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The judge overseeing the case against Cristhian Bahena Rivera voiced skepticism repeatedly Thursday as the former farmhand's defense attorneys tried to prove there are grounds to grant him a new trial.
Bahena was convicted in May of first-degree murder in the 2018 abduction and stabbing of Mollie Tibbetts. In the week before he was scheduled to be sentenced, his attorneys filed motions to delay that hearing and order a new trial, arguing that new evidence had emerged pointing to additional possible suspects.
Thursday's hearing, set to hear that evidence, involved multiple witnesses and affidavits building out the defense's new theory: that unknown parties had kidnapped Tibbetts at the behest of a drug dealer and accused sex trafficker named Michael Lowe, and that a man named Gavin Jones and another associate, Dalton Hansen, had later killed Tibbetts and framed Bahena after investigators seeking the vanished University of Iowa student came too close to where she was hidden.