In 2006, when the Duke lacrosse players were accused of gang-raping a stripper—falsely, it turned out—mobs of students appeared outside the players’ homes to bang pots and pans. One of these blithering idiots, Manju Rajendran, explained on MSNBC that the “symbolic” banging of pots and pans was borrowed from Latin American protesters:
Women in Lima, Peru, initiated this as a way of surrounding the houses of women who were being assaulted by their husbands or by their partners. And it was a very confrontational way of saying, “We demonstrate solidarity with the women who are being attacked in this way or by anyone who’s being persecuted in this fashion.” We challenge the racism and the sexism and the classism implicit in these actions. We want to shame the attackers, and we want to invite the witnesses to step forward and come clean.1
In America—unlike Peru, evidently—we have a system of justice based on rules, a presumption of innocence, and a fair hearing. The fact that the Duke lacrosse players later turned out to be completely innocent of the charges illustrates one of the benefits of that system compared with mob lynchings. But as Le Bon says, Latin people are easily whipped into a frenzy on the basis of the most tenuous facts. Crowds, he says, “are everywhere distinguished by feminine characteristics, but Latin crowds are the most feminine of all.”2
Liberals despise the rule of law because courts interfere with their ability to rule by mob. They love to portray themselves as the weak taking on the powerful, but it is the least powerful who suffer the most once the rule of law is gone. The only purpose of government—as opposed to the state of nature—is to replace “might makes right” with a system of justice. The Left’s relentless attack on the judicial system is yet another example of their Jacobin lunacy in opposition to calm order.
One of the main differences in the political systems to emerge from the French and American revolutions is the prominence of the judiciary in America. While this has had malignant effects, such as John Edwards, the idea was that the courts would be a bulwark against tyranny by protecting individuals from the popular passions of the majority. Our Constitution not only places strict limits on Congress’s powers, but also elevates the judiciary to nearly equal standing with the legislature, allowing the courts to review laws as an additional protection for individual rights.3
Of course, those who benefit from mobs have never cared for the American form of government. From their contempt for the Constitution to their “Europeans Need Not Apply” immigration policies, liberals apparently would prefer to live in a country more like Zimbabwe. Their fondness for powerful governments is premised on the assumption that they would get to be Mugabe. It never occurs to them that they might be Mugabe’s dinner. Robespierre and his cohorts had the same idea.
The two main impulses of the Legal Left in America appear totally contradictory to a normal person. On one hand, they act as if judges are all-seeing visionaries capable of expressing the “general will” in accordance with Rousseau. But at the same time, liberals don’t trust judges to do their jobs, which is to hold trials.
While Justice William Douglas’s crayon scribblings on the Constitution are treated like Moses’ stone tablets, liberals believe no judge can possibly preside over a fair criminal proceeding, unless the defendant is (1) a white male, and (2) accused of rape, blowing up a building in Oklahoma City, or shooting an abortionist.
In all other cases, liberals automatically denounce criminal trials as unfair. This is why the record for the fastest trial-to-execution in the second half of the twentieth century is held by Timothy McVeigh. If only he had claimed he blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building to protest U.S. imperialism, courts would still be hearing his appeals.
This is not only because liberals admire marauding violent criminals—which they do—but also because they want to create widespread distrust of the justice system. Liberals would prefer it if courts limited themselves to abortion policy and war strategy and steered clear of actual trials.
Both hallucinatory constitutional rulings and attacks on the criminal justice system have the same goal: undermining the rule of law in order to establish mob rule and anarchy. Trust only the media; liberals will tell you who’s guilty. In the world of the liberal, as in the world of Robespierre, there are no crimes, only criminals. And the criminal is usually Sarah Palin.
The crown jewel for the Left in destroying people’s faith in the courts was the Central Park jogger case, one of the most shocking, brutal crimes in the nation’s history.
On April 19, 1989, a twenty-eight-year-old investment banker working at Salomon Brothers went for a run through Central Park around 9 p.m. During her run she was attacked, dragged into the woods, savagely beaten, raped, and left for dead. It wasn’t until 1:30 a.m. that night that police found a bloody, disfigured creature moaning in a puddle of mud. The jogger had been dragged 200 feet down a muddy ravine. She was barely alive, still thrashing four hours after the attack.
By the time the police found her, she was semiconscious, still gagged, bound, and bleeding. She had lost three-quarters of her blood. The police couldn’t tell at first if she was male or female, a homeless person or an investment banker. The homicide unit of the Manhattan DA’s office initially took the case because not one of her doctors believed she would be alive in the morning.
