Posted on 12/24/2002 12:39:09 PM PST by mrustow
Edited on 05/26/2004 5:10:47 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
December 24, 2002 -- The criminal case is over - and now lawyers for the "Central Park 5" want the criminal inquiry to begin.
"The next stage . . . is to discover how this terrible tragedy happened and to make those responsible for it accountable," said Roger Wareham, a lawyer for three of the five.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Carefully leaking through The New York Times, in early October, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White's office indicted the New York City Police Department for pervasive "racial profiling" of minorities. Reportedly as part of "negotiations" by Janet Reno's Justice Department to "monitor" the NYPD, White's office mindlessly repeated an unfounded report released on June 16, 2000, by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, chaired by Mary Frances Berry. Although Berry's "investigators" did not bother collecting evidence, she had felt emboldened to call for federal monitoring, i.e., a take-over, of the department.
On October 6, Republican New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani responded, "The whole idea of racial profiling in the New York City Police Department is absurd ... and we're more than willing to defend it in court, anyplace, anytime, anywhere." To which the Rev. Al Sharpton countered, "There is something sick and dangerous about a mayor that would sit looking facts in the face and tell you that the facts don't exist."
Since the tragic shooting of Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo on February 4, 1998, the mainstream media have devoted thousands of stories to "racial profiling," based on the unquestioned assumption, shared by the media and Mary Frances Berry alike, that the Diallo case was one of racial profiling, i.e., a police lynching. Berry, the media, et al., conveniently ignored the fact that the NYPD officers who shot Diallo were hunting for his neighbor, the "Bronx Rapist," who resembled Diallo. Isaac Jones, the worst serial rapist in the city's history, later confessed to over thirty sexual attacks on women, and was sentenced to over 200 years in prison in his first trial alone.
And how do those charging racial profiling explain what happened in Central Park on Sunday, June 11, just five days before the release of the Commission's report? I am referring to the daylight sexual attacks on 53 women carried out by a mob of over thirty young men, the majority of whom were black (the rest were Hispanic), in front of thousands of witnesses, during and after the annual Puerto Rican Day parade.
We only know about the attacks, because dozens of passersby filmed them, and sent their videotapes to local TV news operations. No video, no crime -- witnesses be damned.
If black and Hispanic men live in constant fear of being rounded up or shot by racist, white police officers, how could so many of them run fearlessly through the park, assaulting women with abandon, despite 4,000 police nearby on parade duty? And how does a department characterized by racist, "excessive force," suddenly turn pacifist?
Not surprisingly, the media and the Justice Department alike ignored such questions.
In the days following the parade, dozens of veteran NYPD officers responded to scathing criticisms of the police by complaining that they had been handcuffed in doing their job by a long-entrenched racial double-standard at black and Hispanic ethnic parades.
Reporters at the Daily News alone interviewed some 28 NYPD officers. Speaking under condition of anonymity, the officers all maintained that, in the interest of avoiding confrontations with "minorities," in contrast to the zero-tolerance enforcement at the St. Patrick's Day Parade, "a softer tone has been taken at ethnic events like the National Puerto Rican Day and the West Indian Day parades, where public drinking and marijuana smoking produce more warnings than arrests."
So much for Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's war on "quality-of-life" crimes and minorities.
There was just one flaw in the story's reporting: Racial double-standards in law enforcement have been in effect in New York City, EVERY day, for years.
In January, 1991, when a black and Hispanic gang singled me out on a packed, virtually white-free, Brooklyn-bound subway train for an assault and attempted robbery, a Transit Police detective acknowledged that the attack was racially motivated, and thus a "bias crime." The detective reported that such racial attacks on whites happened every single day in New York, "but there are some things you can't say," due to the political climate.
Since then, mayors and police commissioners' fear of offending racist blacks, and need to show businessmen and tourists that New York is safe, have converged to give us a revolution, not in the FIGHTING, but in the REPORTING of crime.
After one of at least nine 1990s' racial assaults and attempted muggings I (more or less) fought off, a white transit sergeant told me, "You fit the profile." He mentioned that I was short and bespectacled, but left out the most important factor, my race.
But officially, none of the aforementioned crimes took place. Bloody stab wounds and corroborating witnesses notwithstanding, eventually all of the cases were "disappeared."
Between 1995 and 1998, a series of scandals uncovered by reporters William Rashbaum of the Daily News(now with The New York Times) and Leonard Levitt of Newsday, respectively, showed street cops being instructed to define down violent felonies into misdemeanors or non-crimes, and police failing to report numerous serious felonies (first-degree rape and homicide).
One such crime occurred on December 8, 1995, when a black man on the Queens-bound A train I was riding, was shot at point-blank range. I saw the lifeless-looking victim on a gurney, and counted 39 officers at the crime scene. NYPD spokeswoman, Officer Kathy Kelly, later insisted to me, "There's no shootings on the eighth."
