The Central Park Jogger Rape - 25 years later

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John Flynn

The Central Park Jogger Rape - 25 years later

Post by John Flynn » Sun Apr 20, 2014 1:38 am

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Yusef Salaam:
“Hit her with pipe/she went down and hit her again/. . .
Kevin [Richardson] fucked her. . .
To me it was something to do.
“It was fun.”

Beasts In The Park

NEW YORK—Spring in America goes off like a bomb. Well into April, Manhattan's many parks are brown and sere from winter's crushing grip. Then the temperature begins to seesaw wildly, into the 70s and back down to freezing. The trees imported by public-spirited natives to line the canyon-like streets suddenly bud and burst into blossom so heavy that you wonder how their boughs support it.

Every prospect pleases, in the words of Heber's great missionary hymn. And only man is vile. Some men; children, really, if not animals.

At about 10pm on Wednesday, April 19, a 28-year-old woman was jogging in Central Park when she was attacked by a roving gang of teenagers. She was beaten with stones and a lead pipe, raped repeatedly and left, naked, bleeding profusely and unconscious, in a pool of water where she was discovered four hours later. She is still in a coma. She will probably have permanent brain damage, if she lives.

New York is obsessed with this atrocious crime. The youths apparently responsible have been arrested, largely because they continued to attack other passers-by until the police caught up with them. They range in age from 13 to 17. Interviews with their families and friends fill the newspapers. Pundits pontificate. Politicians utter pieties and appeal for calm.

There are hundreds of murders and thousands of rapes in New York every year. Some voices can be heard asking why this one has attracted so much attention. The favoured explanation is racial: the victim is white, the perpetrators all black or Hispanic (Puerto Ricans or Mexicans.)

Another theory suggests class: the victim is an investment banker who, like the rest of the city's elite, including journalists, might normally have hoped to be insulated from the welfare underworld of her assailants.

Both these claims are deeply perverse. It is a simple fact that most violent crime in New York is committed by blacks and Hispanics: they constitute more than 90 per cent of the prison population. There is no shortage of white victims of every social status, if anyone cared to look.

All New Yorkers are terrified of crime. But they are also deeply inhibited about discussing it openly, for fear of the possible racial implications. So something like the Central Park rape can always trigger an erratic but intense response.

A dangerous consequence of this inhibition is public ignorance. For example, it is now being reported that wolf-pack attacks by teenagers--they call it 'wilding'—have quietly become rather common in New York. This particular gang had been active in the area for some time; another even recently attacked Bloomingdale's, the famous department store in the heart of the shopping district. And a city employee provided this enlightening justification of the regular official claims that Central Park is safe: 'You could go through there nine times out of ten and nothing would happen ..'

Which are odds that last Wednesday night's rape victim, only three years in Manhattan, might have liked to know.

A tragedy as profound as the collapse of public order in America's cities ultimately defies commentary. The police manifestly lack the powers to deal with the problem. The politicians, equally clearly, are not going to hand them over. Powerful taboos surround the subject. Columnists who write about it risk being labelled cranks. It's far more acceptable to dwell on the threat to world civilization posed by Colonel Oliver North.

Perhaps a specific point offers a more suitable focus. 'Throughout the day', the New York Times reported from Harlem on Monday, 'blacks debated what they said were the larger issues the incident brings to light--needs for better housing, education and job opportunities.'

In fact, most of the youths already live in subsidized housing located on some of the most expensive land on earth. And their relatives and friends, no doubt hoping to establish their good character, soon began insisting that they were comparatively well-situated, to the point where a later story carried the credulous headline 'Park Suspects: Children of Discipline'.

Readers of Tom Wolfe's extraordinary Bonfire of the Vanities, which really says all there is to say about New York, will remember that in these circumstances a child who has not actually murdered a teacher is called an 'honour student'. But nevertheless, the New York Times felt able to hand-wring editorially: 'How could apparently well-adjusted youngsters turn into so savage a wolf pack? The question reverberates.'

The answer reverberates too. It had already been provided in the taped confession of one of the youths involved in the attack. Asked by police why he had whipped the woman about the head with a lead pipe. Yusuf Salaam, who is 15, replied: 'Because it was fun.'

