iluvu wrote: ↑Wed Jul 03, 2019 12:25 pm https://www.cambodiadaily.com/news/ex-m ... ee-150956/

Ex-marine, previously sentenced to 210 years in prison for raping girls in Cambodia, could walk free
LOS ANGELES (FOX 11) - A retired U.S. Marine captain whose conviction for the violent sexual abuse of young girls in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, was overturned on appeal pleaded not guilty Tuesday in downtown Los Angeles to federal sex crimes charges.

Michael Joseph Pepe was sentenced five years ago to life in prison for illegal sex acts with seven girls aged 9 to 12. Six of the girls flew to the U.S. to testify in Los Angeles federal court that Pepe, who was working as a teacher in the country at the time, had drugged, bound, beat and raped them in his compound in Phnom Penh.
Original source: https://www.foxla.com/news/local-news/e ... -walk-free

UPDATE 2021

Retrial to Begin for Ex-Marine Captain Charged in Cambodia Child Rapes
By City News Service
Aug 3, 2021

LOS ANGELES (CNS) - A retired U.S. Marine captain whose conviction for the violent sexual abuse of young girls in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, was overturned on appeal is expected to face retrial today in downtown Los Angeles.

Michael Joseph Pepe was sentenced seven years ago to life in prison for illegal sex acts with seven girls aged 9 to 12. Six of the girls flew to the U.S. to testify in Los Angeles federal court that Pepe, who was working as a teacher in the country at the time, had drugged, bound, beat and raped them in his compound in Phnom Penh.

Pepe was prosecuted under a federal law meant to punish people who travel overseas to engage in child sex. Although he was convicted in 2008, sentencing was postponed for six years after allegations arose that the lead investigator on the case had been sexually involved with one of the interpreters who translated for the victims at trial.

In 2018, a divided panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals unexpectedly reversed Pepe's conviction, finding that the government hadn't shown that he was “traveling'' when he assaulted the girls. Pepe maintained that he had relocated to Cambodia in March 2003.

The panel wrote that if Pepe is retried, the government “will need to prove that he was still traveling'' when he allegedly assaulted the girls.

Pepe, 67, pleaded not guilty two years ago to charges of travel with intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct and aggravated sexual child abuse.

Pepe, whose last U.S. address was listed in Southern California, was working part-time as a professor at a Cambodian university when he was arrested by the Cambodian National Police in June 2006.

The investigation into Pepe began when a girl reported that she and several other children had been abused by him. During a search of his PhnomPenh villa, police found three girls, aged 9, 10 and 11, as well as hundreds of pornographic images, various drugs, children's clothes, and rope and cloth strips, which the children said Pepe used to bind and gag them, according to court filings.

Cambodian police arrested Pepe in 2006 and he was extradited to the United States the following year.

“Monstrous does not begin to capture the horror of the crime or the impact on the victims,'' U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer said in February 2014 as she sentenced Pepe to 210 years in federal prison, a 30-year stretch for each of the seven girls.

In a brief statement that day, Pepe said he had spent 20 years in the Marines and suffered from organic brain damage and “psychotic effects'' from withdrawal from psychiatric medication.

As for the victims, Pepe offered an apology, of sorts, to “the girls, if you believe that I have harmed you. I ... wish you good luck in the future.''

Until his conviction was reversed and he was brought to the downtown federal lockup to await a retrial, Pepe was incarcerated in a maximum security prison in Tucson, Arizona.

Fischer is once again presiding over Pepe's trial, which starts with jury selection Tuesday.

Copyright 2021, City News Service, Inc.
https://kfiam640.iheart.com/content/202 ... ild-rapes/

CEO News - NB: Below is an archived article from 2010. It shows that there was a lack of professional behavior shown by some of the people who were responsible for the prosecution of Michael Pepe during the US trial.
Two people whose job was to get justice for the Cambodian victims could not wait until after the trial to have sex, and thus there were objections raised by the defense as to their objectivity during the trial.
In the end, this was not the reason for the retrial (which was the "travelling for sex" clause in the charges), but having sex with one of the translators of child abuse victims shows bad judgement and bad taste, at the very least.

Verdict in key child-sex trial at risk
By Scott Glover, Los Angeles Times
Nov. 20, 2010 12 AM PT

A costly and emotionally charged child sex case in which prosecutors traveled to Cambodia and paid to fly frightened young victims to the United States is under fire by defense attorneys amid allegations that court interpreters were biased in favor of the prosecution.

One of the interpreters assigned to the case of Michael Joseph Pepe admitted being involved in a sexual relationship with the lead investigator around the time the case went to trial in May 2008, according to documents filed in federal court in Los Angeles.

