Kipman stopped and returned Rachman's stare until she looked down at her clenched fists. "It would have been proper to argue that the complainant's sexual history was not relevant in this case and to have invoked the shield laws in front of a judge. However, we did not do that, nor did we discuss it in this meeting. We simply took it upon ourselves to hide a police report containing information that we did not like."
Rachman started to speak but Kipman raised his voice. "And yet that is not the most egregious of our errors. That would be that we knew the complainant was lying on the witness stand, and yet we allowed it-in fact, we encouraged it in our line of questioning-which is a serious breach of the law and accepted attorney conduct. It is therefore my recommendation that we concede error and drop the charges. Let's face it, we'll be lucky if we're not sued, and if the New York Bar Association doesn't censure the attorney involved."
Rachman jumped to her feet and shouted, "Since when do we let fear of a lawsuit dictate what crimes we prosecute?"
"You weren't listening," Kipman replied. "I am not making my recommendation because I'm worried about being sued. I'm recommending that we concede error because it was just plain wrong to allow a witness to get on the stand and lie. And it was simply dumb not to hand over that material to the defense."
"You're the one who's not listening," Rachman countered. "All that matters is whether the victim gave her consent to have sex with him that night."
"That is indeed the pertinent question," Kipman agreed. "However, as I said, this is a he said/she said case. There are no other witnesses, except the other defendant who claims that the sex was consensual. You might recall that he was prevented from testifying that his codefendant knew the victim and had previously had sex with her. So if there is a question whether a crime was even committed based on anything other than the complainant's word-which by the way is why it is more appropriate to use complainant rather than victim-is it relevant that she would lie to the police and under oath?
Rachman sneered. "Just like a man. I guess maybe you need to actually try a few thousand of these cases yourself to know when the victim is telling the truth and when she's not. There are a lot of reasons that a woman wouldn't want to delve into her sexual history in front of a judge and jury, starting with the fact that if a man has sex with multiple partners over the course of a week, he's Casanova, but if a woman does, she's a slut. Who wants to admit that in front of a room full of strangers, especially after going through the most frightening, humiliating, and degrading experience a woman can have?"
"Then you should have turned it over to the defense and argued it in a closed motions hearing," Kipman retorted. "If the judge had agreed with you that it was not relevant, then the defense attorney would not have been allowed to question the complainant about it on the witness stand and there would have been no reason for her to perjure herself. But to simply try to sweep it under the rug and hope nobody would notice is woefully bad judgment."
"Are you questioning my competence as a lawyer?" Rachman demanded. "You wouldn't do this if I was a man."
"Bullshit!" Kipman shouted back. "This has nothing to do with your gender and you know it. Nor does it reflect on your abilities as a prosecutor. However, it is my opinion that in this particular case, you made a mistake…a bad one."
Rachman started to say something, but Karp had had enough. "I think this conversation has reached an end," he said. "I concur with Harry's judgment in this matter. We will concede error and drop the charges-"
"NO!" Rachman screamed. "I cannot allow this…this…this travesty to happen. Those two spoiled athletes took advantage of an intoxicated young woman who did not give her consent. We can't let them off."
The room was shocked into silence as Rachman finished raving and stood with her knuckles pressed into the tabletop and sobbing. "I won't-" she started to say but was brought up short by Karp.
"Ms. Rachman, that's enough. You will remove yourself from this room and return to your office, where I expect you to pull yourself together. We'll talk about this later this afternoon."
Rachman stifled her sobs and narrowed her eyes as she looked from Karp to Kipman. "I see," she said, scooping her files together. "I see."
"If those are files from other cases, please leave them and have your assistant deliver your report," Karp said.
Rachman froze and appeared ready to say something really scathing, then thought better of it. She dropped the files on the table with a thud, then walked around the table, her eyes straight ahead, and out the door. The door slammed shut and a voice at the other end of the table exclaimed, "Holy shit. The Ice Princess had a meltdown!"