There are males who think it is fun to rape women and batter them to death. This is a reality that cannot be reasoned away. It can only be crushed.

The Central Park Jogger Rape - 25 years later
$300 Million Lawsuit


New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio is all set to pay as much as $300 million to the so-called Central Park Five (and, of course, their lawyers). [Central Park Case Settlement Could Cost City Millions, By Sean Gardiner, WSJ, March 23, 2014] This group of four black and one Hispanic man admitted to and were convicted of beating and sexually abusing/ raping white investment banker Trisha Meili 25 years ago today (April 19, 1989). They were also convicted of separate violent crimes against parkgoers John Loughlin and David Lewis. Their names: Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey/Kharey Wise.(For a contemporary report, see Beasts In The Park, By Peter Brimelow , The Times (London), April 29, 1989.)

The Central Park 5 is a classic case of American Main Stream Media Reverse Reporting, up there with Sally Hemings, Hurricane Katrina, and, perhaps, Joe McCarthy and Clarence Thomas. In each case, the truth was initially widely known, but crooked “journalists” and “scholars” then lied, again and again, until the lies replaced the truth as the conventional wisdom. (The Duke Rape Hoax saga is similar but differs in that the lie was initially conventional wisdom and then refuted, but now is apparently climbing out of its coffin anyway.)

Immediately after the Jogger defendants had confessed/admitted to the attack, their black supremacist supporters began weaving racial fairy tales—such as that Trisha Meili either had been attacked by her boyfriend or somehow faked the attack altogether; and the confessed attackers were really the victims of a vast racist, white conspiracy to hang the crimes on innocent blacks, the new “Scottsboro Boys” whose confessions had been “coerced.” (The real Scottsboro Boys never confessed to anything.) She is known to blacks and Hispanics as “Patricia Meili,” although she actually went by “Trisha,” because New York’s black newspapers made a point of constantly publishing her legal name.

The confessed/admitted Jogger attackers duly recanted. But between July and December 1990, all five were convicted in split trials marked by outrageous conduct by the attackers’ supporters and relatives.

Their attorneys commented that the defendants had made so many self-incriminating statements that a successful defense was impossible:
  • Afterward, Mr. Richardson's lawyer, Howard Diller, said he was "shattered."

    "They convicted themselves with their own statements," he said. "We could not overcome them."

    Colin Moore, the lawyer for Mr. Wise, said his client's "vivid" videotaped statement "proved to be too difficult to overcome."

    [2 Teen-Agers Are Convicted in Park Jogger Trial by Ronald Sullivan, New York Times, December 12, 1990.]
The only reason the Central Park 5 case is now being questioned: In November, 2001, after the statute of limitations had passed, a delusional, psychopathic, convicted serial rapist and murderer, Matias Reyes, asserted that he had committed the attack on Trisha Meili all by himself. DNA testing confirmed that he had indeed raped Meili.

But prosecutors had always said one assailant had not been caught. So this did not at all exculpate the other perpetrators. Nevertheless, during much of 2002, New York MSM reporters published what were thinly-veiled press releases for the five convicted attackers’ lawyers, despite the other evidence that had actually cause the jurors to convict them. [New York Times goes wilding on Central Park jogger, By Ann Coulter, WND October 16, 2002]

And as racially corrupt, nonagenarian Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau neared retirement, he became concerned with his obituaries and eventually supported the new dispensation, in much the same way that a dying Mayor Ed Koch would later come to support homosexual marriage. Morgenthau caused the Central Park 5’s convictions to be “vacated”—not the same as “exoneration,” despite subsequent MSM misreporting—and also, amazingly, caused the vacation of their convictions in the Loughlin and Lewis assaults, although these were not affected by Reyes testimony at all.

Significantly, however, Morgenthau did not actually sign on to the coercion fairy tale. He affirmed that there was nothing wrong with the conduct of police or prosecutors. Nevertheless, New York’s Police Commissioner ordered an investigation [PDF ] which also came to the same conclusion. In a 90-minute telephone interview that panelist Michael F. Armstrong graciously provided me, he surmised that Reyes did indeed rape Meili, but that he only came upon her after she had already been beaten and sexually abused by the first group of attackers.

