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Jury finds Victor Peña guilty on all charges in kidnapping, rape trial
The Charlestown man was accused of abducting and raping a woman over the course of three days in 2019.
Victor Peña, the Charlestown man accused of abducting and repeatedly raping a woman in 2019, was found guilty on all charges by a jury Tuesday in Suffolk Superior Court.
The jury, which took two hours to deliberate, found Peña guilty of kidnapping and the 10 counts of aggravated rape he was facing.
Prosecutors said Peña abducted the woman, who is now 27, after she left a Boston bar in January 2019, holding her in his Charlestown apartment. They said he raped her repeatedly over the course of three days before police broke down the door and rescued her.
Peña, 42, had pleaded not guilty to the charges. He has been held without bail since he was arrested in 2019. A judge found Peña was dangerous during an April 2019 hearing.
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He is set to be sentenced Monday morning. He faces 25 years in prison for the kidnapping charge, and each count of rape could get him up to 30 years.
Peña voluntarily watched the bulk of his trial from a separate room via an audiovisual feed and a Spanish interpreter; he previously disrupted jury selection when he appeared naked on a courtroom monitor and performed an obscene act.
The woman, who was 23 at the time of the incident, testified during the trial that the last thing she remembered the night of her kidnapping was feeling tipsy while dancing at Hennessy’s with her sister and friends. The next thing she remembered was waking up naked the morning after in Peña’s apartment. She told jurors that she tried to escape twice while Peña was asleep, but he woke up and caught her before she could reach the door, which she later found had a deadbolt that required a key from the inside to unlock.
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She testified that Peña threatened to kill her and she eventually stopped fighting back against his sexual assaults because she “didn’t want to die.”
In his own testimony, Peña said he was trying to help the woman, insisted he didn’t hold her captive, and said that she wanted to “have relations” with him. He also called the trial corrupt “persecution.”
Throughout the trial, Peña’s attorney, Lorenzo Perez, attempted to show his client lacked “criminal responsibility because of mental disease or defect.”
Peña’s older brother, Jose Peña, previously told the media his brother became mentally impaired at age 7 when he suffered a medical issue that temporarily blocked oxygen from reaching his brain.
A forensic psychologist who evaluated Peña’s mental health last month, however, told the jurors that even though the 42-year-old said he heard voices in different languages, he does not have a mental illness that would cause him to be divorced from reality.
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