Robles claims police influenced victim

Saying police were so suggestive in making him the prime suspect that they influenced his positive identification by the victim, the defense for a man charged with trying to abduct a woman in front of her 10-year-old son wants her identification of him barred from evidence.

The defendant, Ramon Robles, faces up to 12 years behind bars if convicted on charges of kidnapping and assault stemming from the incident last year outside an establishment on Sparta Street. He is set to go to trial June 5.

He is charged for accosting a woman one evening last summer outside Wilma Jean’s Kitchen on Sparta Street while she was standing at a vending machine.

‘He grabbed me by the hair and drug me around the side of the building,’ the victim recalled during preliminary hearing against Robles, saying she and her son were standing at a soda machine when her attacker sprang out of the darkness.

The woman said the man pulled her around to the side of the building but she was able to swing her fist over her shoulder, hitting the man and sending him running away. The woman recalled seeing a tattoo and smelling alcohol on the man’s breath.

It was a short time later the woman was taken to Robles’ nearby residence by police, who, acting on her brief description of her attacker, developed Robles as a suspect. Both the woman and her son identified Robles as the attacker when he was brought out of his residence by police.

However, Robles maintained, while drunk, he had been in his house all evening and that there were other people in the neighborhood who fit his description. The defense intends to provide an alibi defense for Robles’ whereabouts at the time of the assault. The defense maintains the victim never saw Robles’ face and that her identification was based purely on a short glimpse of a tattoo and clothing he was wearing.

More specifically, the defense believes the fact police singled Robles out caused both the victim and her son to be influenced to agree that Robles was the attacker.

Given the influence, the defense wants all identification by the victim and her son thrown out as well as any other evidence gained by their positive identification.

Circuit Court Judge Bart Stanley, who heard arguements in the case Tuesday, will rule on the admissability of the evidence in the coming days.