Cornell Student Assaulted (Black on White "hate crime" at Ithaca Ludacris concert?)

ITHACA--A white female student assaulted Sunday night leaving the Nappy Roots and Ludacris concert at Cornell's Barton Hall told The Sun that she was the victim of a hate-crime, which left her with a ruptured ear drum and thirteen stiches on her face.

The Cornell Police morning report noted that the police received a "complaint from a student that was physically assaulted by an unkown individual." The report indicated that the assault occurred at 11:47 p.m. and that the investigation is continuing.

The incident, as described by the victim, began when the student had a minor altercation with another girl who was at the concert while the performace was still going on.

After the student put her hair up to get it out of the way, the alleged assailant proceeded to hit her, at which point the student and her friends moved to the back of the concert space.

When the concert was over, the student separated from her friends to get into her car and said she found herself surrounded by a group made up of five black females and one black male, who have yet to be identified.

Allegedly, the incident turned physically violent when one of the girls slapped the student hard enough to rupture her eardrum, a blow which threw her off balance. The other five assailants proceeded to kick and punch her as she fell down.

The six assailants stopped hitting the victim only when one of her male friends came out of the concert and stepped in.

"If it wasn't for [him], I don't know how long it would have gone on," she said.

The victim said doctors estimate it will take her eardrum a year and a half to heal.

"This was a hate crime, and it shouldn't happen to another person. The more people know the better," said the victim's mother.

"We take any sort of hate crime very very seriously," said Linda Grace-Kobas, interim vice president for communications and media relations. "We will thoroughly investigate all aspects of the incident."

"I would encourage her to file a bias-related incident report," said Robert Harris, vice provost for diversity and faculty development. "We have a process and with a report we can begin putting that process to work."

Once an incident report is filed, a University employee is assigned the case to assist victims in pursuing their situation, according to Harris.

"It's really hard to live with this. I want people to know because I need to press charges. If anyone has any information, tell the police because [they] don't know anything right now," the student said.

Update: CU denies access to Nov. 9 police report, claims exemption from open gov't. laws:

The Journal received a denial to the Freedom of Information Lawrequest submitted Wednesday. In the letter, Simeon Moss, Deputy Director of Cornell News Service, said Cornell is not an agency of government subject to the New York Freedom of Information Law.
In contrast, Robert Freeman, executive director of New York State Committee on Open Government, said reports from Cornell Police are subject to the Freedom of Information Law because members of the Cornell Police are deputized through the Tompkins County Sheriff's Office and perform government functions such as arrests.
"Cornell Police have police powers equivalent to those of local police departments," Freeman said. "Cornell Police perform what is clearly a government function."
Grace-Kobas said in a phone interview Monday that she disagreed with Freeman's statement.
"That's his opinion, not legal fact," Grace-Kobas said.

Smelling more and more like a cover up, isn't it?

Ithaca is the City of Evil.

Today's Ithaca Journal has a letter from a former Ithaca resident that sums up this case (and the case against the City of Evil) nicely:

Last November, a white female student was attacked by a group of blacks on the Cornell campus following a hip hop concert. To date, little has been published about this incident, which was clearly a hate crime, and Cornell has refused to release many details.
Now contrast that with the attack on Patricia Morris, a black woman, by three whites in what was evidently a personal dispute. In that case, the three attackers were charged with a hate crime. They were eventually only convicted of assault, which was the right result.
A crime is a crime and should be treated as such. However, in the People's Republic of Ithaca, it seems to depend on who is involved. White on black is automatically a hate crime, while black on white is a racial misunderstanding,
Hate crimes grant superior rights to certain select groups, rather than treating all persons equally before the law.
This politically correct atmosphere is one reason why I, who have lived in Ithaca for a quarter century, no longer call Ithaca home.

Ithaca is the City of Evil.

Update, posted at the request of a fellow Freeper:

The Cornell Review: Notes From The Underground

Back to Main Page

Ithaca DA Ignores Politically Inconvenient Crime

By Sara Townsley
Published 3/27/2004

After a thorough investigation, that is still ongoing, The Review has unearthed answers to some of the questions raised in my last column. We thought our readers would appreciate an update.

