A one-time drifter was sentenced to life in prison plus an additional 10 years yesterday for repeatedly raping a 13-year-old relative over a period of hours in her Dorchester home, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said.

A Suffolk Superior Court jury last summer found MILTON RODGERS (D.O.B. 5/2/66) guilty of three counts of rape of a child, two counts of indecent assault and battery on a child, and one count of assault and battery.

After another set of proceedings this week, a second jury late yesterday found that Rodgers was the same defendant convicted in Suffolk County in 1988 of raping another child and in 1983 of manslaughter in Alabama. Those previous convictions left Rodgers open to enhanced sentences on his most recent offenses.

Judge Nancy Staffier Holtz yesterday sentenced Rodgers to three concurrent life terms for the child rape convictions, plus a 10-year term for the indecent assault and battery on a child conviction, with that term to be served from and after his life terms. Rodgers will serve a three-year term for assault and battery concurrent with the 10-year sentence.

Proceedings on second and subsequent offense enhancements are usually conducted immediately after the defendant is convicted of the case-in-chief – in this case, the rape and assault offenses. Because of protracted legal arguments and mid-trial appeals in last year’s proceedings, however, the trial jury was released upon rendering its verdict. This week’s proceedings were further delayed because the sentencing judge was later rotated to another county, to a civil session that could not accommodate incarcerated defendants, and other procedural constraints.

Assistant District Attorney Dana Pierce, who tried the case as a child abuse prosecutor but is now assigned to Conley’s Gang Unit, proved at Rodgers’ 2009 trial that the defendant raped the young girl three times on April 3, 2008, in the victim’s home. The only other person in the residence was the victim’s hearing-impaired grandmother.

In the midst of trial, Rodgers’ defense attorney moved to preclude the testimony of the senior criminalist at the Boston Police Crime Laboratory, who had performed the standard technical review of the DNA lab work linking Rodgers to the crime. Under the US Supreme Court decision in Commonwealth v. Melendez-Diaz, Staffier Holtz allowed the motion on the grounds that the senior criminalist – who had testified in hundreds of Suffolk County cases with scientific evidence – could not testify because she had not herself performed the lab work.

With the case already before the jury, prosecutors assigned to Conley’s Appeals Division immediately began preparing arguments for use before the state’s Supreme Judicial Court in an effort to bring the senior criminalist’s testimony back into evidence.

At the same time, Pierce’s trial team contacted the lab technician who had performed the DNA testing while employed by Boston Police but who had by then taken on new employment in California. That technician agreed to return to Boston to testify, and Conley’s office was forced to pay the costs of her plane ticket and hotel stay. She testified, exactly as Lynch would have, that Rodgers’ DNA profile was consistent with the DNA profile developed from biological evidence recovered in the victim’s underwear after the crime.

“From start to finish, this case highlighted our commitment to victims and our relentless efforts to find justice for them in court,” Conley said. “We met challenge after challenge not as discrete units but as one office of trial prosecutors, appellate attorneys, victim advocates, and support staff. We worked in concert with Boston Police investigators to build the strongest possible case and then present it skillfully and expertly in court. Now, more than two years later, those efforts have paid off and a predator is behind bars for life.”

Prior to sentencing, Pierce read to the court impact statements from the victim and her mother.

“This whole process has hurt me mentally and physically,” the victim wrote. “Everything in my life went upside down … I hated getting compliments on how I looked. I have had multiple breakdowns in school. I was hiding my emotions until I couldn’t hide them anymore.”

Of her daughter, the victim’s mother wrote that “Milton Rodgers has left her with her worst moment in life, her worst nightmares at night, wounds a forever could not heal, and a broken heart no mother can fix.”

Jillian Quigley was the DA’s assigned victim-witness advocate. Rodgers was represented by attorney Aviva Jeruchim.