The New York City Police Department, the best in the world, gathered evidence; cases were assembled and brought to trial. About a year later, three teenagers—Antron McCray (fifteen), Yusef Salaam (fifteen), and Raymond Santana (fourteen)—were convicted in one trial and two more, Kevin Richardson (fourteen) and Kharey Wise (sixteen), were convicted in a second trial of various crimes against the jogger.
Those convictions were based almost entirely on the defendants’ detailed, videotaped confessions. When they confessed, they were subjecting themselves to criminal prosecution and lengthy prison terms. They didn’t know what the evidence would show, what the other suspects would say, or even if the jogger would emerge from her coma and identify them. (She did not identify them, having blocked all memory of the attack.)
Those confessions were obtained in accordance with due process, admitted by the judge after a six-week hearing, played for the jurors, and attacked by defense counsel.
In the trials, evidence was ruled on by the judge and tested in court. Witnesses were presented for both sides, subjected to cross-examination and argument. The defendants were given the right to testify in their own defense. Two unanimous, multiethnic juries found the defendants guilty of some crimes and acquitted them of others. Their convictions were later upheld on appeal by other judges.
The only way liberals could get those convictions thrown out was to change venues from a courtroom to a newsroom.
And so, thirteen years later, the convictions were vacated based not on a new trial or on new evidence, but solely on the confession of Matias Reyes, a career criminal, serial rapist, and murderer who had nothing to lose by confessing to the rapes—and much to gain by claiming he acted alone.
As in the French tribunals, the Show Trials were based on a lie—to wit, that Reyes’s confession constituted “new evidence” that might have led to a different verdict at trial.
In fact, Reyes’s admission that he had raped the jogger changed nothing about the evidence presented in the actual trials. It was always known that others had participated in the attack on the jogger, which is why prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer said in her summation to the jury, “Others who were not caught raped her and got away.” It was known at the time that semen from the the jogger’s sock and cervix did not match any of the defendants’. The only new information Reyes provided was that he was one of those who “got away.”
Reyes might have been part of the wolf pack attacking the jogger, he could have joined the wolf pack in progress, or he might have come along afterward and raped the beaten, semiconscious jogger. No barbarity was out of the question with Reyes—this is a man who had sexually assaulted his own mother and raped and killed a pregnant woman in front of her children.
Although Reyes made the shocking claim that he had acted alone, there was no new evidence suggesting that this was true—apart from his own word. Unlike the detailed, videotaped confessions given in the days after the rape from all five convicted of rape in the real trials, Reyes’s confession was never subjected to cross-examination. He faced no penalty for his confession.
Reyes’s confession not only cost him nothing, it helped him. When he confessed, he happened to be imprisoned with one of the convicted Central Park rapists, Kharey Wise, who was a leader of the prison Muslim community and a member of the Bloods gang. Before Reyes made his confession, he requested a transfer to one of the most desirable prisons in New York on the grounds that he feared retaliation from Wise’s gang.
Inasmuch as the statute of limitations for rape in New York was five years4 and the Central Park jogger’s rape occurred in 1989, Reyes could have confessed in 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, or 2001 and risked nothing. But it was not until Reyes was incarcerated with Wise that he decided to announce that he had raped the jogger all by himself and win a favorable prison transfer.
It’s remarkable how many “confessions” purporting to exonerate others come from people who will face no penalty for the confession, either because the statute of limitations has run out or because they are already serving thirty-three years to life in prison or both—as in Reyes’s case. Confessions that clear the convicted dramatically improve an inmate’s standing in the prison pecking order by sticking it to the authorities, even without an advantageous transfer.
But liberals put enormous pressure on the doddering district attorney, Robert Morgenthau, to vacate the convictions. The entire left-wing apparatus, from the media to the defense bar, was fixated on getting those convictions overturned—and overjoyed when they were. Another victory for the Innocence Project!
For the Central Park rape convictions to be vacated was almost as much a blow to civilization at the attack itself. If those juries, under those circumstances, could convict wholly innocent young lads, then the whole legal system was a scam and a fraud.
Here’s the truth about the Central Park rape.
It is undisputed that a mob of about forty African-American and Hispanic teenagers were running wild in Central Park the night of April 18, 1989, assaulting anyone in their path. At least a dozen of them had been arrested leaving the park before the jogger’s body was even discovered. They implicated others, who were rounded up over the next few days, until the police had questioned thirty-seven boys who had been in the park that night.5
Only ten of the thirty-seven interviewed were charged with any crimes. Of those, only five were tried for the rape of the jogger—the five who confessed. Manifestly, the police were capable of interviewing suspects without coercing them to confess. But five confessed anyway, four on videotape with adult relatives present and one with a parent present but not on videotape. All five gave vivid, largely consistent accounts of the attack, implicating themselves and the others.
