Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [120]
So when the five defendants’ confessions are inconsistent, the DA said it proved they’re lying. And when they were consistent, the DA said it proved they had an ulterior motive to lie. They must be out to get Richardson! Heads, I win; tails, you lose.
The DA’s report exonerating the five defendants was a conclusion in search of evidence, not an honest examination of evidence in search of the truth.
Another alleged “discrepancy” in the defendants’ description of the attack concerned who hit the jogger. The general theme of their confessions was that they all hit and stomped her. But they did not give carbon-copy descriptions of who hit her, in which order, and with what object. The DA’s office found that highly suspicious.
Antron McCray and Raymond Santana said Steve Lopez—who was never charged with a crime relating to the jogger—hit her in the face with a brick. Kharey Wise also said Lopez hit her in the face with a “handrock.” Yusef Salaam said someone he couldn’t name hit her in the face with a brick. Richardson said Michael Briscoe—also never charged—hit her in the face. Separately, both McCray and Yusef Salaam said that at some point Salaam hit her with a pipe.31
I doubt a football color commentator could be more accurate describing a pileup.
The DA’s report was looking for excuses to exonerate, not answers. The fact that five defendants could not provide the names of the other assailants was said to cast doubt on their confessions—as opposed to indicating that not all members of the wolf pack knew one another. We’re talking about a mob, not a bowling league. But the fact that Matias Reyes was among the assailants they couldn’t identify was supposed to prove they couldn’t possibly have all attacked the same woman.32 Wouldn’t it be more suspicious if the defendants had been able to name everyone else in the gang, but not Reyes?
The DA also claimed a multiple offender rape was not part of Reyes’s “pattern” and that he was a “loner” in his criminal behavior. This was apparently meant to demonstrate that Reyes, whose entire life was a welter of criminal violence and sexual depravity, was such a creature of habit that he would not have deigned to join a gang rape he stumbled into by accident.
Like horoscope readers, the DA picked out anything in the Central Park rape that matched Reyes’s other rapes, and ignored anything that didn’t fit, to prove a “pattern” in Reyes’s rapes. Thus, the DA’s report said:
• Reyes picked women who were Caucasian or “appeared to be Caucasian.”
In addition to being almost Caucasian, some of his victims were pregnant and some were not. One was his own mother and the others were not. One had her children with her during the rape and others did not. One was raped in her apartment, one in a church, one in a foyer, one while exercising in broad daylight in the park. Some he killed, some he let live. Some were attacked at night, some during the day, some indoors, some outdoors.
You see the pattern? Yes, gang rape is definitely outside Reyes’s pattern—why, it’s as different from his usual crimes as insider trading.
As for Reyes’s “pattern” of choosing white-ish women, that criterion would restrict his potential target list to a majority of the female population of Manhattan.
Reyes’s alleged “pattern” wasn’t even limited to rape and murder. He also shoplifted and committed robberies, usually by himself but sometimes with acquaintances. So he was capable of participating in multiple-offender crimes.
• All his rapes involved conversations with women as initial contact.
He didn’t have a “conversation” with the jogger, so the DA’s report quickly dismissed this as a deviation from his “pattern,” stating that it is “explained by the circumstances in which he targeted his victim.” If circumstances might propel him to vary his pattern to skip the formalities of his usual rapes, what if the “circumstances” were