I am in the process of writing a detailed refutation of The Central Park Five, a propaganda film disguised as a documentary by Ken (Civil War) Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns and her husband David McMahon. This has attained instant classic status and is routinely shown to impressionable school children, the latter-day, non-fiction equivalent of To Kill a Mockingbird.

In the course of my research, I came across this remarkable discussion of the Central Park 5 case by legendary New York City prosecutor, defense attorney, crime fiction and true crime author Robert K. Tanenbaum, posted on his website in April 2013, but as far as I know unreported. I strongly recommend it to VDARE.com readers. [My Opinion—A Critique: The Injustice of a Rush to Judgment—The Central Park Jogger Case [pdf]]

.Tanenbaum writes of the 2002 vacations:
  • By so acting, the Manhattan D.A. has destabilized and delegitimized the credibility of our justice system and placed in jeopardy law enforcement practices, methods, procedures and techniques utilized in solving crime, to wit:

    (1)Vacated legitimately obtained guilty verdicts of defendants who committed vicious unimaginable outrages against several innocent individuals;

    (2) fractured the moral high ground and credibility of key and essential crime solving methods;

    (3) turned the justice system upside down by illegitimately providing the defendants grounds to sue the City and law enforcement (police and assistant D.A.’s who investigated and tried the cases) for substantial money damages in the amount of $250 million!
In an interview, Tanenbaum told me that DA Morgenthau had a corrections officer interview Matias Reyes in prison, but of extensive gaps where the CO interviewed Reyes without the tape running. Morgenthau never permitted the NYPD to polygraph Reyes, interview him in prison, or for him to be cross-examined in court while under oath.

Morgenthau even went so far as to order other inmates in the same prison who knew Reyes not to cooperate with the NYPD investigation. One of those inmates reportedly had told an investigator that Reyes had come upon the Jogger, hearing her scream while being attacked by the others, and attacked her anew.

As Tanenbaum shows, what DA Morgenthau asked for was in violation of legal precedent.

Most disturbing here is the Manhattan D.A.’s position that the Reyes allegations warranted an outright dismissal of the convictions, which is prohibited under relevant New York legal precedent—Section 440.10 of the Criminal Procedure Law, as construed by the courts. It is with the utmost astonishment that we view the decision of the court before whom this proceeding was pending, granting such remedy of dismissal.

It is undisputed that the law does not permit an otherwise valid conviction to be set aside, merely on the basis of a third party’s (Reyes’) claim of guilt of a crime for which other defendants have been previously convicted.

At best, such a claim mandates only that the court conduct a full evidentiary hearing to test the veracity of the third party’s allegations that he/she, rather than the convicted defendants, is the guilty party.
Robert K. Tanenbaum brings a special expertise to this case. His latest book is the true crime saga, Echoes of My Soul, about wrongful conviction in the 1963 “Career Girls” murder of Janice Wylie (who was also raped) and Emily Hoffert.

Why would a man who wrote the book on coerced confessions support the detectives and the prosecutors in this case? Because in the Central Park case, the detectives and prosecutors were working with independently corroborated facts that came from dozens of sources, whereas in the Career Girls case, investigators made up “facts” to fit their preconceived ideas, and fed the accused his “confession.”

Tanenbaum thinks that Robert Morgenthau was the worst thing to ever happen to the Manhattan DA’s Office. He says he was a politician, rather than a prosecutor, who politically corrupted the office, the sort who should never be involved in the administration of justice. Tanenbaum resigned rather than stay on with Morgenthau.

Without any prompting from me, Tanenbaum compared the degeneration of the Central Park Case to the Duke Rape Hoax: “Look at the Duke Lacrosse case: they rushed to judgment without any facts.”

Tanenbaum was a young prosecutor in legendary Manhattan DA Frank Hogan’s office, where his mentors were John Keenan and Mel Glass. He told me:

“[Hogan’s office] was an apolitical meritocracy. He created a moral environment.

