EDITH RAZO-PINA/CHAVEZ - 2.5 months -(2009) Pahrump NV

JP APPOINTED AS NYE COUNTY SPECIAL DISTRICT ATTORNEY

By an Order of the Fifth Judicial District Court, John ‘JP’ Schlegelmilch has been appointed to serve as a Special District Attorney for Nye County in the case of State of Nevada v. Bianca Razo-Pina. Razo-Pina has been charged with Murder during the Commission of Child Abuse, Open Murder, and Child Abuse Causing Substantial Bodily Harm. The trial is currently set to commence September 7, 2010, in the Nye County Courthouse in Pahrump.

Razo-Pina is accused of causing the death of her two month old infant by the use of blunt force trauma.

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http://pvtimes.com/news/20-years-for-mom-in-babys-09-death/
20 years for mom in baby’s ’09 death
Posted on05 October 2011.


By Kelci Parks

Pahrump resident Bianca Razo-Pina, 20, was sentenced Monday in connection with the 2009 death of her 2-month-old daughter, Edith.

Razo-Pina and her boyfriend had taken their daughter to the Desert View Hospital emergency room in July of 2009. The infant was in full arrest and turning blue.

Emergency room doctors went to work on the baby and hospital staff notified police of suspicious bruising on the infant.

In subsequent interviews with police, Razo-Pina first denied that any trauma had befallen the child.

She later told authorities that the child may have sustained the bruising when she fell off a bed onto a concrete floor. Razo-Pina also spoke of an incident when the child fell off a couch.

Additionally, during later interviews, she described one night when Edith woke up crying. Razo-Pina recalled carrying the child to the kitchen where she said she may or may not have accidentally hit the child’s head on a door frame, says the incident report.

Razo-Pina was later arrested, along with the child’s father. She was originally charged with one count of murder and one count of child abuse and neglect with substantial bodily harm and/or death. She accepted a plea deal of child abuse and neglect as well as involuntary manslaughter.

“Historically, in Nye County, there’s no fondness for an Alford Plea,” said Razo-Pina’s defense attorney, Harry Kuehn. “But in this case they agreed not to huff and puff too much and we were able to enter an Alford plea, which, of course, allows a person to plead to one or more offenses while denying that a crime was actually committed by the person.”

Kuehn argued several points in front of Fifth Judicial District Judge Kimberly Wanker on his client’s behalf, starting with an attempt to discredit a lie-detecting method utilized by Nye County authorities called Computerized Voice Stress Analysis CVSA .

“I have a personal goal when it comes to the CVSA. It’s my hope that it will be eliminated as a police tool in my lifetime. Ten states have legislatively prohibited the use of the CVSA because it’s what I call a voodoo science. It’s based on a computer chip that measures the trimmers in a person’s throat and then correlates that to truthfulness or untruthfulness. The CVSA is not only inadmissible, it’s so bad that it’s no better than a coin flip,” he said.

Police reports consistently conveyed that the suspect reacted in an abnormal way to the situation. Statements from authorities who interviewed her and witness statements from multiple hospital nurses noted that Razo-Pina showed little or no emotion throughout the entire ordeal.

“Much of this case was based on my client’s reactions. I’ve only been a lawyer for 31 years, but people react in countless different ways,” said Kuehn. “I don’t want to end this without mentioning my client’s demeanor with me for the past 800 days. From the beginning, your honor, whatever has been written in the reports about lack of emotion and odd behavior has not been demonstrated in my presence. I want you and the parole board to know that she is absolutely devastated by the loss of her child.”

The defense offered a modified recommendation of lesser time, served concurrently as opposed to consecutively.

Nye County Deputy District Attorney Wes White said the defendant was given a good plea deal and to come back and ask for a further reduction was unwarranted.

“There’s not a whole lot that can be said, other than a two-month-old baby girl lost her life. In a case like this, where a plea deal is reached, the state feels, most often, that in that plea bargain the defendant received her break,” said White. “Here, murder charges were not pursued, felony murder, charges that could have landed her in prison for the rest of her life. The most she faces now is 24 years in prison. She had her break, and I think that she owes society a debt and she owes that little girl a debt.”

Wanker listened intently to both arguments.

“This has been a very troubling case for me. I have read everything in the file forward and backwards,” she said. “The bottom line is that we have a dead child. And according to the medical reports in this case, the physician from Sunrise Hospital, who happened to be an expert in pediatric ophthalmology, commented that these injuries were so severe that … had the child survived, she probably would have been blind and suffered from so many things that quite frankly it was probably a blessing that the child passed on.”

Wanker said she was appalled with the lack of accountability she saw in the case.

“I think the part for me that is most troubling is the lack of accountability and responsibility. Nobody takes any accountability or responsibility for what happened to the child.”

She noted that she was not only concerned about the number of stories provided concerning what may or may not have happened to the child, but also the apparent lack of emotion. It also concerned her that after being arrested and bonding out, it took Razo-Pino a few hours to arrive at the hospital to be with her dying child.

“Again, I’m very troubled by this case. I’ve thought a lot about it, probably more on this case than all of the others that are sitting here on my desk this morning,” said Wanker, who then glanced at the towering caseload next to her.

After a long pause, she sentenced Razo-Pina to the Nevada Department of Corrections for a minimum of 76 months and a maximum of 190 months for the child abuse and neglect charge.

For the involuntary manslaughter charge, Razo-Pina received a sentence of 19 to 48 months, to be served consecutively. Razo-Pina was given credit for 804 days of time served and could be paroled in as little as just over five years.




Bianca Razo-Pina