Other members of the Central Park mob provided various corroborating details to the police, such as one who said Kevin Richardson told him, “We just raped somebody,” and another who heard Raymond Santana and another boy laughing about how “we made a woman bleed.” Various other witnesses said they saw the defendants walking from the 102nd Street transverse area where the jogger was raped.6
As one of the lead detectives on the case, Mike Sheehan, told New York magazine: “They are telling us—the sequence may be off, but they’re essentially telling us the same stuff. They remember a guy they beat and took his food, they remember hitting this guy running around the reservoir. They went through all of these things, each kid. And they also tell you about the jogger. And they place people, so you have a mental picture of where they were around this woman’s body. And their parents are with them, not only in the interviews but in the videotape, for the record. That’s enough for me. I’m satisfied.”7
Although the suspects accused others of attacking the jogger, too, no one was tried for that crime unless he confessed. Steven Lopez, for example, was implicated by two of the defendants, including Kharey Wise, who matter-of-factly told the police that while Lopez was raping the jogger, he “got sick of looking at her face,” so he picked up a brick to smash it.8 Also, a hair was found on Lopez’s jacket “consistent” with the jogger’s hair but not sufficient to be used at trial.
Lopez did not confess to assaulting the jogger, so he was never tried for any crime against her and only pleaded guilty to the robbery of another man in the park that night. That’s how important the confessions were—and how unimportant the “forensic evidence” was back in 1989.
Yusef Salaam started talking immediately after Detective Thomas McKenna told him, “I don’t care what you say to me. We have fingerprints on the jogger’s pants.” At that point, Salaam said, “I was there, but I didn’t rape her.”9 A juror later told 60 Minutes, “We never doubted the veracity of Detective McKenna for a minute.”10
If the police had manufactured the confessions, how did the defendants know facts about the crime that the police couldn’t have known? On April 21, 1989, Kharey Wise told a detective that someone he thought was named “Rudy” stole the jogger’s Walkman and belt pouch.11 The jogger was still in a coma and the police had no way of knowing that a Walkman had been stolen from her.
Indeed, that was one of the DA’s main reasons for buying the entirety of Reyes’s jailhouse confession in the Show Trial: the false claim that Reyes was the only one who knew about the jogger’s Walkman. Kharey Wise told the police at the time about the Walkman, and it was Wise who was in the same prison with Reyes when, thirteen years later, Reyes had his sudden attack of conscience.
Two of the defendants, Santana and Richardson, independently brought investigators to the precise location of the attack on the jogger.12
Moreover, their videotaped confessions were not vague, five-minute statements that anyone could have given. They were multiple, lengthy statements that included damning minutiae. In separate interrogations taken by various investigators, all five of the defendants independently identified where the jogger was when they first saw her. All five said they charged her, dragged her into the woods, beat, molested, and raped her before leaving her lying on the ground, semiconscious and half naked. None of them admitted to raping her themselves, instead pinning the rapes on others. But all of them admitted to assisting in her rape, which is all that was required for a rape conviction for all of them.
McCray confessed to participating in the attack on the jogger only after his mother said to him, “Tell the truth. We brought you up better than this.” He proceeded to give a vivid account of a wolf pack attack in the presence of both his parents. This was before law enforcement, much less the media, knew exactly what had happened that night.
Here is a small part of McCray’s confession given the day after the attack (the full excerpt from New York Newsday is printed in the Appendix):
Prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer (Q): What happened as she came closer?
A: That’s when we all charged her.
Q: Did you charge her?
A: Yes.
Q: What happened when you charged her?
A: We charged her, we got her on the ground, everybody started hitting her and stuff, she was on the ground, everybody stompin’ and everything. Then we got each, I grabbed one arm, some other kid grabbed one arm and we grabbed her legs and stuff. Then we all took turns getting on her, getting on top of her.
Q: Did you hit her?
A: Yes, kicked her.
Q: Where did you kick her?
A: I don’t know, just kicked her, I felt it, just kicked her, it was like a whole bunch of us.
Q: Who else kicked her?
A: Um, um, Kevin [Richardson, another defendant], um, all of us.
Q: That tall thin black guy I was asking you about, did you see him hit her in the ribs?
A: I heard it. I heard it.
A: It sounded like when you get hit in your chest. Sounded like that.
Q: Was she screaming, is that how you could tell she was being hit?
A: She wasn’t screaming. She was hurt, though. She wasn’t screaming.
Q: How could you tell she was hurt?
A: ’Cause she was lying there.
• • •
Q: Did you see her get hit in the head?
A: I heard it, not only, I seen it.
Q: Who did it?
A: The tall, black kid.
• • •
Q: What was she wearing?
A: I think a white T-shirt, something like that.
Q: Who took off her shirt?
A: The tall black kid.
