Demonic

by Ann Coulter

  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.

  Q: What did you hear?

  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 in
criminating 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.