AURORA | A former Arapahoe County social worker reportedly left an Arapahoe County courtroom in handcuffs after being sentenced to four years in prison for framing an Aurora City Council member for child sex abuse.
CBS Channel 4 reported that Robin Niceta apologized during her sentencing hearing Friday for her actions, blaming them on mental illness.
Niceta’s sentencing came months after her November conviction and multiple sentencing postponements.
Last November, it took a jury just over an hour to return their verdict that Niceta was guilty of attempting to influence a public servant.
She faced up to six years in prison for the felony conviction.
Prosecutors won the case that Niceta called an Arapahoe County hotline in January 2022 to falsely accuse Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky of molesting her own son as a way of punishing Jurinsky for criticizing then-police Chief Vanessa Wilson on a talk radio show. Niceta and Wilson were in an intimate relationship at the time.
Last year, Jurinsky won a $3 million default judgment against Niceta in a libel case stemming from the same hotline call.
During the November trial, prosecutors argued that Niceta wanted revenge against Jurinsky and took steps to cover her tracks both before and after the crime.
Michael Garnsey, an Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office investigator, testified about digital evidence recovered from Niceta’s cell phones and laptop that pointed to her placing the call to the county’s child abuse hotline on Jan. 28, 2022, one day after Jurinsky went on a radio show to criticize Wilson.
Messages recovered from Niceta’s personal cell phone indicate Wilson complained to Niceta on Jan. 27 about Jurinsky’s radio appearance. Niceta was employed at that time by the Arapahoe County Department of Human Services as a caseworker specializing in the investigation of child sexual abuse cases.
On Jan. 28, minutes before the hotline call, Niceta’s county-issued laptop was used to look up information online about Jurinsky and a sports bar, JJ’s Place, which Jurinsky owns. The hotline caller claimed to be an employee of JJ’s Place.
The same computer and Niceta’s county cell phone were also used to look up information about the state’s child abuse hotline, including Bing searches such as, “does the child abuse hotline keep phone numbers in Colorado.”
At 5:07 p.m., phone records obtained from T-Mobile indicate Niceta’s personal cell phone was used to contact the Colorado Child Abuse and Neglect Hotline, which forwarded the call to Arapahoe County’s child abuse hotline.
The caller tried to block their caller ID by dialing “star-six-seven” beforehand, which did not prevent T-Mobile from recording information about the call.
During the phone call, Niceta received text messages from Wilson, which prosecutor Daniel Cohen pointed to along with other messages to discredit defense attorney Frank Moya’s assertion that Wilson made the call herself.
Prosecutors also described an alleged plot by Niceta and her mother, Janice Dudley, to convince the court that Niceta was suffering from a brain tumor, with her defense attorneys arguing earlier this year that Niceta was too sick to travel for court appearances to Colorado from New Mexico, where her parents live.
The attorneys withdrew from her case once the authenticity of medical records describing Niceta’s cancer diagnosis were called into question.
Niceta also faces a trial on charges related to her falsifying the cancer claim later this summer.
Whenever I hear how relieved people are when someone [usually a male] is charged with a serious or reviled crime — ‘Did they catch him? They did? Well, that’s a relief!’ — I mentally hear the phrase, ‘We’ll give ’im a fair trial, then we’ll hang ’im.’
And if I point out he may be the wrong guy who’s being railroaded, I could receive the erroneous refrain, ‘Well if he’s truly innocent, he has nothing to worry about.’
It is also why the news-media should refrain from publishing the identity of people charged with a crime — especially one of a repugnant nature, for which they are jailed pending trial (as is typically done) — until at least after they’ve been convicted.
‘Justice system’ vice probably occurs much more frequently than we can ever know about. And I’ve noticed that people tend to naively believe that such ethically challenged courtroom conduct can/will never happen to them.
Any person’s wrongful charge, trial, conviction and punishment should be concerning to any law-abiding person. However statistically unlikely, the average person could someday find themselves unjustly accused and sentenced.
This woman’s manipulation of the system is a story of such a level of goofy thinking that was so convoluted and thus it completely and unequivocally backfired in the end. Part two of this trilogy is rolling along to draw on more faulty defective logic.
The propensity otherwise remains — Birds Of A Feather…
EX- Police chief Wilson has cooked up some insane theories in her employment lawsuit. She was fired for a policy of being soft on law enforcement and strong on creating her own APD WOKE department. The predictable advice the city lawyers will recommend is the approach of settling this rather than square-off in trial. Hopefully, this council stands their ground and dismisses any such suggestion instantly.
Oh? Yep, Let’s go to trial and see what happens. I would hope she wins $10million dollars!!! Jurinsky has continued to show her inaptitude and ‘butt’ ever since she was put in office. She should be recalled.