Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [114]
For the Central Park rape convictions to be vacated was almost as much a blow to civilization at the attack itself. If those juries, under those circumstances, could convict wholly innocent young lads, then the whole legal system was a scam and a fraud.
Here’s the truth about the Central Park rape.
It is undisputed that a mob of about forty African-American and Hispanic teenagers were running wild in Central Park the night of April 18, 1989, assaulting anyone in their path. At least a dozen of them had been arrested leaving the park before the jogger’s body was even discovered. They implicated others, who were rounded up over the next few days, until the police had questioned thirty-seven boys who had been in the park that night.5
Only ten of the thirty-seven interviewed were charged with any crimes. Of those, only five were tried for the rape of the jogger—the five who confessed. Manifestly, the police were capable of interviewing suspects without coercing them to confess. But five confessed anyway, four on videotape with adult relatives present and one with a parent present but not on videotape. All five gave vivid, largely consistent accounts of the attack, implicating themselves and the others.
Other members of the Central Park mob provided various corroborating details to the police, such as one who said Kevin Richardson told him, “We just raped somebody,” and another who heard Raymond Santana and another boy laughing about how “we made a woman bleed.” Various other witnesses said they saw the defendants walking from the 102nd Street transverse area where the jogger was raped.6
As one of the lead detectives on the case, Mike Sheehan, told New York magazine: “They are telling us—the sequence may be off, but they’re essentially telling us the same stuff. They remember a guy they beat and took his food, they remember hitting this guy running around the reservoir. They went through all of these things, each kid. And they also tell you about the jogger. And they place people, so you have a mental picture of where they were around this woman’s body. And their parents are with them, not only in the interviews but in the videotape, for the record. That’s enough for me. I’m satisfied.”7
Although the suspects accused others of attacking the jogger, too, no one was tried for that crime unless he confessed. Steven Lopez, for example, was implicated by two of the defendants, including Kharey Wise, who matter-of-factly told the police that while Lopez was raping the jogger, he “got sick of looking at her face,” so he picked up a brick to smash it.8 Also, a hair was found on Lopez’s jacket “consistent” with the jogger’s hair but not sufficient to be used at trial.
Lopez did not confess to assaulting the jogger, so he was never tried for any crime against her and only pleaded guilty to the robbery of another man in the park that night. That’s how important the confessions were—and how unimportant the “forensic evidence” was back in 1989.
Yusef Salaam started talking immediately after Detective Thomas McKenna told him, “I don’t care what you say to me. We have fingerprints on the jogger’s pants.” At that point, Salaam said, “I was there, but I didn’t rape her.”9 A juror later told 60 Minutes, “We never doubted the veracity of Detective McKenna for a minute.”10
If the police had manufactured the confessions, how did the defendants know facts about the crime that the police couldn’t have known? On April 21, 1989, Kharey Wise told a detective that someone he thought was named “Rudy” stole the jogger’s Walkman and belt pouch.11 The jogger was still in a coma and the police had no way of knowing that a Walkman had been stolen from her.
Indeed, that was one of the DA’s main reasons for buying the entirety of Reyes’s jailhouse confession in the Show Trial: the false claim that Reyes was the only one who knew about the jogger’s Walkman. Kharey Wise told the police at the time