There were a few chuckles around the table and a full-fledged guffaw from Guma, but Karp wasn't in the mood. "Now, if we can proceed with the matters at hand, I know we all have a busy day ahead of us. Anything else?"
"Well, the morning's newspaper," Murrow said.
Karp winced. "I'm sure you are all aware that Murrow is referring to the appearance of two more heads…without their bodies…in East Harlem," he said. "What can you tell us, Clay?"
"I'm getting updates from the PD but they don't have much more than the newspapers reported," Detective Clay Fulton responded. "Apparently some nutcase with a thing for cutting the heads off Middle Eastern men is running amok in the city. This time the heads were dropped off at the front door of a small mosque. The imam-that's the preacher-was turning in for the night when he heard a knock on the door. No one was there when he answered, but someone left two heads in a bag for him. The police are apparently having a tough time identifying the victims-they obviously aren't carrying wallets and their fingerprints are…uh…unavailable. There are no claims of responsibility reported by the media, so far. NYPD has stepped up patrols in traditionally Muslim areas and is warning people in that community not to go out at night alone."
"Any description of a suspect or suspects?" Karp asked. He'd arrived that morning with messages on his answering machine from the Arab-American Protection League and the Muslim Society of New York, who demanded a meeting. He'd put off returning the calls until he actually knew something about what was going on.
"Not really," Fulton said. "A taxi driver swears he saw two men-at least he thinks they were men-one tall and one short, jumping down a manhole about three blocks from the mosque after the heads were delivered."
"I take it the police don't put a lot of credence in the report."
Fulton shook his head. "They checked it out but didn't take it much further from there. According to our witness, not only did the suspects fly several inches off the ground, they flew down the manhole and then the cover replaced itself magically. Turns out the cabdriver is taking psychotropic medication prescribed for hallucinations. The office pool in our bureau is that he forgot to take his pill that day."
The rest of the meeting was, by comparison, uneventful. As the others stood to leave, Murrow asked, "We still on?"
"Yep, my office in, say, fifteen minutes?" Karp replied, looking at his watch.
Ten minutes later, Murrow and Kipman walked in on Karp, who was already deep in conversation with Clay Fulton, Ray Guma, and Richard Torrisi. As Karp was making introductions, Mrs. Milquetost buzzed and said, "Robin Repass and Pam Russell are here to see you."
When the two women entered there were more introductions, and then Karp asked them to all be seated as he walked over to an easel that had been set up behind his desk. "All right, we have quite a bit to get through and because this isn't entirely Manhattan DA business, I don't want to use up any more of the taxpayer's crime-fighting dime than I have to. A few of you-Harry, Ray, and Richard-are already aware of this, but I've been asked by Mayor-elect Denton to take on the case of Jayshon Sykes et al. v. City of New York…the civil lawsuit involving what is otherwise known as the Coney Island Rape Case."
"What?" Murrow said, showing the first spark of political sensitivity all morning. "How can you do that? How come I wasn't told?"
Karp held up his hand.
"Please, Gilbert, if you'd let me get through this, it should answer your questions. But it was not my intention to keep any of you in the dark as an indication of a lack of confidence in your counsel. Most of you I've known for many years and I would trust with my life, including you, Mr. Murrow. The truth is that initially I was reluctant to choose this course and only recently reached this decision."
Murrow didn't look any happier, but he sat back in his chair and waited.
"The answer to your first question is that after Mr. Denton is sworn in, the current Corporation Counsel, Sam Lindahl, will be replaced"-Karp paused for the applause to die down, although he noticed Murrow suddenly sat up again in his chair-"and at the same time, the governor will announce that I have been appointed as special counsel for the case on behalf of the new Corporation Counsel. Harry has checked the statutes, and apparently the governor can do it as I'm not really an elected official."
"Yet," Murrow muttered.