Q: Who took off her pants?
A: I think it was him.
• • •
Q: Did somebody have sex with her?
A: Yeah.
Q: Did a lot of people have sex with her?
A: Yeah.
Q: Who was the first person to get on top of her?
A: The tall black guy.
Q: Did somebody else get on top of her then?
A: He grabbed one of her arms, this other kid got on top of her.
Q: Who was that?
A: This Puerto Rican guy.
Q: Did you have your fly open?
A: Yeah, but my penis wasn’t in her.
• • •
Q: How long did you do that for?
A: I don’t know, a couple of minutes.
Q: What happened after Kevin was done?
A: Then we left her then, then this guy hit her in the head. Then we left.
Q: Who hit her?
A: I don’t know. I just, the pipe, I think the tall skinny kid.13
As an article in the New York Times said at the time, the case was won not in the courtroom “but in three grubby New York City police station houses, where detectives smoothly convinced the three young men to confess.”14
In addition to the videotaped confessions and written statements, the defendants also made incriminating statements to the police and to their friends. When Santana was picked up by the police, he blurted out, “I had nothing to do with the rape. All I did was feel the woman’s tits.” Which is a little like saying, “I didn’t shoot him, Officer, I just tied up the victim, bought the gun, and loaded the bullets. Someone else pulled the trigger. Can I go now?”
Melody Jackson, the sister of a friend of Kharey Wise, testified that she talked to Wise by phone when he was in jail after the arrests and he told her that he didn’t rape the jogger, he “only held her legs down while Kevin [Richardson] f—ked her.”15 (In the district attorney’s argument for vacating the convictions, this admission was watered down to: “Wise replied that he had not had sex with her, but had only held and fondled the victim’s leg.”)16
The Central Park jogger’s assailants were not making deals when they gave detailed, corroborated, videotaped confessions. Their stories never unraveled, but rather were corroborated by other evidence. Both juries were well aware that the semen in the jogger’s cervix and on her sock did not match any of the defendants’ DNA.17
Although it’s difficult to imagine these days, in 1989, DNA was not a big part of criminal investigations. Back then, DNA testing was being called a “novel,” “high-tech,” “sophisticated” test. The month the jogger was attacked, newspapers were excitedly reporting “a powerful and still unfolding laboratory discovery, a genetic ‘fingerprint’ created from the body’s deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA,” as the Chicago Tribune put it. This “still unfolding” discovery was said to be “a breakthrough weapon in the war against violent crime.”18 In state and federal courts across the nation, DNA had been used in only about eighty court cases.19
DNA identifications were first invented by Alec Jeffreys in 1984—five years before the Central Park rape. The first time DNA was ever used to help solve a crime was in Leichester, England, in 1986. The first time DNA evidence was ever given as evidence in a U.S. trial was in November 1987, in a rape case in Florida. DNA evidence was not even permitted in New York courts until November 198820—just six months before the Central Park jogger was attacked.
Needless to say, DNA evidence was immediately, virulently attacked by defense lawyers. One month after the Central Park wilding, a New York court refused to admit DNA, which the judge termed “novel scientific evidence”—based on the arguments of future Innocence Project attorney Peter Neufeld.21
The New York Times—the same newspaper that would be howling about the lack of DNA evidence against the Central Park rape defendants thirteen years later—ran an article on the unreliability of DNA testing one month after that attack. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers had set up a committee headed by Peter Neufeld along with his future Innocence Project colleague and Axis of Evil cohort, Barry C. Scheck, to reopen all convictions involving DNA testing done by a major genetics testing laboratory.22
In the next few years, obviously, DNA became the gold standard for criminal evidence (except to Scheck, who argued against the DNA in the 1995 O.J. case). But in April 1989, no sane detective would plan on winning a conviction based on forensic evidence: It wasn’t clear that the “novel scientific evidence” of a DNA test would even be admissible, and all other forensic evidence generally narrowed the suspect pool down to about 40 percent of the population.
Complaining about the lack of forensic evidence in a 1989 case would be like complaining that the cops didn’t use Google maps on their iPhones to locate the jogger.
As even defense attorneys told the New York Law Journal at the time, there were lots of reasons the defendants’ DNA might not be found at the crime scene: The police might have failed to retrieve all of the semen, the defendants might not have ejaculated (as several of the defendants stated in their confessions), or the sample could have been contaminated.23
The evidence in the Central Park wilding trial was out of Perry Mason, not CSI–New York. Collecting physical evidence was not important to saving the jogger’s life; nor, in 1989, was it particularly relevant to making a criminal case.
DNA is like fingerprint evidence. Your DNA at the crime scene proves you were there, but the absence of your DNA doesn’t prove you weren’t. That’s why two juries, fully aware that the defendants’ DNA was not at the crime scene, convicted them anyway.
