The illegal alien charged with murdering 20-year-old college student Mollie Tibbetts is asking that his confession be thrown out of the case.
In August 2018, Bahena-Rivera, an illegal alien from Mexico, was charged with Tibbetts’ murder after police said he admitted to confronting and chasing down the young woman after her body was found in a cornfield in Poweshiek County, Iowa. The illegal alien lived in a region of Iowa that was surrounded by sanctuary cities, as Breitbart News noted, and worked on a dairy farm using a stolen ID and Social Security card after allegedly crossing the U.S.-Mexico border as a child.
Bahena-Rivera’s attorneys have now filed a motion requesting that the illegal alien’s confession to police be thrown out of the case because they claim their client was not read his Miranda rights.
The motion claims law enforcement officials did not make Bahena-Rivera aware of the fact that he could have refused to have his car searched by police when they first went to question him last year at Yarrabee Farms, the dairy farm that employed the illegal alien.
The defense team also states that Iowa detectives did not read the illegal alien his Miranda rights before Bahena-Rivera confessed to murdering Tibbetts, and that authorities allegedly told him he did not need an attorney for the questioning.
This is the latest request that Bahena-Rivera has made in the murder trial against him. Most recently, the illegal alien’s defense team asked that the jury pool be moved to an Iowa county with less of a white population and more of a predominantly Hispanic region.
Bahena-Rivera’s attorneys claim “a fair and impartial trial cannot be preserved with a jury selected from [Poweshiek] county” due to alleged negative perceptions of the Hispanic community by white Americans in the area.
As Breitbart News reported, the illegal alien had initially requested that he not be called an “illegal alien,” and his attorneys have said that he has a “constitutional right” to receive $5,000 in state taxpayer money to hire an independent investigative team for his defense.
According to prosecutors, Bahena-Rivera was the last person who saw Tibbetts jogging on the evening of July 18 in Brooklyn, Iowa, security camera footage reveals. That is the night Tibbetts went missing.
The illegal alien told police that Tibbetts was jogging when he saw her, according to prosecutors. That is when he said he approached Tibbetts and started talking to her. After Tibbetts told Bahena-Rivera that she would call the police if he did not stop following her, the illegal alien allegedly chased her and says he “blacked out” after this.
Police believe Bahena-Rivera stabbed Tibbetts to death, then drove to a cornfield where prosecutors say Bahena-Rivera placed cornstalks over her to hide her body. The illegal alien has been held on a $5 million bond, and the murder trial is set for September.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.