Posted on 08/10/2014 8:58:40 AM PDT by Kaslin
Twenty-five years ago, Trisha Meilithe Central Park joggerwas a 28 year-old employee for a prestigious Manhattan investment banker when she was mercilessly beaten, raped, and left for dead by thugs.
Meili lost approximately 80 percent of her blood. Her skull was fractured to the point that her one eye had popped out of its socket. On the scale of 3 to 15 that neurologists use to gauge brain functioning, Meilis was assigned a rating of 4. She spent nearly the next two weeks in a coma, with experts expecting her to die.
This crime became a racially explosive issue, for Meili was white and her assailants were not: Of the 30 or so minority youths that had been randomly terrorizing park dwellers, four blacks and one Hispanic confessed to having engaged in the attack on Meili. Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise, and Yusef Salaam were arrested, tried, convicted, and issued prison sentences.
But in 2002, long after the Central Park Five, as documentarian and apologist for the convicts, Ken Burns has dubbed them, had done their time, and long after the statute of limitations on the 13 year-old crime had expired, convicted serial rapist and murderer, Matias Reyes, who was already serving a life term, confessed to being Meilis lone assailant. DNA testing confirmed that it was Matias semenand his alonethat was found on Meilis body and around the scene of the crime.
Shortly afterwards, District Attorney Robert Morgenthau prevailed upon his states Supreme Court to vacate the convictions of the Central Park Five. Not unsurprisingly, the latter sued the City of New York for wrongful imprisonment to the tune of $250 million.
In June, courtesy of the ever illustrious Mayor DiBlasio, the Central Park Five discovered that they would receive $40 million.
Not since the O.J. Simpson acquittal have we witnessed this gross a travesty of justice. Yet its also a travesty of intelligence, for only a foolor perhaps a liarcould think that the Central Park Five were innocent of anything, much less the attack on Trisha Meili.
For starters, no one has ever disputed that the Harlem thugs had been in Central Park that fateful evening for the sole purpose of assaulting and mugging innocents (one of whom had been bludgeoned with a pipe). As is the wont of cowards, the Five set upon only those who they outnumbered, those who were weaker and more vulnerable. This they confessed from the moment they were in police custody.
To the present day, they have never retracted this confession.
Yet the Five also proceeded immediately to implicate themselves in the assault on Meili. On multiple occasions, while alone with the police as well as when they were accompanied by their adult relatives, they left no doubts about their role in this act of barbarism:
Antron McCray: 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, eachI 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.
Kevin Richardson: Raymond [Santana] had her arms, and Steve [Lopez] had her legs. He spread it out. And Antron [McCray] got on top, took her panties off.
Raymond Santana: He was smackin her, he was sayin, Shut up, bitch! Just smackin her I was grabbin the ladys tits.
Kharey Wise: This was my first rape.
Ann Coulter reminds us that Melody Jackson, whose brother was friends with Wise, testified that the latter told her by phone while he was incarcerated at Rikers Island that even though he didnt actually rape Meili, he did restrain the victims legs while Kevin Richardson fucked her.
Jackson, incidentally, informed the police of this exchange only because she thought that it would help Wises case.
Coulter also notes that one of the youths apprehended by police shortly after the attack against Meili insistedprior to being questionedthat he knew who did the murder. This is proof that, at the very least, the pummeling that Meili endured was witnessed by multiple people and that its severity was such that it was assumed that it was fatal.
Meili was left for dead.
But there is more.
This same punkagain, mind you, without even being asked about the attack, much less a murderfingered none other than Antron McCray as the murderer.
Multiple videotaped confessions of the Five; the presence of semen, blood, and hair on all of the suspects; a scratch on Kevin Richardsons neck that, in the company of his father, headmitted he received by Meili; and several witness accounts confirmed for the police that the vermin who Ken Burns would years later make into martyrs were as guilty as sin itself of initiating and facilitating an attack against Trisha Meili that nearly cost the poor woman her life.
Matias Reyes semen was the only attackers DNA found on Meili or at the crime scene. However, neither this nor the word of this serial rapist and murderer that he acted alone goes any distance whatsoever toward proving the innocence of the Central Park Five.
Police have been prevented by the District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau, who recommended that the convictions of the Five be vacated, from interrogating Reyes.
Linda Fairstein, the original prosecutor in this case, expressed her certainty that the Central Park Five are guilty. Reyes, she believes, merely finished what they had started. As for this notion that the NYPD coerced false confessions from the suspects, Mike Sheehan, one of the central detectives who investigated the crime, and who, in his own words, had spent decades taking over 1,000 confessions, in 3,000 homicides, has nothing but contempt. All of this stuff about coercion really pisses me off, Sheehan has said. Do you honestly think that wedetectives with more than 20 years in, family men with pensionswould risk all of that so we could put words in the mouth of a 15 year-old kid? Absolutely not.
Even Morgenthau concedes that no police misconductlike coercing the teens into admitting to a crime in which they had zero involvementever occurred.
Now the Central Park Five is $40 million richer.
But the taxpayers of New York Cityincluding the victims of the wilding rampage visited upon Central Park 25 years agohave suffered a loss far greater than this.
For that matter, the fortune of the Central Park Five is the misfortune of all decent people.
FMCDH(BITS)
I would love to follow this money to see how much of it flows back to deBlasio.
From the moment I read that the DNA “prioved” these guys innocent I was extremely dubious that justice had been served.
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