Five Freed in New York Jogger Rape Seek Damages

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Five men whose convictions were overturned in the highly publicized 1989 rape of a jogger in Central Park launched a $250 million legal claim on Friday against New York, arguing the city should pay for their "false arrest" and "malicious prosecution."

The five, convicted as teen-agers of beating and sexually assaulting the 28-year-old investment banker, say they were coerced by police and prosecutors into confessing to one of the city's most wrenching criminal cases.

A judge last year overturned the convictions of the five, who spent between seven and 12 years in prison, after a confession by a serial rapist, backed up by DNA tests, that he alone attacked the woman.

Yusef Salaam, the only one of the five to appear at a news conference by attorneys announcing their legal plans, said he hoped "by filing the lawsuit it will be justice for all of us."

The five were convicted largely on the basis of confessions made to police after the April 19, 1989 attack. Their ages ranged from 14 to 16 at the time.

The collapse of the racially charged case -- the jogger is white, the five men black or Hispanic -- began last year when convicted rapist Matias Reyes told authorities he raped the woman, an investment banker who worked at Salomon Bros.

Not only did new DNA evidence link Reyes to the crime, but his was the only DNA found at the scene.

Police have stood by the investigation. In January, the New York Police Department issued a report concluding that all of them -- the five men and Reyes -- were involved in the attack.

The victim, found unconscious, raped and beaten, spent two weeks in a coma and never fully recovered. She has permanent neurological damage, including balance problems, headaches and double vision, and no memory of the attack.

Salaam, Kharey Wise, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson and Raymond Santana were convicted of rape, assault, robbery and riot for attacking the jogger as well as attacking a couple on a tandem bicycle, two male joggers and a homeless man.

At the time, the teens used the term "wilding" to describe their nighttime crime spree in the park.

Well-known civil rights attorney Jonathan Moore, who is working on the case, said he "intends to have their good name restored and that they be compensated for the true suffering they endured."

Specifically, the lawsuit claims "false arrest," "false imprisonment" and "malicious prosecution."

"These children were set upon in the park. That is the central issue. The question is whether they were falsely accused. And they (police and prosecutors) will have to pay for it," attorney Michael Warren said.

A Different Drummer

Race Hustlers Re-Run
Central Park Jogger Case

By
Nicholas Stix

A Different Drummer [November, 2002]

In an increasingly multicultural, urban environment, it becomes more and more difficult to achieve justice, as racial and ethnic activist groups seek not only to impede the prosecution of the apparently guilty, but to undo successful prosecutions, after the fact. The most striking example of this development, is the attempt underway to undo the convictions of five of the attackers in what came to be known as the Central Park Jogger Case. And so, five cold-blooded thugs: Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Kharey Wise, Yusuf Salaam and Raymond Santana, have now been nominated for urban sainthood.

Central Park was -- and still is -- an urban preserve favored by well-to-do, liberal, white New Yorkers. On April 19, 1989, dozens of black teenagers took the subway to Central Park, for a night of "wilding." The term, never previously heard by whites, had been coined by young blacks to describe group attacks by (often armed) blacks on lone, unarmed whites. A night of wilding promised an orgy of racial violence.

The teenagers swarmed over the park that night, committing assaults. "The Jogger," a petite, 28-year-old, 105-pound investment banker, tried to outrun the boys, and fought valiantly, but never had a chance. Her worst injury came from a steel pipe, which Yusuf Salaam hit her in the head with. The 14-16-year-old boys dragged the woman 200 yards from the jogging path, ripped her clothes off, and variously fondled, raped, and beat her.

By the time a passerby found her, The Jogger had lost seventy percent of her blood. As is typical of massive, blunt trauma wounds, the victim lost all memory of her ordeal. Notwithstanding problems with taste and balance, her survival and recovery have been nothing short of miraculous.

The detailed report of the attack was provided by the boys themselves, who incriminated each other, and who knew things (e.g., the exact articles of the victim's clothing) that only the attackers would know. Kevin Richardson's underwear was soiled with grass stains. Save for Yusuf Salaam, all of the boys videotaped or signed detailed confessions in their parents' presence.

Investigators also got statements from over forty other people incriminating the five, who were ultimately convicted variously of assault and sexual abuse. However, police were always aware that they had not caught all of the attackers. Semen found on one of the victim's socks did not genetically match any of the five arrested attackers.

