For 12 years, Amado Miranda skirted justice by fleeing to Mexico while under indictment for inappropriately touching a 9-year-old girl at the church where he was a pastor in 2000, prosecutors said.

On Thursday, jurors in the 137th District Court sent him to prison for the same amount of time at the end of his trial.

Jurors deliberated for about two hours before returning with two, 12-year sentences which will run concurrently.

Miranda, who was eligible for probation, will have to serve half of his prison sentence before he can apply for parole. He will also have to register as a sex offender for life when he is released from prison.

Prosecutor Laura Beth Fossett said the sentence has given closure that the victim, who is now a 26-year-old mother, has sought for more than a decade.

The woman, when she was 13, made an outcry in 2004 to a school counselor, claiming Miranda molested her about four years earlier during non-service days at the Agape International Baptist Church, where he was pastor from 1997 to 2001.

Lubbock investigators tracked Miranda in 2005 to Sugar Land and a police detective there interviewed him with the help of a Spanish-speaking police employee. During the three-hour interview, Miranda confessed to touching the girl’s genitals, was indicted weeks later, arrested and released on bond.

In 2006, court records show he was set to enter a guilty plea but never showed. His bond was surrendered and a warrant for his arrest was issued. He was arrested in 2008 in El Paso as he crossed the border into the U.S. and booked into the Lubbock County Detention Center. He was again released on bond, which was surrendered a year later when he failed to keep in contact with his bonding company, resulting in another arrest warrant. That warrant wouldn’t be served until May 2016 when he again was arrested as he crossed into the U.S. from Mexico.

During her testimony, the woman said Miranda’s abuse has made it hard for her to trust anyone around her children. She said stepping foot in a church triggers bad memories.

"I can’t even take her (oldest daughter) to church to build a bond with God," she said.

She said she has also made bad decisions in the past, which included a misdemeanor theft conviction that she said was a result of a bad relationship. However, she accepted responsibility for her actions, pleaded guilty and was given a year’s probation, which she completed.

In her victim impact statement, which she gave in Spanish, the woman offered Miranda forgiveness, not for his sake but in order for her to move on and end this chapter of her life.

Earlier in the day, jurors deliberated for an hour before finding Miranda guilty on two counts of indecency with a child.

Judge John McClendon instructed jurors that they could ignore Miranda’s confession to police if they believed he did not give it voluntarily.

Miranda’s attorney, David Martinez, argued his client, who spoke little English, was confused by the way the interpreter translated the detectives’ questions during the interview and believed he did not understand he could have left the interview before making his confession and hiring a lawyer.

A transcript of the interview, which was prepared by a federally certified translator, showed some of the detectives’ questions were inaccurately interpreted during the interview.

"He never understood he had a right to walk out," Martinez said.

He also told jurors the woman could not give enough details about the abuse to be credible.

"I believe, based on the evidence, that is the most important doubt you should have," he said.

Miranda’s son and a former parishioner told jurors they never saw the defendant alone with children and he never taught children’s Bible classes at the church.

Fossett said the transcript showed Miranda was not forced to confess to end the interview and was even able to go home after the interview.

"That shows you Amado Miranda was there voluntarily throughout the entire course of the interview," she said.

In his closing argument during the punishment phase of the trial, Martinez asked jurors for sympathy for his client, who suffers from kidney cancer and heart disease, saying the 14 months he has been at the jail since his May 2016 arrest was punishment enough. He sought probation or a prison sentence of less than 10 years.

"He doesn’t have a long time to live," he said.

However, prosecutor Cara Landers told jurors Miranda’s bond surrenders showed he was someone who believed the rules didn’t apply to him.

"He’s already shown you he’s not entitled to that (probation)," she said. "He refused to submit to authority for a decade."

Fossett said Miranda deserved the maximum sentence of 20 years, saying he abused his status as pastor to prey upon a 9-year-old girl then did everything in his power to avoid taking responsibility for his actions.

"Instead of teaching her God’s love, he demonstrated the evils of the world," she said.