What the prosecution had was better than DNA: detailed, videotaped confessions from four of the five defendants and an unvideotaped confession from the fifth. Even the O.J. jury might have convicted had they seen the defendant in a thirty-minute video, giving a detailed description of how he killed his wife and Ron Goldman.
Perhaps liberals could tell us in advance what evidence of guilt they intend to consider probative, instead of waiting to see what the evidence is and then saying they were really looking for something else. Whatever the evidence is, they react like Diogenes in the New Yorker cartoon, staring at an honest man and saying, “Actually I was looking for a taller honest man.”
The judge in the real trials, Justice Thomas B. Galligan, held a six-week hearing on the admissibility of evidence, primarily the confessions, taking testimony from twenty-nine witnesses, including four defendants and their parents and relatives, who were contesting the confessions. Galligan found all the confessions were given voluntarily, with Miranda warnings and following proper procedure.
Despite attempts to discount the videotaped confessions with claims that they were preceded by hours of brutal police grilling, every defendant but one was questioned only in the presence of his parents or other adult relatives. The exception was Yusef Salaam, who lied to the police and told them he was sixteen, even showing them his adult transit pass. His questioning ended abruptly as soon as his mother showed up and told the police he was only fifteen. Yusef was the only defendant who did not make his confession on videotape.
Although each of the defendants had denied penetrating the jogger, they all admitted to fondling or restraining her as others raped her. If the defendants assisted in the jogger’s rape, they were guilty of rape even if they didn’t deposit their semen anywhere in Central Park that night.
In Antron McCray’s thirty-four-minute videotaped statement, for example, he said, smirkingly, “Everybody started hitting her and stuff. She was on the ground, everybody stompin’ and everything.… I grabbed one arm, some other kid grabbed one arm and we grabbed her legs and stuff. Then we all took turns getting on her, getting on top of her.… I just like, my penis wasn’t in her. I didn’t do nothing to her … I was just doing it so everybody … Everybody would just like, would know I did it.”24
If the jury believed this, they had to find him guilty of rape as an accomplice.
In the opposite of a rush to judgment, the two juries deliberated for ten days and eleven days, respectively. At the first trial, all three defendants were acquitted of the most serious charge, attempted murder, but convicted of assault and rape on the “acting in concert” theory. The first three defendants were also convicted of riot and of assaults on other park-goers that night.
Defense counsel attacked the confessions as coerced, and evidently the jurors took these arguments seriously: The second jury concluded that Kharey Wise’s videotaped confession resulted from “subtle forms of coercion” and acquitted him of rape and attempted murder, convicting him only of assault and sexual abuse.
Kevin Richardson was convicted of rape and attempted murder—the only defendant convicted of the latter charge. The evidence against Richardson included his leading prosecutors to the exact location of the crime; his vivid description of the attack given on videotape in the presence of his father; and a deep scratch wound on his cheek that he told police was from the jogger. Also, the crotch of the underwear he was wearing the night of the attack was suspiciously stained with semen, grass stains, dirt, and debris. Someone else’s semen on the jogger’s sock couldn’t explain that away. Richardson’s own half-sister, who signed his confession as a witness, took the stand to attack his statement as involuntary, but ended up admitting under oath that those were her brother’s own words.25
For being found guilty of a savage attack on a female jogger that only by the grace of God didn’t kill her, the defendants were each sentenced to five to ten years in prison, except Richardson, who got five to fifteen years. Former congressman Tom DeLay was sentenced to three years in prison for putting campaign money in the wrong account.
All but one, Raymond Santana, appealed their convictions. All convictions were upheld.
But thirteen years later, the media told astonishing lies about both the original trials and the alleged “new evidence.” New York Newsday, for example, breathlessly reported that it had gotten its hands on “a confidential police report” concluding that “all forensic evidence used at trial … has now been determined to be useless.” Congratulations, Newsday! You could have run a Nexis search for that “confidential” information. It was known to be perfectly useless at the trials, too.
According to AP reports at the time, for example, the most powerful “forensic” evidence came from retired detective Nicholas Petraco, who testified that hairs found on Richardson’s clothes “could have” or “might have” come from the jogger. On cross-examination, he admitted that “he could not determine that a hair definitely came from a specific individual.” He also said “that hair could end up on someone’s clothing by casual contact or from being airborne.”26
Forensic evidence didn’t convict the defendants. Their confessions did. Reyes’s jailhouse confession changed nothing about those cases: He had merely revealed himself as one of the rapists who “got away.”
