Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [116]
Melody Jackson, the sister of a friend of Kharey Wise, testified that she talked to Wise by phone when he was in jail after the arrests and he told her that he didn’t rape the jogger, he “only held her legs down while Kevin [Richardson] f—ked her.”15 (In the district attorney’s argument for vacating the convictions, this admission was watered down to: “Wise replied that he had not had sex with her, but had only held and fondled the victim’s leg.”)16
The Central Park jogger’s assailants were not making deals when they gave detailed, corroborated, videotaped confessions. Their stories never unraveled, but rather were corroborated by other evidence. Both juries were well aware that the semen in the jogger’s cervix and on her sock did not match any of the defendants’ DNA.17
Although it’s difficult to imagine these days, in 1989, DNA was not a big part of criminal investigations. Back then, DNA testing was being called a “novel,” “high-tech,” “sophisticated” test. The month the jogger was attacked, newspapers were excitedly reporting “a powerful and still unfolding laboratory discovery, a genetic ‘fingerprint’ created from the body’s deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA,” as the Chicago Tribune put it. This “still unfolding” discovery was said to be “a breakthrough weapon in the war against violent crime.”18 In state and federal courts across the nation, DNA had been used in only about eighty court cases.19
DNA identifications were first invented by Alec Jeffreys in 1984—five years before the Central Park rape. The first time DNA was ever used to help solve a crime was in Leichester, England, in 1986. The first time DNA evidence was ever given as evidence in a U.S. trial was in November 1987, in a rape case in Florida. DNA evidence was not even permitted in New York courts until November 198820—just six months before the Central Park jogger was attacked.
Needless to say, DNA evidence was immediately, virulently attacked by defense lawyers. One month after the Central Park wilding, a New York court refused to admit DNA, which the judge termed “novel scientific evidence”—based on the arguments of future Innocence Project attorney Peter Neufeld.21
The New York Times—the same newspaper that would be howling about the lack of DNA evidence against the Central Park rape defendants thirteen years later—ran an article on the unreliability of DNA testing one month after that attack. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers had set up a committee headed by Peter Neufeld along with his future Innocence Project colleague and Axis of Evil cohort, Barry C. Scheck, to reopen all convictions involving DNA testing done by a major genetics testing laboratory.22
In the next few years, obviously, DNA became the gold standard for criminal evidence (except to Scheck, who argued against the DNA in the 1995 O.J. case). But in April 1989, no sane detective would plan on winning a conviction based on forensic evidence: It wasn’t clear that the “novel scientific evidence” of a DNA test would even be admissible, and all other forensic evidence generally narrowed the suspect pool down to about 40 percent of the population.
Complaining about the lack of forensic evidence in a 1989 case would be like complaining that the cops didn’t use Google maps on their iPhones to locate the jogger.
As even defense attorneys told the New York Law Journal at the time, there were lots of reasons the defendants’ DNA might not be found at the crime scene: The police might have failed to retrieve all of the semen, the defendants might not have ejaculated (as several of the defendants stated in their confessions), or the sample could have been contaminated.23
The evidence in the Central Park wilding trial was out of Perry Mason, not CSI