“This never would have happened, if Frank Hogan were D.A.”
As his discussion concludes:

Lest anyone doubt the assailants’ character and cruelty on that night in Central Park, pay particular attention to Det. [Thomas] McKenna’s memo book entry of statements made to him by the defendant Yusef Salaam:

“Hit her with pipe/she went down and hit her again/. . . Kevin [Richardson] f----d her. . . To me it was something to do.

“It was fun.”

http://www.vdare.com/articles/it-was-fu ... ears-later

Mike Sullivan

Re: The Central Park Jogger Rape - 25 years later

Post by Mike Sullivan » Sun Apr 20, 2014 1:43 am

Central Park Case Settlement Could Cost City Millions
Mayor Bill de Blasio Said He Wants to Settle a Wrongful Conviction Suit Filed by Five Men


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Yusef Salaam, left, Kevin Richardson and Raymond Santana were exonerated in the Central Park jogger case.
The men, shown with supporters on Jan. 17, 2013, are suing the city for $250 million—$50 million each.



Mayor Bill de Blasio's pledge to settle the wrongful conviction lawsuit brought by five men known as the "Central Park Five" against the city could cost tens of millions of dollars, according to recent cases with similar circumstances, even as legal experts said it is a case the city could possibly win.

The 1989 near-deadly beating and rape of Patricia Meili, who at the time was 28 years old and jogging in Central Park, is one of the most infamous crimes in city history. The ensuing legal cases are also among the city's most controversial, and inspired a documentary from celebrated director Ken Burns.

Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson and Kharey "Korey" Wise were teenagers when they were convicted of the crimes against Ms. Meili and others in the park that night, largely on the strength of their statements to police. Incarcerated leading up to their trials, they served between 6¾ and 13 years in prison.

The jury's decision though, was overturned in 2002, when Matias Reyes, a convicted rapist and murderer currently serving a prison sentence of 33 years to life, told authorities he alone attacked the jogger. DNA tests confirmed he sexually assaulted Ms. Meili. He hasn't been prosecuted because the statute of limitations has passed, according to Manhattan district attorney's office officials. Mr. Reyes didn't respond to requests for comment.

The five men initially convicted of the crimes filed a civil lawsuit against the city in December 2003, saying they were tricked by law-enforcement officials into making false statements implicating each other.

The wrongful-conviction case was litigated by city lawyers for 10 years under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Detectives and prosecutors have said in legal papers that they had probable cause—based on the five's statements—to arrest and prosecute the five men. A judge agreed with the city's legal arguments that the statements weren't coerced, and an appeals court backed that ruling. The city doesn't owe the five men any damages, city lawyers said.

Mr. de Blasio has taken a different tack from his predecessor. In December, at a news conference naming the new head of the city's law department, Zachary Carter, the mayor said, "we will settle the Central Park Five case because a huge injustice was done." He later said the settlement should happen "quickly."

Since Mr. de Blasio took office, the same city attorneys who fought the case met with lawyers representing the men, at least twice, to try to reach a settlement, a person familiar with the matter said.

Several plaintiff attorneys—not affiliated with the suit—said that they think this case isn't an automatic win for the five men should it go to trial.

Ronald Kuby, an attorney who recently obtained a $2 million settlement for a Bronx man who spent 11 years in prison before being exonerated, said Mr. de Blasio's stance is "unique" in that "the city actually has a legally viable defense but it's so morally odious."

"Essentially that [defense] being that 'yeah we made a terrible mistake, sorry kids, but nobody intentionally violated your rights,'" said Mr. Kuby who isn't affiliated with the case.

Michael Hess, who served as the city's Corporation Counsel from 1998 through 2001 under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, said in most cases, "if the facts show that the city or any client is not liable or negligent or misbehaved in anyway then frequently you defend the case."

The de Blasio administration, Mr. Carter and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg's city Corporation Counsel, Michael Cardozo, declined to comment. Attempts to reach the five plaintiffs though their lawyers were unsuccessful. Ms. Meili said in an email that because of traumatic brain injuries she suffered in the attack, she had no memory of the incident or the six weeks she spent in the hospital after, and declined to comment further.

