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by Pablo Guzmán
BROOKLYN (CBS) ― We came back Wednesday for a second day to Judge Priscilla Hall's courtroom in Brooklyn Supreme Court to finally see the confession video Nixzaliz Santiago made on Jan. 11, after her 7-year-old daughter, Nixzmary Brown, was found dead in their apartment.

Santiago and Cesar Rodriguez, the little girl's stepfather, were later taken into custody.

Santiago's lawyer, Robert Abrams, argued against disseminating the tape, saying police tricked the woman into believing if she just answered a few questions, she could leave the 79th Precinct station house and be reunited with the surviving children who had been taken from her.

"But she was also afraid," Abrams said, "of her husband, Cesar Rodriguez, a man who took out his anger at being fired on his family, and especially his stepdaughter, Nixzmary, torturing the girl, beating her, running cold water from a faucet over her head ... until she died. If there is a criminal here, it is Cesar Rodriguez. Not Ms. Santiago."

However, Abrams spoke to reporters in the hall outside the courtroom during the lunch break. And that was cited by Assistant Brooklyn District Attorney Jane Meyer later in the day. She told the judge it was wrong for the defense to argue against releasing the tape to the media, while also speaking to the media about the tape. Judge Hall seemed upset about Abrams' remarks, and said it would be one of the things she considers overnight before making her decision.

The tape, about an hour and 20 minutes long, is riveting. Abrams' co-counsel, Lynne Troy Henderson, made a compelling argument during her cross-examination of the detective who interrogated Santiago and is seen with her translating, Det. Georganne Valentin: That Santiago may not have been completely aware, Henderson said, that
she was being treated as a suspect. And that this was a confession that might be played before a jury that could send her to prison.

On the tape, Santiago talks about the events that led to her husband, she said, "punishing" the little girl for stealing a cup of yogurt. How the mother waited hours before checking on the girl, looking at her and determining she seemed to be breathing, and was even moaning after the beating and near-drowning, so she must be OK.

But then the breathing, and even the moaning, she said, stopped.

Santiago, at times, sobbed loudly in court as the tape was played. But the climactic moment, in court and on the tape -- the twin effect, of real life and video was, in fact, a bit eerie --- came when the assistant D.A. leading the questioning on the tape shows the mother a picture of her daughter taken as the police found her, dead -- murdered -- inside the
apartment. The camera pushes in to the photo seconds before the D.A. gives it to the mother. It is a closeup of Nixzmary's face; and it looks like a child brutalized by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. Somewhere in there is a once-happy little girl, who played, and danced, and laughed, and dreamed. Somewhere. But laid over that is the twisted, beaten, hollow visage of a torture victim.

On the tape, the mother covers her face in her hands, crying. In court, the mother wept.

The D.A's tone has changed. Her voice on the tape is harder now. She shows the mother a second photo. It is the little girl's back. If there is an inch of skin not bruised deeply, I don't see it.

"You said your husband did all the beating," the D.A. said. "One person did this?"

"Well, maybe I hit her once. ...," was the response.

If this tape is ever played before a jury, the defense claim that Santiago suffered "battered women's syndrome" may not play. While many jurors have heard about and may even agree with the "battered woman's defense," many other jurors, especially women, are of the mind that a mother will react with extraordinary rage and do anything to protect her children. Even getting them away from their father or stepfather.

And the hour and 15 minutes or more that Santiago speaks on this tape might not only be a nail in Cesar Rodriguez's case; it could bring her down as well.

It is going to be very hard for a jury not to keep looking over at a woman who is describing on the tape standing by and watching her husband beat and nearly drown a little girl for stealing a cup of yogurt. A little girl who was starving, the D.A. will tell the jury, because her stepfather kept her tied to a chair; and had her eat kitty litter.

All of this, in the mother's words ... on the tape.

(© MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)