Pepe, a retired U.S. Marine captain who was working as a teacher in Cambodia, was convicted of having sex with seven girls ages 9 to 12. The girls, speaking through Vietnamese and Khmer interpreters, testified that Pepe drugged, bound, beat and raped them in his compound in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital.

After Pepe’s conviction, prosecutors discovered and disclosed the relationship between interpreter Ann Luong Spiratos and Gary J. Phillips, a special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Following the disclosure, Pepe’s defense attorneys asked U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer for a new trial, arguing that the “secret … sexual relationship” between Spiratos and Phillips resulted in skewed interpretations by Spiratos and a colleague, which aided the prosecution and undermined the defense.

“Only after Mr. Pepe was convicted did the defense learn that the Vietnamese language interpreter was not the disinterested interpreter that she appeared,” wrote deputy federal public defender Charles C. Brown. “We now know that what the jury heard during the trial was not what the witnesses said but what the interpreters said they said.” Brown argued that Spiratos’ alleged bias spread to another interpreter she brought in to work on the case.

As a result of the controversy, Pepe’s sentencing has been postponed. The motion for a new trial has been pending before Fischer for nearly four months.

Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, said prosecutors hired experts who reviewed the translations after the trial and found no substantive differences between witnesses’ testimony and what the interpreters said aloud in court. He said some of the interpretations questioned by the defense experts were done by an interpreter other than Spiratos who had no reason to put her career at risk by manipulating witnesses’ testimony.

In a recent interview with The Times, Spiratos said her interpretations were unbiased.

In a hearing earlier this year, Fischer expressed concerns about the objectivity of a defense expert who was critical of interpretations by Spiratos and a fellow interpreter she brought on to help with the case. Fischer ordered prosecutors and defense attorneys to meet and attempt to reach an agreement about what discrepancies — if any — exist between the testimony and translations in order to help her decide how to proceed with the case.

The defense’s new trial motion also hinted at improper conduct by one of the federal prosecutors on the case. According to the court papers, Phillips, the ICE agent, said that Assistant U.S. Atty. John Lulejian encouraged him to become involved with Spiratos. [The prosecutor and agent are not named in the court filing, but sources close to the case have confirmed their identities.]

“Wait till you see who I hired … she is Vietnamese and is very hot,” Phillips said the prosecutor told him, according to a declaration he submitted to the court.

Phillips said Lulejian twice told him he should “take care” of Spiratos, an apparent reference to having sex with her, according to court papers. Phillips added that Lulejian himself was “enamored” with Spiratos and that the prosecutor showed him photographs of her that he had on his phone.

Phillips, who is the subject of an ongoing internal investigation by ICE, declined to comment through an agency spokeswoman.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm ... story.html

United States v. Pepe, No. 14-50095 (9th Cir. 2018)

Justia Opinion Summary
The Ninth Circuit vacated defendant's conviction and sentence under the 2005 version of 18 U.S.C. 2423(c), which applies to a U.S. citizen who travels in foreign commerce, and engages in any illicit sexual conduct with another person. In this case, defendant, a U.S. citizen, drugged and raped several children in Cambodia, where he claims to have resided for several years. The panel held that Congress subsequently amended the statute to add a new basis for criminal liability. The panel held that, from the statutory amendment, as well as the accompanying legislative history, it was evident that section 2423(c) was previously inapplicable to U.S. citizens living abroad unless they were traveling—meaning something more than being in transit—when they had illicit sex. Because the jury was not properly instructed on the travel element in this case, the panel vacated and remanded should the government elect to retry him.

Court Description: Criminal Law.
The panel vacated a conviction and sentence under the 2005 version of 18 U.S.C. § 2423(c), which applies to a U.S. citizen “who travels in foreign commerce, and engages in any illicit sexual conduct with another person,” and remanded, in a case in which the defendant, a U.S. citizen, drugged and raped several children in Cambodia, where he claims to have resided for several years. The defendant contended that the statutory language didn’t encompass his conduct because, as a resident of Cambodia, he had ceased “travel[ing] in foreign commerce.” The panel held that in light of a 2013 amendment to the statute adding a new basis for criminal liability, as well as the accompanying legislative history, it is evident that the version of § 2423(c) in effect at the time of the defendant’s illicit sexual conduct was inapplicable to U.S. citizens living abroad unless they were traveling—meaning something more than being in transit—when they had illicit sex. The panel wrote that this subsequent Congressional pronouncement is clearly irreconcilable with this court’s previous construction of the statute in United States v. Clark, 435 F.3d 1100 (9th Cir. 2006) (concluding that § 2423(c) “does not require that the conduct occur while traveling in foreign commerce”), and that the panel is therefore not bound by the reasoning in Clark.

Long read: United States vs Pepe in pdf (31pages)
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/ap ... 07-11.html