by Ann Coulter
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 wer
e 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.
PART IV:
WHY WOULD
ANYONE
BE A
LIBERAL?
FOURTEEN
STATUS ANXIETY:
PLEASE LIKE ME!
The same mob mentality that leads teenaged girls to bully another teenager to the point of suicide compels people in all walks of life to engage in all sorts of appallingly bad behavior. Usually, the fragmented conscience of a mob means violence. But there’s also a species of intellectual mob, relying on praise and ridicule to enforce its views. Many people, especially in New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, would rather be punched in the face than be sneered at by the elites. We call them liberals.
The mob mentality is irresistible to people with a desperate need to be popular, those who are perennially afraid of getting a bloody nose in the playground of life. This is why conservatives can never be a mob. By definition, it’s not a mob if it’s called a mob, denounced by the chattering class—the media, politicians, college professors, and celebrities. Anyone who doesn’t mind being sneered at by The Daily Show and other temples of the status anxious is not susceptible to groupthink.
Recent studies on high school bullies found that bullying behavior is driven by status anxiety. People with some status, but not the highest status, bully others because of their need to climb the social hierarchy.1
As the New York Times summarized the studies, bullying behavior is correlated with “how much the student cares about being popular.”2
People who think of themselves as sophisticated professionals who would never hiss “slut” at a girl for dating her friend’s boyfriend are driven by the same desperate need for social acceptance. They’re just appealing to a different in-group. As Eugene Lyons said of communist-sympathizing liberals in the 1930s, “Under the guise of a nobly selfless dedication they were, in fact, identifying themselves with Power.”3
What most people care about is their standing in their own worlds—not what people they will never meet might think of them. The Dixie Chicks insult President Bush in London, not in Lubbock, Texas. The liberal mob operates not only by terrifying nice, law-abiding Americans with bottle-throwing lunatics, but also by imposing a powerful groupthink on public discourse. Le Bon says it is the human instinct to imitate that makes fashion so powerful. “Whether in the matter of opinions, ideas, literary manifestations, or merely of dress, how many persons are bold enough to run counter to the fashion?”4