Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [118]
For being found guilty of a savage attack on a female jogger that only by the grace of God didn’t kill her, the defendants were each sentenced to five to ten years in prison, except Richardson, who got five to fifteen years. Former congressman Tom DeLay was sentenced to three years in prison for putting campaign money in the wrong account.
All but one, Raymond Santana, appealed their convictions. All convictions were upheld.
But thirteen years later, the media told astonishing lies about both the original trials and the alleged “new evidence.” New York Newsday, for example, breathlessly reported that it had gotten its hands on “a confidential police report” concluding that “all forensic evidence used at trial … has now been determined to be useless.” Congratulations, Newsday! You could have run a Nexis search for that “confidential” information. It was known to be perfectly useless at the trials, too.
According to AP reports at the time, for example, the most powerful “forensic” evidence came from retired detective Nicholas Petraco, who testified that hairs found on Richardson’s clothes “could have” or “might have” come from the jogger. On cross-examination, he admitted that “he could not determine that a hair definitely came from a specific individual.” He also said “that hair could end up on someone’s clothing by casual contact or from being airborne.”26
Forensic evidence didn’t convict the defendants. Their confessions did. Reyes’s jailhouse confession changed nothing about those cases: He had merely revealed himself as one of the rapists who “got away.”
But when a case is tried in the media, rather than a courtroom, new rules of evidence apply. In a courtroom, juries are able to see videotaped confessions, note inconsistencies or corroborating evidence, evaluate the credibility of witnesses, and consider alternative theories of the crime. They get to hear both sides of the argument.
Under the media’s Show Trial rules, only one side is heard, much like political debates on MSNBC. Any evidence tending to implicate the defendant is suppressed or denied, while any evidence tending to exonerate the defendant is treated as ironclad.
Thus, Innocence Project–style defense lawyers dismiss eyewitness testimony as notoriously unreliable—unless it’s an eyewitness providing an alibi. If a defendant’s DNA is found at the crime scene, it is mocked as merely circumstantial evidence and probably contaminated. But if the defendant’s DNA is not found at the crime scene, it’s deemed bulletproof evidence of innocence.
Voluntary confessions that carry a penalty are said to prove nothing—they were coerced, given under duress, extracted in exchange for leniency. But jailhouse “confessions” are apparently never questionable—even if the primary beneficiary is a gang member in the same cellblock and the confession leads to a desirable prison transfer.
Confessions outside of court are not subject to cross-examination or evaluated by a jury. But if they exonerate the guilty, the media believe those confessions with all their hearts!
We know Reyes raped the jogger based on his DNA at the scene. The only question was whether he acted alone, as he claimed, or there were many attackers, as the five defendants said in their confessions and two juries believed.
But the only question for Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, was how to get a good write-up in the New York Times. So while newspapers repeated nonsense fed to them by the Innocence Project, Morgenthau’s office wrote a brief for the defense. His office began with the assumption that Reyes was telling the truth about acting alone and then scoured the record for evidence to support that theory. Unfortunately, there was no evidence to support Reyes’s single-rapist claim.