The Central Park Jogger Case: A Letter to the New York Times

On December 5, I sent the following letter to the New York Times. You can bet the ranch the newspaper, which stopped printing my letters five years ago, will never publish it.

In your December 6 editorial ("Injustice in the Jogger Case") supporting Manhattan D.A. Robert Morgenthau's call to exonerate the five men convicted in the 1989 Central Park Jogger case, you write, "Fair-minded people are appalled by the prosecutorial missteps and overreaching that led to the faulty convictions of five teenagers..."

I submit that fair-minded people who have followed the case since its bloody inception, are appalled that a public servant would cave in to racial extremists who demonized the victim, and who never wanted any non-whites to be punished for this heinous crime. The boys were questioned and confessed in front of their parents, implicating themselves and each other. They were guilty as hell, and prosecutors worked heroically, in the face of constant racial harassment and threats. The police always knew that they had not caught all of the attackers.

On April 19, 1989, dozens of young men assumed that they could terrorize people based on the color of their skin. Thirteen years later, Robert Morgenthau and the New York Times have told them that they were right, all along. Injustice, indeed. Shame on both of you.

I cannot imagine the legal theory under which their convictions get overturned.

The legal theory is actually sound -- the convictions were overturned based on the prosecutor's belief that if this evidence had been available at the time, the outcome of the trial would probably have been different.

The problem is, I don't think the D.A. believed that. It was known and reported in 1989, that there was another attacker or attackers who had never been caught, including the owner of the unidentified semen, which turned out to belong to Matias Reyes. So, the semen was not new evidence. That leaves Reyes' "confession." But evidence was not only be new, but credible; Reyes' testimony is not. No way did a small man drag an incredibly fit, if petite, woman 200 yards against her will, and inflict the sort of damage that woman suffered. Had Reyes said he bashed her brains in with an aluminum baseball bat from the get-go, and THEN dragged her, unconscious, he might have had more plausibility, but he's claiming he knocked her down with a "tree branch," before dragging her. Gimme a break.

Note too the obstruction of justice in the DA making it impossible for NYPD detectives to question Reyes or his fellow inmates, and in the ADA refusing to interview the original prosecutors or lead detectives on the case. The fix was in.

And it doesn't matter if there is no semen from the other boys, since the principle of "acting in concert" says that anyone who participated (e.g., holding her down) is as guilty as the guy who penetrated her, and ejaculated.

This is not to defend the D.A. here -- in fact, he had absolutely no reason to throw out the other convictions that were handed down in that trial (for assault and battery by these young thugs during their "wilding" spree that night).

Interestingly, the defense attorneys truly botched the case because they had a perfect alibi for their clients. If they had constructed the timeline properly for that night, they could have shown that the thugs could not have raped that woman because they were busy assaulting people elsewhere in Central Park at the time.

In other words, they exposed the defendants to sentences of 10 years or more because they didn't want to effectively plead guilty to lesser offenses.

Since the lawyers saw it as their job to get their clients off, and the boys had committed so many crimes in addition to the attack on the jogger, they could have gotten long jail sentences for the other crimes, and the lawyers could have gotten disbarred for sending their clients up the river. Note too the role of the boys' confessions: As one of the defense lawyers said, when the verdicts were handed down, he "couldn't overcome" the effect of the confessions.

By way of contrast, consider the case of Steven Lopez, identified by another boy as the "ringleader." When he was picked up that night, Lopez refused to make any statements to police. He eventually copped a plea to a 1 1/2-4 1/2 year sentence for robbing a man in the park that night.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.