Federal prosecutors want a 38-year-old Dulce man to say, on the record and in front of a judge, that he is rejecting a proffered plea deal in a case where he is accused of raping his 14-year-old niece.
A federal grand jury indicted Cisco Cruzito Pinto on two counts of aggravated sexual abuse on March 12, 2024, after he was charged with one count of the same in February, by FBI Agent Travis Kosir.
Kosir’s filing in federal magistrate court came three months after a DNA report came in implicating Pinto, and five months after his niece reported the alleged rape, on Sept. 13, 2023. His niece told his wife that he raped her earlier that morning. Both Pinto and the alleged victim are Jicarilla Apache Nation tribal members.
After a pre-trial detention hearing on Feb. 29, 2024, federal Magistrate Judge Laura Fashing ordered Pinto be released to a halfway house.
In a motion for a Lafler/Frye hearing on March 24, where a judge would get on the record that Pinto wants to reject the plea deal proffered by prosecutors, prosecutor Meg Tomlinson wrote that plea negotiations have been going on since July 2024, including a “firm” plea deal offered on July 22, 2024.
“The parties discussed the offer over email in the ensuing months,” Tomlinson wrote. “On March 13, 2025, the United States sent the same, previously extended offer in the form of a formal written plea offer over email to defense counsel. The plea acceptance deadline for the offer was March 21, 2025.”
That same day, Pinto’s defense attorney, federal public defender Hadley Brown, wrote that Pinto was rejecting the plea deal, Tomlinson wrote.
Tomlinson wrote that she wanted to “protect against any future claim of ineffective assistance of counsel on this issue” by getting, on the record, that Pinto wants to reject the plea deal.
In the last motion to continue trial for another 90 days, filed Dec. 13 by Brown, she wrote that she needed to spend more time talking to Pinto about the plea deal.
“Plea negotiations as well as counseling Mr. Pinto as to the plea offer are especially challenging in this case because the possible penalties are so severe, and Mr. Pinto has practically no experience in the criminal legal system,” Brown wrote. “Moreover, he has never spent any meaningful length of time in custody prior to this case.”
District Judge David Urias granted the motion for the hearing on March 28, requiring it be conducted by a magistrate judge. No hearing date has been set.
The plea deal will be filed during that hearing and sealed and no outlines of the deal are in any court documents.
What happened
Jicarilla Apache Police Department Sgt. David Valdez was called to the house Pinto shared with his wife and seven children, three who are theirs and four nieces and nephews, including his 14-year-old niece, in the early morning hours of Sept. 13, 2023. Pinto’s wife called 911 to report the niece said she had been raped, Kosir wrote in the affidavit for an arrest warrant.
In an interview with Kosir and Valdez, Pinto’s wife, only listed as “WITNESS 1” in court documents, told them the pair had gone to Pagosa Springs, Colorado to a restaurant, where Pinto got drunk; his wife was not drinking. They drove home around 3 a.m. in the morning, Kosir wrote.
The wife, who offered a timeline that was not sequentially possible, tried to get Pinto to go to bed, but “he kept getting up and said he was checking the front door or that he heard something,” he wrote.
One of the times she went to see where he went, she found him in the 14-year-old girl’s room and told him to leave her alone, he wrote.
When the wife woke up in the early morning hours, Pinto was gone again and the 14-year-old niece ran out of her room, crying, saying Pinto molested her. The wife told her to go back into her room and stay quiet as Pinto came out of the bathroom, after taking a shower, and put his clothes in the washing machine, before staggering down the hall, knocking down paintings, then went back to sleep in the bedroom, Kosir wrote.
The wife then drove down the road to call 911, he wrote.
The girl told investigators her uncle came into her room, got on top of her, kissed her, licked her neck and arm, and then raped her, Kosir wrote. The girl was seen by a sexual assault nurse who collected samples.
During a forensic interview on Nov. 1, 2023 the girl allegedly said Pinto raped her when she was seven or eight years old, he wrote.
On Nov. 28, 2023, the DNA tests came back from the lab and showed “very strong support for inclusion” of Pinto as the DNA taken from the swabs, he wrote.