Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [121]
• All his rapes involved violence and robbery—in particular, stolen Walkmans.
This is like saying Reyes’s rapes involved violence and robbery—in particular, stolen money. Walkmans were very common in the eighties and, thus, common items of theft. Can we get the Innocence Project on the record agreeing that robbery of small electronics during a rape constitutes a unique criminal pattern, admissible against a defendant in court as a prior bad act?
• He asked his victims for their pin numbers and he claims he asked the Central Park jogger for her address.
An address isn’t a pin number, which raises another dissimilarity ignored by the DA’s whitewash. Reyes usually raped women who would have their wallets on them in order to carry out the “robbery” part of his pattern. But we know he raped the jogger, so evidently he was capable of varying this part of his “pattern,” too.
In the end—as had been planned from the beginning—the DA’s report concluded that had the jury known about Reyes’s raping the jogger, they might have found the five defendants innocent—even though the juries knew there were other rapists who got away. On the DA’s theory of “new evidence,” no gang rape can ever be prosecuted unless every single perpetrator is caught right away. Otherwise, any rapists who escaped can always materialize five years later and the original convictions will have to be tossed.
What new information did Reyes’s confession add to what the juries knew? “Others who were not caught raped her and got away”—as the prosecutor told them—pretty clearly captures the idea that others raped her and got away.
While the DA’s office was formulating preposterous excuses to find the five convicted rapists innocent, the New York Police Department was also reexamining evidence. Among the people they reinterviewed was Ronald Williams, who had told police back in 1989 that when he bumped into Kharey Wise the day after the attack, Wise had said, “You heard about that woman that was beat up and raped in the park last night. That was us!” When Matias Reyes unveiled his stunning single-perpetrator theory in 2002, the police reinterviewed Williams. He recalled Wise’s admission precisely and stood by his account.33
If only we had some way of sorting out these facts that relied on uniform rules of evidence. What we need is a group of unbiased decision-makers drawn from all walks of life—we could call them “jurors”!
But that’s not how the Central Park rape case was finally resolved. It was decided not by multicultural juries hearing both sides and carefully weighing the evidence, but in law offices and pressrooms by a remarkably undiverse group of mostly Irish and Jewish college-educated New Yorkers, who lied about the evidence in order to vindicate a mob and destroy trust in the judicial system.
This was a bigger victory for the Left than forcing Nixon to resign in 1974.
After the convictions were vacated, the five who had been convicted promptly brought a $250 million lawsuit against the city, and Ken Burns announced he was making a documentary about the “Central Park Five,” as liberals dubbed the jury-convicted rapists.
Even the fairest judicial system is not infallible. There will always be human error and human malice. This is why the criminal justice system is carefully designed to err on the side of innocence at every step of a criminal prosecution. The guilty are constantly being set free. Incriminating evidence is thrown out at the drop of a hat. Not so, evidence of innocence. The criminal justice system is a one-way, pro-defendant ratchet. So is the media, the difference being that in court, evidence of guilt is not actually prohibited.
Still, some truly innocent people have been falsely accused and sent to prison. But liberals don’t care about the truly innocent: They want to spring the guilty. The child-hysteria