But when a case is tried in the media, rather than a courtroom, new rules of evidence apply. In a courtroom, juries are able to see videotaped confessions, note inconsistencies or corroborating evidence, evaluate the credibility of witnesses, and consider alternative theories of the crime. They get to hear both sides of the argument.
Under the media’s Show Trial rules, only one side is heard, much like political debates on MSNBC. Any evidence tending to implicate the defendant is suppressed or denied, while any evidence tending to exonerate the defendant is treated as ironclad.
Thus, Innocence Project–style defense lawyers dismiss eyewitness testimony as notoriously unreliable—unless it’s an eyewitness providing an alibi. If a defendant’s DNA is found at the crime scene, it is mocked as merely circumstantial evidence and probably contaminated. But if the defendant’s DNA is not found at the crime scene, it’s deemed bulletproof evidence of innocence.
Voluntary confessions that carry a penalty are said to prove nothing—they were coerced, given under duress, extracted in exchange for leniency. But jailhouse “confessions” are apparently never questionable—even if the primary beneficiary is a gang member in the same cellblock and the confession leads to a desirable prison transfer.
Confessions outside of court are not subject to cross-examination or evaluated by a jury. But if they exonerate the guilty, the media believe those confessions with all their hearts!
We know Reyes raped the jogger based on his DNA at the scene. The only question was whether he acted alone, as he claimed, or there were many attackers, as the five defendants said in their confessions and two juries believed.
But the only question for Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, was how to get a good write-up in the New York Times. So while newspapers repeated nonsense fed to them by the Innocence Project, Morgenthau’s office wrote a brief for the defense. His office began with the assumption that Reyes was telling the truth about acting alone and then scoured the record for evidence to support that theory. Unfortunately, there was no evidence to support Reyes’s single-rapist claim. So all the DA’s office was able to supply was sophistry.
Curiously, Reyes remembered raping the jogger with Technicolor clarity. But he couldn’t remember another brutal rape he committed a mere two days before the attack on the jogger.
Regarding the earlier attack, he said he vaguely recalled accosting a woman in Central Park, but he wasn’t sure if he had actually raped her. The DA investigated and determined that on April 17, 1989—two days before the attack on the jogger—Reyes had “in fact attacked, beaten, raped, and robbed a twenty-six-year-old white woman who had been exercising in the park.… The victim was badly beaten about the head. She had a large hematoma on her forehead, abrasions to both knees, bite marks on her left upper arm and neck, scratches over her neck, face, knees and back, and multiple bruises. In addition her right eye was bruised and shows subconjunctival hemorrhages.”27
Reyes couldn’t remember that. But he remembered amazing details about his alleged solo rape of the jogger, occurring just two days later. Reyes knew, for example, the exact point on the trail where the jogger was first assaulted, which side of the jogger’s head had been bashed, where the blood was on her shirt, and what she was wearing. You know, the sort of details that only someone with access to a newspaper would know.
If Reyes had been facing a criminal penalty for being the sole rapist, liberals would have been denouncing his confession as obvious hokum. But the DA’s report cited Reyes’s freakish accuracy about details of the jogger’s attack as proof of his credibility, rather than as what it was: evidence that he had been coached.
Indeed, the DA’s report even made excuses for Reyes’s failure to remember raping the first woman, claiming that it “may be explained by the fact that, according to the victim, he apparently did not ejaculate.”28 Not ejaculating explains why the five defendants did not leave semen on the jogger—a possibility ignored by the Show Trial tribunal. There is no scientific study suggesting that a failure to ejaculate affects memory of a rape, but this was the scientific theory invented on the spot by Morgenthau’s office.
By contrast, the DA was suddenly shocked to discover minor discrepancies in the confessions of the five who had been convicted of the attack. The alleged discrepancies consisted of things like the defendants’ inability to uniformly agree about who hit the jogger first. This was a mob attack in a dark wooded area, after 9 p.m. at night in April. After everything we’ve heard about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, it defies reason that predators in a gang attack would give identically worded, play-by-play accounts of a wilding.
Maybe next time, the wolf pack should assign one member to take detailed meeting minutes of the rape, so they can get the order right. “Yusef, could you read that back to me please? I want to make sure there’s no confusion about who grabbed her breasts and who hit her with the pipe.”
Honest eyewitness accounts are never perfectly consistent in all respects. That’s why Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John give slightly different versions of the same story. It’s identical statements that ring false—such as liberals all claiming at the exact same moment that Clinton’s impeachment was a “rush to judgment.” An eyewitness who happens to remember that the victim was wearing colored contacts and Fruit of the Loom underwear and was humming a Backstreet Boys song at the time of the attack seems to be drawing on something other than his memory.