If the NYPD is "disappearing" thousands of violent felonies per year, minorities, who make up 50 percent of the city's population, but who officially commit 89.2 percent of its violent crimes, are disproportionately benefiting from the undercounting. And yet, blacks complain constantly of "racial profiling."
The blacks charging racial profiling see black criminals as allies in a race war against whites. Media reports that mindlessly repeat such charges intimidate the police out of doing their job, which in turn empowers black felons. Which is the point.
As black claims of racial profiling have gone national, so too has the problem of fraudulent police crime counts. The FBI has long refused to recognize official crime figures from Boca Raton, Florida; in September, the Bureau reported that in 1998, the Philadelphia Police Department engaged in a massive underreporting of felonies.
New York's scandals culminated in January, 1998, when NYPD Transit Bureau Chief Kenneth Donoghue was caught fudging subway crime statistics, and forced to resign. Less than one month later, Amadou Diallo lay dead in his building doorway.
The New York media immediately forgot all about fudged crime statistics, and switched to unfounded stories about "racial profiling." After all, reporting both stories simultaneously would have opened up a credibility gap as big as Yankee Stadium.
Let us now return to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Although Chairwoman Mary Frances Berry had earlier written of her undying hatred of all white police officers, and been exposed as a contributor to Hillary Clinton's senate campaign, she refused to recuse herself. Berry's report saw the mere statistical frequency of arrest and "stop-and-frisk" rates for black and Hispanic males as "evidence" of racial profiling by white police officers, rather than as the raw data that it was. Mary Frances Berry was initially permitted to convene her political kangaroo court, in order to help Hillary Clinton get black votes in her Senate race; the Justice Department is now giving Berry's racist fantasies the power of precedent, in order to help the Gore-Lieberman ticket, as well.
Does racial profiling exist in New York City? Of course, it does -- the racial profiling of whites.
Posted on 11/05/2002 10:52 AM PST by mrustow
A Different Drummer [November, 2002]
In an increasingly multicultural, urban environment, it becomes more and more difficult to achieve justice, as racial and ethnic activist groups seek not only to impede the prosecution of the apparently guilty, but to undo successful prosecutions, after the fact. The most striking example of this development, is the attempt underway to undo the convictions of five of the attackers in what came to be known as the Central Park Jogger Case. And so, five cold-blooded thugs: Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Kharey Wise, Yusuf Salaam and Raymond Santana, have now been nominated for urban sainthood.
Central Park was -- and still is -- an urban preserve favored by well-to-do, liberal, white New Yorkers. On April 19, 1989, dozens of black teenagers took the subway to Central Park, for a night of "wilding." The term, never previously heard by whites, had been coined by young blacks to describe group attacks by (often armed) blacks on lone, unarmed whites. A night of wilding promised an orgy of racial violence.
The teenagers swarmed over the park that night, committing assaults. "The Jogger," a petite, 28-year-old, 105-pound investment banker, tried to outrun the boys, and fought valiantly, but never had a chance. Her worst injury came from a steel pipe, which Yusuf Salaam hit her in the head with. The 14-16-year-old boys dragged the woman 200 yards from the jogging path, ripped her clothes off, and variously fondled, raped, and beat her.
By the time a passerby found her, The Jogger had lost seventy percent of her blood. As is typical of massive, blunt trauma wounds, the victim lost all memory of her ordeal. Notwithstanding problems with taste and balance, her survival and recovery have been nothing short of miraculous.
The detailed report of the attack was provided by the boys themselves, who incriminated each other, and who knew things (e.g., the exact articles of the victim's clothing) that only the attackers would know. Kevin Richardson's underwear was soiled with grass stains. Save for Yusuf Salaam, all of the boys videotaped or signed detailed confessions in their parents' presence.
Investigators also got statements from over forty other people incriminating the five, who were ultimately convicted variously of assault and sexual abuse. However, police were always aware that they had not caught all of the attackers. Semen found on one of the victim's socks did not genetically match any of the five arrested attackers.
Enter Matias Reyes. Reyes, now 31, is serving a thirty-three-year-to-life sentence for murder and rape. Once the statute of limitations ran out on the Central Park attack, he "found God," a common jailhouse occurrence. In January, Reyes confessed that he alone had attacked The Jogger. DNA tests showed that it was Reyes' semen on The Jogger's socks.
Police had never suspected Reyes in the attack, because he had not been mentioned by the other attackers in their confessions; the attack came almost two months before Reyes' rape, robbery, and murder spree began; and the attack on The Jogger did not fit his modus operandi. Reyes worked alone, and in seeking, unsuccessfully, to blind his victims, always stabbed them in the eyes. And in 1989, DNA testing was much more primitive than it is today. Reyes most likely came upon the unconscious jogger after her initial attackers had fled, and raped her or masturbated over her.