Among many others, we interviewed the Tompkins County District Attorney, George Dentes, who is prosecuting three black female adults in connection with the beating of a white female Cornell student after a Ludacris concert last November. They have all been charged with harassment in the second degree, a “non-criminal offense.” One pled guilty and received a conditional discharge and a $150 fine. One has pled guilty and remains to be sentenced. The third pled not guilty and a trial is pending. The two juveniles involved were handled by a different court.

Charging the adult assailants with “non-criminal offenses” seems astonishingly generous in view of the victim’s substantial injuries, and the strong inference that the attack was at least partially motivated by race. Dentes, however, made three points. One, only the two juveniles involved caused the victim’s injuries, and thus the adults could not be charged with crimes in which physical injury is an element. Two, even if he could have charged “specified offenses” that permit prosecutors to invoke the hate crime law, there was insufficient corroboration of the racial slurs to make it worth pursuing. And three, the Cornell police made the determination of which charges should be brought.

But there are serious problems with all of these points. One, the police point out that Dentes is the lawyer, having unlimited discretion to review charging determinations made by the police. So when confronted with questions about the light charges, the police point to the DA, and the DA points to the police, in a classic circular game of pass the buck.

Two, there was insufficient corroboration of racial motivation only because the sole witness favorable to the victim was scrupulously honest; while the five attackers, in all likelihood, lied to the police. There were two “phases” to the attack, one inside, during the concert, and one outside, afterwards. The victim’s friend was present inside when the women hurled racial epithets at the victim, but the music was so loud, she could not honestly say that she heard them. The attackers, meanwhile, obviously motivated by self-interest, and perhaps emboldened by the lack of witnesses to contradict them, denied ever using racial epithets. We are unable to discern a motivation for the victim to lie, and anyone who watches Chappelle’s Show can surely find it plausible that she was called “whitey” a time or two. Or twenty.

Lesson to violent criminals: always attack in groups with the cover of loud music, so there are more people to deny the story than to corroborate it. It normally infuriates police and prosecutors when suspects play them this way, but apparently, Ithaca’s politically correct magnetic field has scrambled their moral compass.

Third, and worst of all, Dentes' knowledge about who caused the victim’s injuries is incomplete. When the adult women first harassed the victim during the concert -- while using racial epithets -- one shoved her, and two punched her in the head, causing lumps and bruises. Under New York law, this is assault in the third degree, a class A misdemeanor. This is also a specified offense to which the hate crime statute applies, which would increase it to a class E felony.

Furthermore, while the two 14-year-olds caused the most severe of the victim’s injuries in the later incident outside, Dentes has overlooked an important detail. Bleeding and attempting to defend herself against the two juveniles as the three adults looked on, the victim took a swing at one of the juveniles. The instant it hit home, one of the adults announced: "you've hit a minor, now you're in trouble." In other words, just as drug dealers use 12-year-old lookouts because minors face only minimal penalties and expunged records when they turn 18, there is a strong inference that the adults employed the juveniles to carry out the beating. This is solicitation in the third degree, also a class E felony, specifically applicable to adults enlisting minors to commit their crimes by proxy. Even if it would be a challenge to prove this in court beyond a reasonable doubt, a responsible prosecutor would have charged it anyway, to pressure the defendants into pleading guilty to a lesser charge.

Finally, the most shocking discovery: Dentes has never talked to his star witness, the victim. This means she did not testify at the sentencing of the first attacker, likely resulting in the grossly indulgent sentence. It also suggests, so late in the game, that he has no intention of having her testify in the trial or sentencing phases of the other two attackers, coming up very soon. His failure to interview the victim suggests that he hasn't interviewed anyone else either, and his flimsy knowledge of the facts suggests he hasn’t even read the police report very carefully.

Dentes holds his office at the pleasure of the voters. Incredible as it is that a Republican can get elected in the People’s Republic of Ithaca, it’s obvious how he keeps the masses happy: by pandering to the town’s base of leftover 1960s radicals and ivory-tower multiculturalists. Dentes has been criticized in the past for aggressively pursuing minority suspects, so going after violent criminals his constituency prefers to treat gently might create a stir and endanger his office. But we don’t care what party you are: covering your ass, passing the buck, failing to do your homework, and allowing violent crime to go unpunished is an outrage.

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