LIMA, Peru – Joran van der Sloot knew his guilty plea in the strangulation death of a young woman he met at a Lima casino was a big gamble as he tried to get a reduced sentence. On Friday, the poker-loving Dutchman lost.
A three-judge panel sentenced him to 28 years in prison, discarding his claims of contrition in a killing his attorney said was triggered by trauma from being the prime suspect in the unsolved 2005 disappearance of U.S. teenager Natalee Holloway.
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Asked if he accepted the sentence, Van der Sloot said he would appeal.
The sentencing came a day after a judge in Alabama declared Holloway legally dead as her parents try to bring Van der Sloot, 24, to the United States for a related crime.
“I believe he is beyond rehabilitation,” Dave Holloway, Natalee’s father, said in Birmingham, Ala., after that hearing.
The Peruvian judges said Friday that due to time already served, van der Sloot’s sentence would end in June 2038.
While the parents of Holloway and Stephany Flores want him to experience the greater deprivation of a U.S. prison, they will have to wait for him to serve his time before any extradition on U.S. charges related to his alleged extortion of Holloway’s mother, a Peruvian legal expert said.
The three female judges showed no sign of believing his contrition for the May 2010 killing of Flores. Their sentence, which took a clerk nearly two hours to read, said he was guilty of “first-degree murder with aggravating factors of ferocity and great cruelty.”
Van der Sloot stood passively as the clerk detailed how he elbowed Flores, a 21-year-old business student, in the face, beat her repeatedly, then strangled her with his bloodied shirt.
Van der Sloot’s expression didn’t change when the sentence was rendered, including the judges’ order to pay $75,000 in reparations to the victim’s family. No members of Van der Sloot’s family attended the trial.
It is the first sentence ever imposed on Van der Sloot despite repeated efforts to prove he was involved in Holloway’s apparent death on the Dutch Caribbean island of Aruba where he grew up. She was last seen leaving a nightclub with him.
The Peruvian victim’s father complained after the sentencing that Van der Sloot was living well in a Lima prison, where he has been segregated from the general population.
“A jail isn’t a five-star hotel,” Ricardo Flores told reporters. “Since the first day, we’ve been complaining about the excessive privileges” Van der Sloot allegedly enjoyed in jail.
Unconfirmed news reports, denied by penal authorities, say Van der Sloot has had a cell phone, television, a video gaming console and Internet access in his cell. A Peruvian TV station published a photo Friday it says was taken by Van der Sloot himself of his prison cell that shows a 42-inch LCD television, a Blu-ray player and an Internet modem.
Flores said that “everything they showed on the TV has been proven” but that he would not have documentation of it to present to the news media until Monday.
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