Although the convicted attackers have all served their sentences, and except for Raymond Santana, who was later convicted of other crimes, been released from jail, they seek -- with their lawyers' help -- to clear their names, rewrite history, and pave the way for a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the City of New York.
The attackers' leading spokesmen are city Councilman Bill Perkins and NYPD Lt. Eric Adams. In 1989, Perkins, then a Harlem tenant organizer, worked with the attackers' black supremacist supporters, while insisting that the attack was not racially motivated.
On September 12, Eric Adams called for a federal investigation: "We believe that because of the demand to bring someone to justice from this crime, we believe that there is a strong possibility that there may have been overzealous policing and overzealous prosecuting."
Eric Adams is the founder of the segregated, counter-police organization of black NYPD officers, 100 Black Men in Law Enforcement Who Care. An open racist, Adams is obsessed with racial purity. According to a former colleague, when Adams discovered that the father of the child of a subordinate, black female officer was white, Adams suddenly forbade the woman from bringing her child to work. And in 1998, ten years after Tawana Brawley had been exposed as having engineered one of the most outrageous race hoaxes in American history, Adams called for a federal investigation on behalf of Brawley, whom Adams still insisted had been raped by white law enforcement officers!
Eric Adams has devoted his life to undermining law enforcement, and supporting black criminals. And for that, he receives fawning treatment from the mainstream media.
Presently, the attackers' biggest supporters are New York's mainstream media.
New York's white-owned, mainstream media did a creditable job of reporting, in 1989, on the criminal investigation of the attack. However, the media ignored the virulent hate campaign that was unleashed by the attackers' supporters, and by the black media, who presented them as the victims of a racist criminal justice system, and who unleashed an orgy of hatred against the victim.
New York's black newspapers, Brooklyn's now-defunct City Sun, and Manhattan's Amsterdam News, depicted the attackers as contemporary versions of the "Scottsboro Boys," the black, 1930s victims of racist lawmen who were eventually cleared of false rape charges. City Sun propagandist Peter Noel (now a star of the popular, far-left weekly, The Village Voice, where he has threatened to kill police officers) concocted a story, according to which "wilding" referred to innocent horseplay.
Although the media -- black and white -- usually follow the unofficial rule prohibiting ever naming a rape victim, every City Sun or Amsterdam News article on the case constantly repeated The Jogger's name. As a result, while white New Yorkers were unaware of her identity, virtually all black, and many Hispanic New Yorkers, knew her name.
At the attackers' 1990 trial, their supporters showed up every day at the courthouse, screaming "The [jogger's] boyfriend did it!," "She did it herself!," and calling the victim "Slut!," when she limped to court to testify.
Since seizing upon Matias Reyes, the mainstream media has so grossly misrepresented the case, as to all but erase the difference between them and their racist, black counterparts.
A September 11 story by New York Daily News reporter Alice McQuillan, could have been written by the attackers' lawyers. McQuillan omitted all of the evidence that convicted the attackers, and quoted black supremacist attorney Roger Wareham (December 12th Movement), who represents attackers Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, and Kevin Richardson as saying, "They had made up their mind, they had somebody else, they didn't want anything to spoil their neatly tied package of convictions and they used these children as scapegoats."
"Children," indeed. Meanwhile, Wareham's co-counsel, Michael Warren, insists that the confessions were gotten "through the most abhorrent form of psychological duress."
With few exceptions, the New York media have followed McQuillan's example. But Alice McQuillan is a fearless truth-teller, compared to the Village Voice's Dasun Allah, who fabricated a new history, whereby whites had invented the term "wilding," in order to "brand black youth."
The movement to clear the five Central Park attackers must be seen in the context of movements to free other blacks convicted of heinous crimes.
One such movement supported former Black Panther Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown), convicted last year, and sentenced to life, for his 2000 assassination of Fulton County, Georgia Sheriff's Deputy Ricky Kinchen, and for seriously wounding Deputy Aldranon English.
The king of such movements seeks the release of former Black Panther Mumia abu Jamal (Wesley Cook), on death row for the 1981 assassination of Philadelphia police Officer Daniel Faulkner.
Abu-Jamal/Cook and Al-Amin/Brown's supporters insist that their heroes, too, were railroaded.
Note too that Al-Amin's victims were both black. According to black supremacist belief, black law enforcement officers who arrest, rather than aid black criminals, are traitors to the race. Such beliefs owe their influence to their enthusiastic support by white elites in the media, education, and even law enforcement.
Yup. The Giuliani years are ancient history.