Enter Matias Reyes. Reyes, now 31, is serving a thirty-three-year-to-life sentence for murder and rape. Once the statute of limitations ran out on the Central Park attack, he "found God," a common jailhouse occurrence. In January, Reyes confessed that he alone had attacked The Jogger. DNA tests showed that it was Reyes' semen on The Jogger's socks.

Police had never suspected Reyes in the attack, because he had not been mentioned by the other attackers in their confessions; the attack came almost two months before Reyes' rape, robbery, and murder spree began; and the attack on The Jogger did not fit his modus operandi. Reyes worked alone, and in seeking, unsuccessfully, to blind his victims, always stabbed them in the eyes. And in 1989, DNA testing was much more primitive than it is today. Reyes most likely came upon the unconscious jogger after her initial attackers had fled, and raped her or masturbated over her.

Although the convicted attackers have all served their sentences, and except for Raymond Santana, who was later convicted of other crimes, been released from jail, they seek -- with their lawyers' help -- to clear their names, rewrite history, and pave the way for a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the City of New York.

The attackers' leading spokesmen are city Councilman Bill Perkins and NYPD Lt. Eric Adams. In 1989, Perkins, then a Harlem tenant organizer, worked with the attackers' black supremacist supporters, while insisting that the attack was not racially motivated.

On September 12, Eric Adams called for a federal investigation: "We believe that because of the demand to bring someone to justice from this crime, we believe that there is a strong possibility that there may have been overzealous policing and overzealous prosecuting."

Eric Adams is the founder of the segregated, counter-police organization of black NYPD officers, 100 Black Men in Law Enforcement Who Care. An open racist, Adams is obsessed with racial purity. According to a former colleague, when Adams discovered that the father of the child of a subordinate, black female officer was white, Adams suddenly forbade the woman from bringing her child to work. And in 1998, ten years after Tawana Brawley had been exposed as having engineered one of the most outrageous race hoaxes in American history, Adams called for a federal investigation on behalf of Brawley, whom Adams still insisted had been raped by white law enforcement officers!

Eric Adams has devoted his life to undermining law enforcement, and supporting black criminals. And for that, he receives fawning treatment from the mainstream media.

Presently, the attackers' biggest supporters are New York's mainstream media.

New York's white-owned, mainstream media did a creditable job of reporting, in 1989, on the criminal investigation of the attack. However, the media ignored the virulent hate campaign that was unleashed by the attackers' supporters, and by the black media, who presented them as the victims of a racist criminal justice system, and who unleashed an orgy of hatred against the victim.

New York's black newspapers, Brooklyn's now-defunct City Sun, and Manhattan's Amsterdam News, depicted the attackers as contemporary versions of the "Scottsboro Boys," the black, 1930s victims of racist lawmen who were eventually cleared of false rape charges. City Sun propagandist Peter Noel (now a star of the popular, far-left weekly, The Village Voice, where he has threatened to kill police officers) concocted a story, according to which "wilding" referred to innocent horseplay.

Although the media -- black and white -- usually follow the unofficial rule prohibiting ever naming a rape victim, every City Sun or Amsterdam News article on the case constantly repeated The Jogger's name. As a result, while white New Yorkers were unaware of her identity, virtually all black, and many Hispanic New Yorkers, knew her name.

At the attackers' 1990 trial, their supporters showed up every day at the courthouse, screaming "The [jogger's] boyfriend did it!," "She did it herself!," and calling the victim "Slut!," when she limped to court to testify.

Since seizing upon Matias Reyes, the mainstream media has so grossly misrepresented the case, as to all but erase the difference between them and their racist, black counterparts.

A September 11 story by New York Daily News reporter Alice McQuillan, could have been written by the attackers' lawyers. McQuillan omitted all of the evidence that convicted the attackers, and quoted black supremacist attorney Roger Wareham (December 12th Movement), who represents attackers Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, and Kevin Richardson as saying, "They had made up their mind, they had somebody else, they didn't want anything to spoil their neatly tied package of convictions and they used these children as scapegoats."

"Children," indeed.

Meanwhile, Wareham's co-counsel, Michael Warren, insists that the confessions were gotten "through the most abhorrent form of psychological duress."

