Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [113]
Those confessions were obtained in accordance with due process, admitted by the judge after a six-week hearing, played for the jurors, and attacked by defense counsel.
In the trials, evidence was ruled on by the judge and tested in court. Witnesses were presented for both sides, subjected to cross-examination and argument. The defendants were given the right to testify in their own defense. Two unanimous, multiethnic juries found the defendants guilty of some crimes and acquitted them of others. Their convictions were later upheld on appeal by other judges.
The only way liberals could get those convictions thrown out was to change venues from a courtroom to a newsroom.
And so, thirteen years later, the convictions were vacated based not on a new trial or on new evidence, but solely on the confession of Matias Reyes, a career criminal, serial rapist, and murderer who had nothing to lose by confessing to the rapes—and much to gain by claiming he acted alone.
As in the French tribunals, the Show Trials were based on a lie—to wit, that Reyes’s confession constituted “new evidence” that might have led to a different verdict at trial.
In fact, Reyes’s admission that he had raped the jogger changed nothing about the evidence presented in the actual trials. It was always known that others had participated in the attack on the jogger, which is why prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer said in her summation to the jury, “Others who were not caught raped her and got away.” It was known at the time that semen from the the jogger’s sock and cervix did not match any of the defendants’. The only new information Reyes provided was that he was one of those who “got away.”
Reyes might have been part of the wolf pack attacking the jogger, he could have joined the wolf pack in progress, or he might have come along afterward and raped the beaten, semiconscious jogger. No barbarity was out of the question with Reyes—this is a man who had sexually assaulted his own mother and raped and killed a pregnant woman in front of her children.
Although Reyes made the shocking claim that he had acted alone, there was no new evidence suggesting that this was true—apart from his own word. Unlike the detailed, videotaped confessions given in the days after the rape from all five convicted of rape in the real trials, Reyes’s confession was never subjected to cross-examination. He faced no penalty for his confession.
Reyes’s confession not only cost him nothing, it helped him. When he confessed, he happened to be imprisoned with one of the convicted Central Park rapists, Kharey Wise, who was a leader of the prison Muslim community and a member of the Bloods gang. Before Reyes made his confession, he requested a transfer to one of the most desirable prisons in New York on the grounds that he feared retaliation from Wise’s gang.
Inasmuch as the statute of limitations for rape in New York was five years4 and the Central Park jogger’s rape occurred in 1989, Reyes could have confessed in 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, or 2001 and risked nothing. But it was not until Reyes was incarcerated with Wise that he decided to announce that he had raped the jogger all by himself and win a favorable prison transfer.
It’s remarkable how many “confessions” purporting to exonerate others come from people who will face no penalty for the confession, either because the statute of limitations has run out or because they are already serving thirty-three years to life in prison or both—as in Reyes’s case. Confessions that clear the convicted dramatically improve an inmate’s standing in the prison pecking order by sticking it to the authorities, even without an advantageous transfer.
But liberals put enormous pressure on the doddering district attorney, Robert Morgenthau, to vacate the convictions. The entire left-wing apparatus,