Documentary record Bound by Fear
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Conviction Christian institutions & contexts Other or denomination not established Washington, Daviess County, Indiana, USA · 2010

United States: pastor convicted of raping the young son of a family who housed his church, sentenced to eighty years

Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Convicted

Authority role

Founding pastor of an independent church

Organization

Independent church founded by Armando Bruno, Washington, Indiana

Spiritual nexus

Bruno founded and pastored the church that met first in D.A.'s family's home and then in a building the family purchased for it; when D.A. disclosed the abuse to his father, Bruno told the father D.A. was lying and 'possessed by the devil,' invoking the book 'Lucifer Dethroned' to convince the father not to pursue the allegation, after which the abuse continued for years.

  • Pastoral or clerical authority
  • Threatened spiritual consequence

Evidence structure

Proceedings

  1. Date in cited record · trial

    Daviess Superior Court, Indiana. Jury convicted Armando Bruno of two counts of child molesting as Class A felonies and two counts of child molesting as Class C felonies against D.A., beginning when D.A. was six years old. Sentenced to an aggregate eighty years.

  2. 2017-05-12 · appellate

    Court of Appeals of Indiana. Convictions and eighty-year sentence affirmed as sufficiently supported by the evidence and not inappropriate. The court reversed only a $5,000 restitution order requiring Bruno to reimburse the State's investigation costs, holding the State was not a proper restitution recipient.

Appellate history

  1. 2017-05-12

    Indiana Court of Appeals affirmed the molestation convictions and sentence in full; reversed only a collateral restitution order requiring Bruno to pay the State's investigation costs.

Documented coercion mechanisms

  • doctrinal instrumentation — telling the child's father the child was lying and 'possessed by the devil,' citing the book 'Lucifer Dethroned' to discredit the disclosure
  • pastoral standing used to secure continued access to the family and silence after partial disclosure

Primary record

Sources

court opinion appellate opinion Bruno v. State, No. 14A01-1606-CR-1530 (Ind. Ct. App. May 12, 2017) (mem. dec.).

Full appellate opinion describing Bruno's founding-pastor role, his use of a spiritual-possession claim to suppress the victim's father's disclosure response, and the affirmance of the molestation convictions and sentence.

Related record

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