But the DA’s report complains that, “on the issue of who actually knocked the jogger to the ground, Kevin Richardson said Antron, Raymond and Steve did it; Antron McCray said everyone charged her; Raymond Santana said Kevin did it; Yusef Salaam said he did it; Kharey Wise first named Raymond, and then named Steve.”29
Again, it would be more suspicious if all the suspects named the exact same person.
In the very next breath, the DA’s report cited the defendants’ consistency as proof that they were lying: All the defendants except Kevin Richardson said Kevin raped the jogger. To explain the wacky consistency of all the defendants naming Richardson, the DA hypothesizes “a possible motive for others to accuse him.”30
So when the five defendants’ confessions are inconsistent, the DA said it proved they’re lying. And when they were consistent, the DA said it proved they had an ulterior motive to lie. They must be out to get Richardson! Heads, I win; tails, you lose.
The DA’s report exonerating the five defendants was a conclusion in search of evidence, not an honest examination of evidence in search of the truth.
Another alleged “discrepancy” in the defendants’ description of the attack concerned who hit the jogger. The general theme of their confessions was that they all hit and stomped her. But they did not give carbon-copy descriptions of who hit her, in which order, and with what object. The DA’s office found that highly suspicious.
Antron McCray and Raymond Santana said Steve Lopez—who was never charged with a crime relating to the jogger—hit her in the face with a brick. Kharey Wise also said Lopez hit her in the face with a “handrock.” Yusef Salaam said someone he couldn’t name hit her in the face with a brick. Richardson said Michael Briscoe—also never charged—hit her in the face. Separately, both McCray and Yusef Salaam said that at some point Salaam hit her with a pipe.31
I doubt a football color commentator could be more accurate describing a pileup.
The DA’s report was looking for excuses to exonerate, not answers. The fact that five defendants could not provide the names of the other assailants was said to cast doubt on their confessions—as opposed to indicating that not all members of the wolf pack knew one another. We’re talking about a mob, not a bowling league. But the fact that Matias Reyes was among the assailants they couldn’t identify was supposed to prove they couldn’t possibly have all attacked the same woman.32 Wouldn’t it be more suspicious if the defendants had been able to name everyone else in the gang, but not Reyes?
The DA also claimed a multiple offender rape was not part of Reyes’s “pattern” and that he was a “loner” in his criminal behavior. This was apparently meant to demonstrate that Reyes, whose entire life was a welter of criminal violence and sexual depravity, was such a creature of habit that he would not have deigned to join a gang rape he stumbled into by accident.
Like horoscope readers, the DA picked out anything in the Central Park rape that matched Reyes’s other rapes, and ignored anything that didn’t fit, to prove a “pattern” in Reyes’s rapes. Thus, the DA’s report said:
• Reyes picked women who were Caucasian or “appeared to be Caucasian.”
In addition to being almost Caucasian, some of his victims were pregnant and some were not. One was his own mother and the others were not. One had her children with her during the rape and others did not. One was raped in her apartment, one in a church, one in a foyer, one while exercising in broad daylight in the park. Some he killed, some he let live. Some were attacked at night, some during the day, some indoors, some outdoors.
You see the pattern? Yes, gang rape is definitely outside Reyes’s pattern—why, it’s as different from his usual crimes as insider trading.
As for Reyes’s “pattern” of choosing white-ish women, that criterion would restrict his potential target list to a majority of the female population of Manhattan.
Reyes’s alleged “pattern” wasn’t even limited to rape and murder. He also shoplifted and committed robberies, usually by himself but sometimes with acquaintances. So he was capable of participating in multiple-offender crimes.
• All his rapes involved conversations with women as initial contact.
He didn’t have a “conversation” with the jogger, so the DA’s report quickly dismissed this as a deviation from his “pattern,” stating that it is “explained by the circumstances in which he targeted his victim.” If circumstances might propel him to vary his pattern to skip the formalities of his usual rapes, what if the “circumstances” were that Reyes stumbled upon a woman being gang-raped? Mightn’t he diverge from his pattern if that opportunity struck? No, the DA’s position is Reyes would stride boldly past a gang rape, refusing to deviate from his alleged “pattern.”
• All his rapes involved violence and robbery—in particular, stolen Walkmans.
This is like saying Reyes’s rapes involved violence and robbery—in particular, stolen money. Walkmans were very common in the eighties and, thus, common items of theft. Can we get the Innocence Project on the record agreeing that robbery of small electronics during a rape constitutes a unique criminal pattern, admissible against a defendant in court as a prior bad act?
• He asked his victims for their pin numbers and he claims he asked the Central Park jogger for her address.
An address isn’t a pin number, which raises another dissimilarity ignored by the DA’s whitewash. Reyes usually raped women who would have their wallets on them in order to carry out the “robbery” part of his pattern. But we know he raped the jogger, so evidently he was capable of varying this part of his “pattern,” too.