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The stunning account was revealed to the Daily News hours before Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau was expected to recommend clearing five defendants convicted of the 1989 attack. Matias Reyes' lone-attacker story, which surfaced this year, has turned the jogger case upside-down. But an inmate says that in 1999 he heard Reyes tell an entirely different tale, according to law enforcement sources, who gave the following account to The News: Reyes, who was behind bars for murder and rape, became friends with the fellow inmate, a convicted killer. He reportedly told his prison pal he was in Central Park, riding high on angel dust and crack, the April evening in 1989 when the jogger was attacked. Hearing a woman's screams, Reyes said he ran over to see a group of teenagers beating a jogger. He believes he scared them off or they ran away. Left alone with the dazed and beaten woman, Reyes said he then continued attacking her. DNA evidence tested this year backs Reyes' claim that he raped her. Law enforcement sources say they have been stymied in their attempts to corroborate the inmate's account by Manhattan prosecutor Nancy Ryan, a top aide to Morgenthau who ran the new investigation into the jogger case. Ryan believes Reyes acted alone and doubts the inmate's account, the sources said. The sources said she also barred two other inmates from speaking about Reyes, infuriating some investigators who believe the five youths also attacked the jogger. "All this highlights why there should be a hearing where Reyes' credibility is tested in a court of law," said former prosecutor Linda Fairstein, who supervised the original jogger probe. "Let him be cross-examined on what he said." In another development, law enforcement sources told The News that officials were able to talk with another inmate who said he carried a threat in prison late last year to Reyes. The inmate said Reyes had been threatened with violence if he didn't take sole responsibility for the jogger attack. |
She has written at least one brilliant column on the subject. I'll see if I can dig it up.
I believe that Annie is philosophically a neocon, but unlike the Nancy boys who dominate the clique, she has balls. Every time she writes, she humiliates "respectable" neocons.
Posted on 12/05/2002 1:20 AM PST by kattracks
December 5, 2002 -- EXCLUSIVE
Cops suspect Matias Reyes confessed to raping the Central Park jogger to win protection from a Muslim prison leader who was serving time for the horrific attack, law-enforcement sources said yesterday.
Reyes, a convicted murderer and serial rapist, made the bombshell confession in January while he and Kharey Wise, one of the Jogger 5, were inmates at the Auburn Correctional Facility near Syracuse.
State records show Reyes, 33, and Wise, 30, were both at the lockup from Aug. 8, 2001, to March 4, 2002. They also had been in Rikers Island together in 1989 and got into a fight.
Two law-enforcement sources told The Post cops believe Reyes made the confession to score points with Wise, who has become a very powerful Muslim leader during his 11 years in prison.
Reyes, who has given a DNA sample, knew that under the state's expanded DNA data-bank program - begun in October 1999 - he would eventually be identified as having raped the jogger, the sources said.
"So he does Wise a favor and gets himself major protection in state prison," one of the sources said.
Reyes was transferred to Attica in March 4 and to the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate Dannemora on June 19. Wise remained at Auburn until he was paroled Aug. 12.
Detectives had heard that Reyes and Wise had connections and spoke on the phone, although they were in different lockups.
So, two weeks ago, they went to Clinton to talk to Reyes' fellow inmates about his confession. But they got nowhere, the sources said.
The first inmate they interviewed told them that prosecutor Nancy Ryan, who is directing the new probe of the case, called and said, "I'm not to talk to you," the sources said.
Earlier, when cops went to talk to Reyes, they were cut off in mid-interview by Ryan, the sources said.
The Manhattan DA's office declined to comment.
In his confession, Reyes said he alone raped and beat the jogger on the night of April 19, 1989.
Reyes said he zigzagged behind the woman, then a 28-year-old investment banker, knocked her down with a tree branch, raped her and beat her with a rock when she tried to escape.
His DNA matched that found at the scene. As a result, Wise and four other teens, who were convicted largely on confessions they made, are now seeking to have those convictions overturned.
Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau, who reopened the investigation into the attack last January, is to respond to their motions today.
The jogger lay undiscovered for about four hours, oozing blood from cuts in her head made by a knife, razor or other sharp object.
Robert Kurtz, the doctor who saved the woman's life, says these cuts call into question Reyes' claim he acted alone because he never mentioned using a knife in his confession or a subsequent TV interview.
Will do.
It's hard to believe these five scum got out and are now poised to sue NYC. It's David Dinkins redux.
Hey, whaddya mean? Our Mayor Mike fearlessly stands up to smokers!
The Prosecutors seem to think so. And prosecutors aren't usually all that eager to believe they made a mistake.
The Prosecutors seem to think so. And prosecutors aren't usually all that eager to believe they made a mistake.
There's just one problem weith your statement: prosecutors have NEVER indicated that they think the five were "wrongfully imprisoned."
It always helps, when weighing in with an opinion on a controversial case, to actually FAMILIARIZE oneself with the facts.
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