With few exceptions, the New York media have followed McQuillan's example. But Alice McQuillan is a fearless truth-teller, compared to the Village Voice's Dasun Allah, who fabricated a new history, whereby whites had invented the term "wilding," in order to "brand black youth."

The movement to clear the five Central Park attackers must be seen in the context of movements to free other blacks convicted of heinous crimes. One such movement supported former Black Panther Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown), convicted last year, and sentenced to life, for his 2000 assassination of Fulton County, Georgia Sheriff's Deputy Ricky Kinchen, and for seriously wounding Deputy Aldranon English. The king of such movements seeks the release of former Black Panther Mumia abu Jamal (Wesley Cook), on death row for the 1981 assassination of Philadelphia police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Abu-Jamal/Cook and Al-Amin/Brown's supporters insist that their heroes, too, were railroaded. Note too that Al-Amin's victims were both black. According to black supremacist belief, black law enforcement officers who arrest, rather than aid black criminals, are traitors to the race. Such beliefs owe their influence to their enthusiastic support by white elites in the media, education, and even law enforcement.

Originally published in
Middle American News.

A Different Drummer

Justice Vacated in
Central Park Jogger Case

By
Nicholas Stix

A Different Drummer [January, 2003]

On December 5, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau asked Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Charles Tejada to vacate the convictions of five men in the 1989 Central Park Jogger attack, as well as for attacks on other victims the same night. Defendants Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Kharey Wise have all completed their prison sentences. On December 19, Tejada granted Morgenthau his wish.

The men were convicted variously of rape, sexual assault, attempted murder, and riot in the first degree. They were part of a group of as many as forty predominantly black teenagers (the others were Hispanic) who went to Manhattan's Central Park on April 19, 1989, expressly to engage in "wilding," i.e., to attack whites. The mob carried out at least 12 separate attacks, including the assault and rape of "The Jogger," whom they left for dead. The woman lost 75 percent of her blood, and remained in a coma for 12 days. And yet, only six defendants were ever prosecuted for the crimes of that night. McCray, Richardson, Santana and Wise all were questioned and confessed on videotape in their parents' presence to attacking The Jogger and other parkgoers. Salaam did not sign or videotape a formal confession, but made self-incriminating statements, including admitting to having beaten The Jogger over the head and in the ribs with a metal pipe. (Outside of defendants and their lawyers, the legalism regarding Salaam having admitted, but not "confessed" to the attack, is a distinction without a difference.)

DA Morgenthau now argues that since another man, 31-year-old convicted rapist-murderer Matias Reyes, has confessed to having raped The Jogger alone, and semen found at the scene was a DNA match to Reyes, that had the juries in two trials (of different defendants) known this information, their verdicts would likely have been "more favorable" to the defendants. Once the statute of limitations passed in the Jogger Case, Reyes got religion, and has since confessed to four other rapes for which he can no longer be prosecuted.

Matias Reyes' confession was full of gaps regarding the details of the attack. But he did say that he had not gone as far north as where The Jogger was attacked. The Jogger attack also did not match Reyes' modus operandi. And Reyes, an average-to-smallish-sized 18-year-old at the time of the attack, has insisted incredibly that he was able to drag the Jogger, an extremely fit woman fighting for her life, 200 yards all by himself.

Already in 1989, it was public knowledge that not all of the Jogger's attackers had been caught, and that semen found at the scene had not been tied to the suspects in custody. In their confessions, defendants mentioned an accomplice named "Tony." Only recently did it surface that Reyes' street name was "Tony."

Morgenthau also justified vacating the verdict in the Jogger Case, because prosecutors had failed to come up with "an alternative theory" of the events that night. Morgenthau's theory is that the defendants were too busy attacking other people to have had sufficient time to also attack The Jogger. Morgenthau then violated logic, law, and morality, by demanding that the convictions in the other attacks also be vacated.

(It is defense counsel's job, not the prosecutor's, to provide an "alternative theory." Following the 1990 convictions, defense attorney Peter Rivera acknowledged that "We didn't say, ‘No, when The Jogger was raped, my client was on 96th Street, mugging someone else.' That would have been self-defeating." Howard Diller, who defended another Jogger defendant, admitted that “They convicted themselves with their own statements. We could not overcome them.”)

