriguez’s assertion carried little weight with Justice L. Priscilla Hall of State Supreme Court. She sentenced him to the maximum term — 26 1/3 to 29 years in prison — for his role in the beating death of Nixzmary in 2006. The minimum was 15 years.

Mr. Rodriguez, 29, who was convicted last month of first-degree manslaughter and unlawful imprisonment, will be in his 50s before he is eligible for parole.

The sentence brought some comfort to prosecutors; they had charged Mr. Rodriguez with second-degree murder, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison, but had to settle for the manslaughter conviction. Several members of the deeply divided jury have said that although they deplored Mr. Rodriguez’s conduct — he admitted beating Nixzmary daily in the final weeks of her life — they could not agree that he had shown “depraved indifference,” the standard for second-degree murder, in causing her death.

“I must say it is a good day for justice for Nixzmary,” the lead prosecutor, Ama Dwimoh, said outside the courtroom.

Nixzmary’s mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, 29, is also charged with second-degree murder and will be tried later this year. Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyers argued at trial that it was Ms. Santiago, not their client, who struck the blow that killed Nixzmary.

Nixzmary’s death in her family’s apartment on Greene Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, on Jan. 11, 2006, after a string of missed warning signs and bureaucratic lapses, shocked the city and prompted an overhaul of the city’s child welfare agency. At her death, she weighed only 36 pounds — normal for a 4-year-old — and her body was covered with gashes, bruises, scabs and scars — some fresh, some weeks old.

From the beginning, prosecutors depicted Mr. Rodriguez as the main cause of the child’s death. An out-of-work security guard and Army veteran who was helping Ms. Santiago raise six children, two of them his, Mr. Rodriguez told investigators that he routinely beat Nixzmary and tied her to a chair with duct tape or twine or bungee cords in an effort to correct her misbehavior.

On the last night of Nixzmary’s life, Mr. Rodriguez told detectives and prosecutors, he beat her with particular severity as punishment for jamming his computer printer with toys. He said he held her head under cold running water and left her naked and moaning on the floor.

When paramedics arrived at the family’s apartment, they found Mr. Rodriguez trying to revive Nixzmary. A medical examiner testified at trial that she had been dead for hours.

Mr. Rodriguez’s trial was marked by legal dramatics, and his sentencing was no different. His lead lawyer, Jeffrey T. Schwartz, asked Justice Hall to set aside the verdict “in the interest of justice” and accused prosecutors of tainting the trial by withholding evidence.

Mr. Schwartz’s associate, Barry Deonarine, told the judge that from his talk with a juror after the trial, “it became clear that the jury had let considerations other than the law and the evidence influence its deliberations.”

Several jurors who had come to the sentencing gasped at Mr. Deonarine’s comments. Mr. Deonarine said outside the courtroom that the juror he spoke to told him that the jury could not reach a consensus on any charge higher than criminally negligent homicide, a low-level felony, but that they felt that in order to live with themselves they needed to convict on a higher charge.

Justice Hall denied Mr. Schwartz’s request to overturn the verdict.

In her plea for the maximum sentence, Ms. Dwimoh reminded the judge that Mr. Rodriguez had a record of bad behavior. She noted that he was discharged from the Army in lieu of court-martial for sending sexual pictures of himself to a minor; that he was convicted of assaulting a relative; that he was charged with assaulting a U.P.S. driver; and, recently, indicted on charges of trying to smuggle homemade knives into his cell at Rikers Island.

“There is no end to Cesar Rodriguez’s violent ways,” she said.

Ms. Dwimoh also urged Justice Hall to consider Nixzmary’s five siblings. No sentence, she said, “could bring their sister back to them or the loss of the innocence of their childhood.” She said that Javier, Nixzmary’s older brother, had told prosecutors Wednesday that “he has prayed that when Cesar gets out of jail he is very frail and weak so that he can’t hurt any other children again.”

When Justice Hall asked Mr. Rodriguez if he had anything to say, Mr. Schwartz said he had advised his client not to speak. Justice Hall put the question again directly to Mr. Rodriguez, and he stood, hunching toward the microphone on the defense table to make himself heard.

After thanking the judge and the jury, he said: “I’m just sorry for causing everybody any emotional pain or distorted memories about the child. I’m just sorry. I loved Nixzmary.”

But he said he was wrongly accused, and added, “If in the end, God gives me enough life to show to this court how wrong this makes that judgment, I wish to prove that some day.”

Outside the courtroom, a children’s-rights advocate handed Ms. Dwimoh a bouquet. Another advocate, Awilda Cordero, tearfully expressed her relief to the television cameras.

Mr. Rodriguez’s relatives were nowhere in sight.

“They were afraid,” Mr. Schwartz said. “He wanted them to come, but they were afraid.”

Annie Correal contributed reporting.

Friday April 4, 2008, 6:33 am
NOTED TY CHARLES

Friday April 4, 2008, 9:14 am
Inmates in prison do not take kindly to child beaters and cause death of a little girl. Maybe Justice will be "served" to him in prison.

TY, Nancy for the update.

Saturday April 5, 2008, 10:47 pm
T.Y. Nancy. He should have gotten harsher punishment! I just cannot believe that some jurors did not think that cruelly treating & brutally beating his step-daughter, a tiny little girl Nixmary, on a daily basis (or at all!) as that monster Cesar Rodriguez did, was not 'depraved indifference' !!!
What does that say for them?