In the end—as had been planned from the beginning—the DA’s report concluded that had the jury known about Reyes’s raping the jogger, they might have found the five defendants innocent—even though the juries knew there were other rapists who got away. On the DA’s theory of “new evidence,” no gang rape can ever be prosecuted unless every single perpetrator is caught right away. Otherwise, any rapists who escaped can always materialize five years later and the original convictions will have to be tossed.
What new information did Reyes’s confession add to what the juries knew? “Others who were not caught raped her and got away”—as the prosecutor told them—pretty clearly captures the idea that others raped her and got away.
While the DA’s office was formulating preposterous excuses to find the five convicted rapists innocent, the New York Police Department was also reexamining evidence. Among the people they reinterviewed was Ronald Williams, who had told police back in 1989 that when he bumped into Kharey Wise the day after the attack, Wise had said, “You heard about that woman that was beat up and raped in the park last night. That was us!” When Matias Reyes unveiled his stunning single-perpetrator theory in 2002, the police reinterviewed Williams. He recalled Wise’s admission precisely and stood by his account.33
If only we had some way of sorting out these facts that relied on uniform rules of evidence. What we need is a group of unbiased decision-makers drawn from all walks of life—we could call them “jurors”!
But that’s not how the Central Park rape case was finally resolved. It was decided not by multicultural juries hearing both sides and carefully weighing the evidence, but in law offices and pressrooms by a remarkably undiverse group of mostly Irish and Jewish college-educated New Yorkers, who lied about the evidence in order to vindicate a mob and destroy trust in the judicial system.
This was a bigger victory for the Left than forcing Nixon to resign in 1974.
After the convictions were vacated, the five who had been convicted promptly brought a $250 million lawsuit against the city, and Ken Burns announced he was making a documentary about the “Central Park Five,” as liberals dubbed the jury-convicted rapists.
Even the fairest judicial system is not infallible. There will always be human error and human malice. This is why the criminal justice system is carefully designed to err on the side of innocence at every step of a criminal prosecution. The guilty are constantly being set free. Incriminating evidence is thrown out at the drop of a hat. Not so, evidence of innocence. The criminal justice system is a one-way, pro-defendant ratchet. So is the media, the difference being that in court, evidence of guilt is not actually prohibited.
Still, some truly innocent people have been falsely accused and sent to prison. But liberals don’t care about the truly innocent: They want to spring the guilty. The child-hysteria prosecutions in the 1980s were mostly brought by liberals. Notably, while Gerald Amirault was serving eighteen years in a Massachusetts prison for crimes that had never happened, the Innocence Project did not ever lift a finger to help him. He was finally released in 2004 under Republican governor Mitt Romney, and then hired by a conservative group, Citizens for Limited Taxation.
When the Duke lacrosse players were falsely accused of gang rape in 2006, once again we didn’t hear a peep out of Barry Scheck and the Innocence Project—even when none of the defendants’ DNA was found on the accuser, her underwear, or her fingernails—and this was using 2006 testing techniques. Only after their convictions were thrown out were the lacrosse players invited to an Innocence Project gala, to create the false impression that people released from prison on legal technicalities were as innocent as they.
Freeing the innocent is merely an accidental—and rare—by-product of the Left’s campaign to discredit legitimate criminal convictions. Liberals’ real goal is to foment disorder, release marauding criminals on society, and destroy the citizenry’s faith in institutions that protect their rights. The liberal intellectual mob creates anarchy in the courts in order to foist literal mobs on society. Don’t trust the courts; trust only the Show Trials.
Recall that Antron McCray’s mother said to him, “Tell the truth. We brought you up better than that.” With those parents, he probably was brought up better than that. But mobs allow people to “pass the moral buck,” as the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck says, so the moral conscience of the group becomes “so fragmented and diluted as to be nonexistent.”34
That’s more comprehensible than what motivates liberals. Why do they want to turn criminals loose on us?
Liberals defend criminal mobs to boost their own power and prestige. In a world of courts and rules, everyone is equal before the law. That’s no good. Liberals need to be above the rest of society in order to impose the Rousseauian “general will” on us. And so the same judiciary they trust to express the general will, when it is proclaiming rights for abortionists, pornographers, and Guantánamo detainees, is deemed utterly incompetent when involved in a simple criminal trial.
This is why liberals prefer to go straight to the Show Trials, where they can proclaim violent criminals innocent, while applying 22 Prairial—the accusation is proof of guilt—to politically incorrect defendants. Our all-seeing mob leaders will tell us who’s guilty on the TV networks and in the pages of the New York Times. In the world of the liberal, as in the world of Robespierre, there are no crimes, only criminals.