Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [117]
DNA is like fingerprint evidence. Your DNA at the crime scene proves you were there, but the absence of your DNA doesn’t prove you weren’t. That’s why two juries, fully aware that the defendants’ DNA was not at the crime scene, convicted them anyway.
What the prosecution had was better than DNA: detailed, videotaped confessions from four of the five defendants and an unvideotaped confession from the fifth. Even the O.J. jury might have convicted had they seen the defendant in a thirty-minute video, giving a detailed description of how he killed his wife and Ron Goldman.
Perhaps liberals could tell us in advance what evidence of guilt they intend to consider probative, instead of waiting to see what the evidence is and then saying they were really looking for something else. Whatever the evidence is, they react like Diogenes in the New Yorker cartoon, staring at an honest man and saying, “Actually I was looking for a taller honest man.”
The judge in the real trials, Justice Thomas B. Galligan, held a six-week hearing on the admissibility of evidence, primarily the confessions, taking testimony from twenty-nine witnesses, including four defendants and their parents and relatives, who were contesting the confessions. Galligan found all the confessions were given voluntarily, with Miranda warnings and following proper procedure.
Despite attempts to discount the videotaped confessions with claims that they were preceded by hours of brutal police grilling, every defendant but one was questioned only in the presence of his parents or other adult relatives. The exception was Yusef Salaam, who lied to the police and told them he was sixteen, even showing them his adult transit pass. His questioning ended abruptly as soon as his mother showed up and told the police he was only fifteen. Yusef was the only defendant who did not make his confession on videotape.
Although each of the defendants had denied penetrating the jogger, they all admitted to fondling or restraining her as others raped her. If the defendants assisted in the jogger’s rape, they were guilty of rape even if they didn’t deposit their semen anywhere in Central Park that night.
In Antron McCray’s thirty-four-minute videotaped statement, for example, he said, smirkingly, “Everybody started hitting her and stuff. She was on the ground, everybody stompin’ and everything.… I grabbed one arm, some other kid grabbed one arm and we grabbed her legs and stuff. Then we all took turns getting on her, getting on top of her.… I just like, my penis wasn’t in her. I didn’t do nothing to her … I was just doing it so everybody … Everybody would just like, would know I did it.”24
If the jury believed this, they had to find him guilty of rape as an accomplice.
In the opposite of a rush to judgment, the two juries deliberated for ten days and eleven days, respectively. At the first trial, all three defendants were acquitted of the most serious charge, attempted murder, but convicted of assault and rape on the “acting in concert” theory. The first three defendants were also convicted of riot and of assaults on other park-goers that night.
Defense counsel attacked the confessions as coerced, and evidently the jurors took these arguments seriously: The second jury concluded that Kharey Wise’s videotaped confession resulted from “subtle forms of coercion” and acquitted him of rape and attempted murder, convicting him only of assault and sexual abuse.
Kevin Richardson was convicted of rape and attempted murder—the only defendant convicted of the latter charge. The evidence against Richardson included his leading prosecutors to the exact location of the crime; his vivid description of the attack given on videotape in the presence of his father; and a deep scratch wound on his cheek that he told police was from the jogger. Also, the crotch of the underwear he was wearing the night of the attack was suspiciously stained with semen,