The violent Tren de Aragua gangbanger who brutally murdered Georgia nursing student Laken Riley has asked a judge for a new trial after he was sentenced to life in prison last month for the crime which shocked the nation.
Lawyers for Jose Ibarra, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela, submitted a two-page court filing Tuesday asking Judge H. Patrick Haggard to set aside the verdict and penalty he decided during the bench trial.
Haggard’s decision was “contrary to law” and “to the evidence” and the judge “committed other errors of law that necessitate a new trial,” the filing alleges.
The court papers don’t elaborate further but do ask the judge to leave the door open for the defense to “review the facts and circumstances” at trial in order to potentially flesh the request out further at a later date.
The motion for a new trial is a necessary first step for the defense team to take before they can file an appeal.
On Nov. 20, Haggard convicted Ibarra of all 10 counts he faced, including counts of murder, malice murder, kidnapping with bodily injury, aggravated assault with intent to rape and Peeping Tom charges.
Over the course of a four-day trial — featuring 29 prosecution witnesses and just three defense witnesses — prosecutors argued that Ibarra, 26, brutally beat and asphyxiated Riley, 22, on Feb. 22 while she was out jogging near the University of Georgia campus in Athens.
Riley — who’d recently transferred from the University of Georgia to Augusta University to study nursing — allegedly fought for her life for roughly 18 minutes against her killer, whom prosecutors said was planning to sexually assault her but for the fierce fight she put up.
Ibarra’s fingerprint was found on Riley’s phone and his DNA was under her fingernails, prosecutors say the evidence showed.
But Ibarra’s lawyers said the fingerprint and DNA evidence analysis was unreliable and tried to pin the murder on Ibarra’s brother, Diego Ibarra, claiming Jose’s body didn’t match the one seen on surveillance footage.