If Mr. de Blasio's office is successful in settling, the main question is how much the city is willing to pay. In their lawsuit, each of the five men has asked for $50 million. But Jonathan Moore, a lawyer for three of the five, said in an interview before talks with the city began that the figure is an inflated amount, more of an attention grabber.

He declined to give a figure that might be acceptable to his clients, adding, "let's compensate them for what they've gone through."

There is no set formula, either in the city or state, for compensating people whose convictions have been overturned and vacated. Some plaintiff attorneys independent of this case said such settlements range between $200,000 and $500,000 for each year spent in prison.

The Wall Street Journal examined 15 wrongful conviction settlements in New York state since 2003, where the men served a minimum of five years. The average payout was approximately $305,000 for each year in prison. By that measure, the five men could receive between $2 million and just under $4 million each. The decade of litigation on this case, which has involved as many as 12 attorneys, could involve millions of additional dollars in legal fees that the city could also have to pay.

But the cases examined by the Journal didn't receive media coverage as intense as the Central Park case. And none caught the interest of one of America's best-known documentarians, Mr. Burns, who this past fall, along with his daughter, Sarah Burns released "The Central Park Five."

An important negotiating point in wrongful conviction settlements include personal details like the amount of prison time served, age when convicted, abuse suffered while incarcerated, lost future income and damage to one's relationships with family, legal experts said.

In the Central Park case, two of the men were 14, two 15 and one 16 years old when they were convicted. After serving their prison sentences, they were registered as sex offenders, Mr. Moore said. As a result, the men "had a tough time finding decent jobs," according to Ms. Burns' book "The Central Park Five."

They worked a series of general labor jobs like construction, bouncer or deliveryman. Three fathered children. Four are currently employed: one is as a forklift operator, another manages a hospital's wireless system, one is employed by a city union and another works in a geriatric center. Mr. Wise, who has a lifelong hearing disability, is receiving Social Security disability benefits, according to Ms. Burns's book.

April 19 marks the attack's 25th anniversary. Mr. Moore said that means the five "have lived with the stigma of being accused of being the worst rapists in the world for 25 years, even after they were exonerated."

There are more than a dozen current and former prosecutors and NYPD employees named in the case. Many are against settling, according to Det. Michael Sheehan, one of the case's lead investigators. He is named as a defendant and said he remains hopeful that Mr. Carter will continue to fight. The defendants cannot be held personally liable in the case.

City attorneys have argued that even if the men's statements were false—which the city has denied in the past—"the detectives were acting in good faith to try to solve the case and they were using interrogation procedures that were widely in use at the time, for better or worse," said Joel Rudin, who is representing a man named Jabbar Collins, who has filed a $125 million lawsuit against the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office after Mr. Collins spent 16 years in prison before his murder conviction was overturned.

"You have to show the reason you were convicted was that the conduct by the police was so unreasonable that no reasonable police officer would have considered it to be lawful," said Mr. Rudin, who isn't involved in the Central Park case.

After the five were released, former Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly commissioned a three-member panel to determine whether the police acted improperly in its investigation. It was led by Michael Armstrong, who formerly served as chief counsel to a 1970s commission that investigated NYPD corruption, and included a retired NYPD assistant chief and the then-head of the NYPD's legal bureau.

The panel, which reported to Mr. Kelly, concluded in a 2003 report "that there was no misconduct." It also said the five all made statements that "despite some differences in specifics" contained a "common" description of the attack on the jogger.

The five men's lawyers have disputed those findings. A key part of their lawsuit said their statements differed "in almost every significant detail" of the jogger attack.

Mr. Armstrong said he questions why detectives would fabricate rape confessions when it was possible that the jogger could survive and identify her real attacker or attackers. "To settle the case by throwing good police officers and prosecutors under the bus," he said, "is not fair, in my judgment."

Write to Sean Gardiner at [email protected]

Corrections & Amplifications
Attorneys for New York City have argued that even if the confessions given by men whose convictions were overturned in the so-called Central Park Five case were false, detectives who obtained them were acting in good faith. An article about the case on Monday incorrectly said city attorneys have argued that even if the men's confessions were coerced, detectives who obtained them were acting in good faith.


http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1 ... 1982258888

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