By Zoe Galland
Brooklyn resident Ramon Ramos has been sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for raping and robbing a 25-year-old Forest Hills woman in the summer of 1993, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown announced.
The defendant was arrested nine years after the attack when DNA evidence linked him to the crime. In his public statement, Brown commented on the need to extend New York's five-year statute of limitations for sex crimes.
Although the attack took place in the early 1990s, Brown said, it was not until 2003 that a medical examiner “linked the rape kit of the victim to the defendant.” Ramos's DNA was already in the state's DNA databank; he was convicted of robbing a Queens child in 1997.
“If not for the DNA databank,” Brown said, “the defendant stood a very good chance of getting away with his heinous crime.”
Other New York district attorneys, including Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau, have also called for an extension of the statute of limitations.
