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He sang a Christian song of redemption in the courtroom, told jokes for his own amusement, and seemed unbothered by the shackles and chains that bound him to a 250-pound chair.
But when Che B. Sosa testified about the violent 1995 rape of a 50-year-old Jamaica Plain woman he is accused of committing, he focused on getting a message to the Suffolk Superior Court jury.
"I am not a rapist," said Sosa, who is currently serving a 55-year sentence for a Norfolk County rape conviction and wore a Department of Correction jumper.
"I love women, all type of women," he said. "But I certainly don't rape them."
Sosa, 39, was testifying on his own behalf yesterday, but he never took the witness stand because of his history of public violence, which includes attacking a former lawyer inside a Dedham courthouse.
Instead, Sosa testified while sitting at the defense table shackled to a special chair designed to prevent sudden bursts of violence. He was supervised by as many as 11 court and Department of Correction officers.
In prison, he is kept in a supermaximum security single-man cell in the Department Disciplinary Unit.
With the jury out of the courtroom, Sosa told Superior Court Judge Christine M. McEvoy that he expects to be convicted and asked permission to have his shackles loosened when sentenced.
"I'd like to be standing like a man and take whatever you give me," he told McEvoy, who politely reminded him the trial was not over.
Sosa is accused of breaking into a Jamaica Plain apartment at about 3:30 a.m. on Aug. 22, 1995, and raping the 50-year-old woman, who was sleeping with the windows open because of the heat that night.
The case went unsolved until 2003, when Boston police made a DNA match that allegedly linked Sosa to forensic evidence recovered from the Jamaican Plain woman, who has testified against him during the trial.
Yesterday, Sosa repeatedly denied he committed the rape.
But he acknowledged to Joshua Wall, first assistant Suffolk district attorney, that he could not say what he was doing the night the rape occurred, which was nearly 13 years ago.
Sosa said he was living in Everett at the time and was an amateur boxer who arose regularly at 4 a.m. for a 5-mile training run.
While testifying, Sosa described a childhood during which he was abandoned by his mother and left to grow up in foster homes, the Department of Youth Services, and state prison.
Sosa also said in 1995 he had stopped taking an antidepressant, possibly Zoloft, and medications for attention deficit disorder.
As he began his day before the jury yesterday, Sosa shuffled into the courtroom and launched into a loud version of "Amazing Grace." In an apparent parody, he looked toward the audience and whispered like the boy in the movie, "The Sixth Sense."
"I see white people," he said.
Outside the jury's presence, Sosa inclined his head toward the gaggle of court and correction officers monitoring him and started addressing them, although no one had spoken to him.
"Did you call me the N-word? Did you call me the N-word? Did you call me a nincompoop?" he said, and then laughed aloud.
Defense attorney Joseph F. Krowski of Brockton, in his closing argument, criticized the skills of Boston police forensic technicians, saying they bungled their lab work, failed to complete testing, and had abandoned scientific objectivity.
"The testing was messed up," said Krowski. "There is nothing that connects Che Sosa" to the crime.
Wall, however, told the panel that the DNA evidence was overwhelming and that police analysts have found there is one chance in 2.1 quintillion that the DNA matches someone other than Sosa.
"The rapist is here in the courtroom," Wall said.
Sosa is facing two counts of aggravated rape, each of which carries a life sentence.
The jury of eight women and four men deliberated about a half-hour and will resume their work on Monday.
John Ellement can be reached at ellement@globe.com.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