Karp smiled at the effort his younger colleague was making to get himself back in the game. He noticed that Repass and Russell, who had not been told the purpose of the meeting, had exchanged surprised glances and were now smiling broadly at him.
"Thanks for the vote of confidence, Gilbert… Anyway, over the past couple of days, I've had the chance to review a good bit of the case files with the assistance of the inestimable Mr. Guma and Mr. Kipman." After the Friday meeting with Liz Tyler, he'd spent the weekend with Ray and Harry poring over more than sixty large, three-ring binders filled with police notes, affidavits, statements-sworn and unsworn-lab reports, and trial testimony, as well as more than two-dozen videotapes.
Karp flipped over the blank front of the chart on the easel. "Those of you more familiar with this case than I, please bear with me and feel free to point out any grievous errors or omissions, but I'll try to lay this out as best I can for everyone here."
After a night of wilding that had ended with the rape and near murder of Liz Tyler on May 19 and 20, 1992, Karp explained, the gang split up. Kevin Little and Kwasama Jones had been picked up that morning by the police as they tried to make their way out of the Brighton Beach area and they almost immediately confessed to having "hurt a woman" near Coney Island. "Hearing that his friends had been taken in by the police, Packer Wilson turned himself in voluntarily in the company of his mother. Based on the statements given by the others, Sykes and Davis were contacted the next day by police. "They attempted to run but were apprehended."
Karp flipped to another page with two items on it. "Essentially the case against the city is twofold. It begins with the premise that the confessions of the defendants were coerced by the jack-booted police and that the evil prosecutors Ms. Repass and Ms. Russell-"
"Boo, hiss," Guma said, and was promptly given the bird by both women.
"-condoned and encouraged these actions, and then used these illegitimate confessions to convict and imprison the innocent defendants. The second issue is that during the trial, the prosecution also brushed over the evidence of a sixth unknown attacker."
Karp paused to make sure everyone was up to speed. "Any questions so far? No? Moving on, I think the allegation of prosecutorial misconduct regarding the sixth attacker is laughable. Not only did Robin spend nearly ten minutes discussing the existence of this sixth man in her opening remarks, it was the prosecution, not the defense, that presented expert witnesses to go over the DNA evidence, which pointed to another perpetrator who was not among the five defendants. Pam again spent considerable time in her closing arguments acknowledging that there was a sixth, unknown attacker-even referring to him, I believe, as 'the one monster who still roams our streets.' I have no doubt that we will quickly dispose of that question."
Karp flipped to another page headlined by the bold capital letters CONFESSIONS and beneath which began a list of the defendants with numbered statements. "The issue of the confessions having been coerced is equally laughable," he said. "To begin with, prior to the last trial, there was a thorough and lengthy Huntley Hearing to determine the voluntariness and admissibility of the defendants' confessions and other evidence. The court took testimony from over twenty prosecution witnesses, including defendant-turned-witness for the prosecution Kevin Little, and heard from the defendants Sykes, Davis, Wilson, and Jones, as well as their families and friends who were present or involved in the initial encounters with the police. In the end, the court ruled that the statements were properly and legally obtained."
Karp took a sip of water. When he and the other two finished with their first pass through the files late Sunday night, he'd been so incensed that he didn't even remember the walk from 100 Centre Street back to the loft. It wasn't just the bestiality and complete lack of human compassion the defendants had shown Liz Tyler. If anything, he was angrier that Brooklyn DA Breman had rolled over so easily. She'd ignored time-honored legal procedure. Most egregiously, Breman never demanded a full evidentiary hearing before accepting Villalobos's word as reason enough to exonerate the four men. And, from everything he could tell looking at the motions that had been filed in the civil trial, Lindahl had made very little effort to defend the case and let Louis get away with every demand without fighting any of it. Karp smelled a rat and maybe more than one.
"Of significant importance with respect to the admissibility of the statements and the fairness of the process used to obtain them," he continued, "no defendant under age sixteen was questioned without a parent, relative, or guardian present, all of whom gave consent. Of the four convicted, only Sykes was over sixteen."