Morgenthau's decision, outlined in a 58-page report authored by Assistant District Attorney Nancy E. Ryan with ADA Peter Casolaro, outraged the supervising prosecutor, the main detectives on the case, and police officials.

Linda Fairstein, who recently retired after thirty years as a Manhattan prosecutor, told New York newspapers she is certain that Reyes "is lying," and that the five defendants participated in the attack on The Jogger. "Absolutely. They were part of the pack that saw the jogger, attacked her with a pipe and began to physically assault her as well as sexually assault her.... "I find [Reyes'] story about acting alone completely incredible. I think most of them [the five convicted defendants] ran off before the completion of the attack. My view is that Reyes is the only one who did complete it."

A team of thirty detectives cracked the case. Lead Detective Humberto "Bert" Arroyo told ABC News, "I believe these kids did it. They said they did it. The videotapes [of the defendants' confessions] speak for themselves."

Speaking to the New York Post, several of the detectives "accused Morgenthau of reneging on his promise to lead 'a fair, impartial and complete' review.

Legendary detective Mike Sheehan, now a TV reporter at local Fox 5 News said, "I'm shocked at Morgenthau. This shows they have no respect for us and no respect for the victims in this case." Retired Det. Capt. Sal Blando recalled, "They were singing and laughing. I'm outraged by this decision. This is a travesty of justice." And Retired Det. Capt. Ken Rowe said, "I visited that woman numerous times in the hospital. I remember her injuries. There's no way one person did that to her. She was on the verge of death."

Personal revenge reportedly played a role in the DA's report. ADA Nancy E. Ryan is a longtime adversary of the recently retired Linda Fairstein; in 1989, Ryan was passed over for the Jogger prosecution. Law enforcement sources say that Ryan was simply interested in undermining Fairstein's case. Ryan did not interview Fairstein, lead courtroom prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer, or most of the detectives from the case, and interviewed one detective for only fifteen minutes, forbidding him to check his notes.

Unnamed NYPD officials told New York Newsday crime beat writer Leonard Levitt, that ADA Ryan made it impossible for the NYPD to re-investigate the case. Ryan forbade detectives from administering a polygraph examination to Reyes, interrupted them whenever they asked him questions in jail, and went so far as to telephone the lawyers of Reyes' fellow inmates, telling them to advise their clients to refuse to cooperate with detectives.

The legal term for such misconduct is "obstruction of justice." The fix was in.

The degeneration of justice in the Jogger Case did not happen overnight. Judge Vito Titone's minority opinion in Yusef Salaam's 1993 appeal of his convictions, anticipated the outrage to come. Salaam argued that because he was a minor when he was questioned, his self-incriminating statements to police should be suppressed, and his convictions vacated.

At his family's apartment, the 15-year-old Salaam told police, in the presence of family and friends, that he was 16, showing officers a school transit pass that said he was 16. However, that strategy backfired. Had Salaam told the truth about his age, detectives could not have questioned him without a parent, adult, or attorney present. But in New York State, 16-year-olds are adults regarding such crimes, and are entitled to no such protections. Salaam's friends and even his own mother initially supported the deception. One of those friends was Salaam's "Big Brother," federal prosecutor David Nocenti. In going along with the fraud regarding Salaam's age, and demanding, as an attorney, to see an adult suspect he was not representing, Nocenti's actions constituted obstruction of justice and professional misconduct, for which he could have been prosecuted and disbarred.

Meanwhile, at the police precinct, the majority decision observed that Salaam "was given complete Miranda warnings. Defendant invoked none of the recited protections and chose instead to give a detailed statement implicating himself in two of the attacks under investigation, including specifically the attack on 'the Central Park jogger.'"

In Judge Vito Titone's dissenting opinion in support of Salaam, he insisted that police should have ignored the law, and treated Salaam like an "infant," refusing the opportunity to question him. The majority disagreed, ruling that police had acted in good faith, and that Salaam was responsible for his "deception and chicanery."

It was a short path from Titone to Morgenthau. On December 6, the day after DA Morgenthau issued his report, the Rev. Al Sharpton demanded that the detectives who broke the Jogger Case, and the prosecutors who won it, be investigated and prosecuted.

Originally published in
Middle American News.

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