Flipping his chart, Karp gave his audience a rundown of some of the "highlights or lowlights, if you will" from the statements of the defendants.
"For instance, defendant Desmond Davis gave a written statement and a videotaped interview. His grandmother was present at the former, his father at the latter," Karp said. "He was contrite and sorry with his relatives present, but quite another character while waiting for them to arrive at the precinct so that questioning could begin. In fact, he and defendant Jayshon Sykes had a grand time sitting in the holding area with police and other detainees present, laughing about what a good time they'd had that night. At one point, in front of other police officers, if you can believe this crap, Desmond called out to a female police officer and asked her if she 'wanted some of what that other bitch' got. Not to be outdone, Sykes said to the same officer that he wanted to lick her 'pussy.' Hardly the behavior characteristic of frightened, vulnerable boys that Hugh Louis is now trying to make these punks out to be."
As Karp spoke and pointed to his charts, the others in the room remained quiet. They could be an irreverent bunch, even when discussing the most heinous crimes. So-called dark humor was a way of getting past the horror. But no one was in the mood for joking this time. They just sat patiently as Karp next introduced what he had labeled "incriminating admissions to investigators and third parties as corroboration of the defendants' guilt."
"That next afternoon, shortly before he turned himself in, Packer Wilson was walking on the sidewalk when he saw two school chums and warned them to stay away from him because 'the cops will be after me.' When they asked him why, he responded, 'You heard about that woman that was beat up and raped at Coney Island last night. I'm in it.'
"Feeling that Kevin Little seemed to show the most remorse for the crime," Karp said, "and might want to help us out, our Ms. Repass and Detective Torrisi escorted him to the pier at Coney Island. Although some of the evidence had already been washed away by the tide, there was still a large pool of blood beneath the pier. According to the affidavits of our two friends here, Mr. Little was heard to mutter, and I quote, 'Damn, damn, that's a lot of blood. I knew she was bleeding, but I didn't know how bad she was. It was pretty dark under the pier. I couldn't see how much blood there was.'"
Shortly after that, he said, Kevin Little had agreed to testify against the others. "I should note that he did not ask for a deal." A few days later, however, Kwasama Jones called the home of codefendant K
evin Little from Rikers Island and talked to Little's sister, fourteen-year-old Hannah. "He was passing on a message from Sykes, who was in solitary for assaulting another inmate, that there'd be dire consequences for Kevin if he didn't keep his mouth shut. During the conversation, Hannah asked Jones how he could have committed such a vicious crime and, she would later testify, he denied raping Ms. Tyler and said, 'I only held her shoulders. It was Jayshon and Desmond, and some other dude, who fucked her.'
"Detective Torrisi escorted Desmond Davis to the pier," Karp said while Torrisi looked out the window. "And according to the detective's report, Mr. Davis laughed as they walked beneath the pier and said, 'Yes, yes, this is where we got her. This is where we fucked the bitch. Man, she was tight.'"
"I wanted to kill him," Torrisi said.
"When I read that, I did, too," Karp said. "But we can hope that what goes around comes around for these guys."
When he read through the files, Karp had wished that he was not defending the city and the three defendants in the room, trying to prevent paying the cretins who stole Liz Tyler's life, but that he was prosecuting them instead. Repass and Russell had done as good a job as anyone could have. They and the police had gone by the book, and, as they'd told his wife, won a fair and just conviction. But he would have liked to have struck a blow himself in this case.
Karp paused and looked into the eyes of each person in the room. "Lest anyone doubt the assailants' character and cruelty on that night at Coney Island, I want to read to you from Detective Torrisi's memo book an entry of a statement given to him by Jayshon Sykes. 'I hit her with that piece of steel. She went down and I hit her again. Then I fucked her. Then Desmond fucked her. To me it was just something to do. It was fun.'"
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