Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
I thank the reader who sent me this story last night, minutes after it appeared online, exclaiming, “A TRAVESTY AND A DISGRACE MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE, A SICK JOKE.”
For once, all caps was the way to go.
There are some stories I’ve covered, where I felt like I could’ve and should’ve done more. This is not one of those stories. I did everything humanly possible, crossed all my T’s and dotted all my I’s, but still the bad guys won.
The five attackers are not entitled to one penny of taxpayers’ money. Their entire argument is that police and prosecutors engaged in misconduct against them. However, even Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau, when he applied to get their convictions vacated, denied that any police officers or prosecutors had engaged in misconduct.
In 1990, prior to the two split trials of the five attackers, Justice Thomas Galligan spent over seven weeks on a “Huntley Hearing” to determine whether the attackers’ confessions should be thrown out. He ruled them all admissible, as did the appeals court later.
The $40 million ghetto lottery the attackers just won is due to the evil of:
New York City Mayor Bill Wilhelm de Blasio;
The New York media; and
What I call the Burns Gang, of alleged documentary director Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah, and her husband, David McMahon.
DeBlasio wanted to rob New York’s white and Asian net taxpayers to give to the attackers, not in spite of their being guilty as hell, but because of it. DeBlasio hates whites, and loves black and Hispanic criminals.
Though the New York media initially did a decent job covering the crime, that was 25 years ago, and newsroom politics have gotten even more racist since then. Look at the New York Times article below. Even the headline is a lie: “5 Exonerated [sic] in Central Park Jogger Case Will Settle Suit for $40 Million.” The attackers were never exonerated, and that’s not simply my opinion, but a legal fact. Their convictions and sentences were vacated. In order for the attackers to have been exonerated, they would have had to have an evidentiary hearing and a new trial, neither of which happened.
In the fairy tale concocted by Jim Dwyer and main author Benjamin Weiser, the whole case rested on a phony story concocted by racist, crooked cops and prosecutors:
The initial story of the crime, as told by the police and prosecutors, was that a band of young people, part of a larger gang that rampaged through Central Park, had mercilessly beaten and sexually assaulted the jogger.
That wasn't a "story"; that was what happened. The Central Park Five may or may not have raped Trisha Meili, but they certainly did sexually abuse her, and they accused each other of having raped her. It's not the fault of police and prosecutors for having believed them.
That Jim Dwyer gets credit for working on the Times story is no surprise; he was a major accomplice of the Burns Gang.
Which brings us to the Burns Gang. Ken Burns admitted that his motivation in making his propaganda movie, The Central Park Five, with his daughter and son-in-law, was to get the attackers a(n undeserved) windfall. His daughter, Sarah, also wrote a book with the same name. The movie and book are both works of race fiction, which re-write history, to promote the racial fairy tale of police and prosecutorial abuse concocted by the attackers’ lawyers.
I have been following this case since the original crime, in April 1989. I have covered it since 2000. I have published exposés on it at Toogood Reports, Front Page Magazine, Middle American News (here and here ), and VDARE. My two most recent VDARE reports on the crime and the hoax which portrayed the five heinous, racist attackers as innocent victims of “racial profiling” appeared this spring:
“‘It Was Fun’—Robert K. Tanenbaum vs. the Central Park Five, 25 Years Later”; and
“Ken Burns’ The Central Park Five: The New To Kill a Mockingbird—Fiction Designed to Induce White Guilt.”
My reports include interviews with legal legends Robert K. Tanenbaum and Michael F. Armstrong. I have re-posted the exhaustive, 2003 investigative report researched and written for the NYPD, whose primary author was Michael F. Armstrong. ( I have also reposted the 16,000-word, 2002 affidavit by ADA Nancy Ryan of the DA’s Office, seeking to vacate the convictions of the admitted and confessed attackers, aka the “Central Park Five.”)
Yet another exhaustive, almost 23,000-word investigative report was authored by
Thomas Clough in 2002, and revised in 2003.
Finally, attorney and former Manhattan prosecutor Robert K. Tanenbaum wrote his own investigative report on the case.
5 Exonerated [sic] in Central Park Jogger Case Will Settle Suit for $40 Million
By Benjamin WeiserJune 19, 2014
The New York Times
The five men whose convictions in the brutal 1989 beating and rape of a female jogger in Central Park were later overturned have agreed to a settlement of about $40 million from New York City to resolve a bitterly fought civil rights lawsuit over their arrests and imprisonment for a sensational crime they did not commit.
The agreement, reached between the city’s Law Department and the five plaintiffs, would bring to an end an extraordinary legal battle over a crime that came to symbolize a sense of lawlessness in New York, amid reports of “wilding” youths and a marauding “wolf pack” that set its sights on a 28-year-old investment banker who ran in the park many evenings after work.
The confidential deal, disclosed by a person who is not a party in the lawsuit but was told about the proposed settlement, must still be approved by the city comptroller and then by a federal judge.
Times Topic: Central Park Jogger Case (1989)
The initial story of the crime, as told by the police and prosecutors, was that a band of young people, part of a larger gang that rampaged through Central Park, had mercilessly beaten and sexually assaulted the jogger. The story quickly exploded into the public psyche, fanned by politicians and sensational news reports that served to inflame racial tensions.
The five black and Hispanic men, ages 14 to 16 at the time of their arrests, claimed that incriminating statements they had given had been coerced by the authorities. The statements were ruled admissible, and the men were convicted in two separate trials in 1990.
In December 2002, a State Supreme Court judge vacated the men’s convictions after an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, found that DNA and other evidence showed that the jogger had been beaten and raped not by any of those convicted, but by only one man: Matias Reyes, a convicted rapist and murderer, who had confessed to the attack.
If approved, the settlement would fulfill a pledge by Mayor Bill de Blasio to meet a “moral obligation to right this injustice.”
The proposed settlement averages roughly $1 million for each year of imprisonment for the men. That amount would suggest that the city was poised to pay one of the men, Raymond Santana Jr. — served about seven years in prison.
The lawsuit had accused the city’s police and prosecutors of false arrest, malicious prosecution and a racially motivated conspiracy to deprive the men of their civil rights, allegations which the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg denied and fought vigorously for more than a decade in federal court.
In contesting the suit, the Bloomberg administration argued that the authorities had acted in good faith and with cause, and should not be held liable. In 2011, a senior corporation counsel lawyer said that the arrests had been supported by “abundant probable cause, including confessions that withstood intense scrutiny, in full and fair pretrial hearings and at two lengthy public trials.”
In early 2013, the city’s Law Department echoed those views. “The case is not about whether the teens were wrongly convicted,” a department spokeswoman said. “It’s about whether prosecutors and police deliberately engaged in misconduct.”
But in January, lawyers for Mayor de Blasio asked the court to delay the litigation so that the new corporation counsel, Zachary W. Carter, could “get up to speed on the facts and the circumstances” of the case. Later, the mayor said that Mr. Carter was “committed to making sure we get to that settlement quickly, some complicated issues, but we’re going to work through them very, very quickly.”
If the proposed settlement is approved by the comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, it would then be submitted for approval to Judge Deborah A. Batts of Federal District Court in Manhattan. In 2007, Judge Batts rejected the city’s motion to dismiss the suit and allowed most of the claims to proceed.
In such settlements, the city typically does not admit liability or wrongdoing; and any settlement with the five men would presumably include the legal fees and costs. Aides to Mr. de Blasio, Mr. Carter and Mr. Stringer all declined to comment on Thursday when asked about the discussions, as did Jonathan C. Moore, a lawyer representing four of the men. A lawyer for the fifth man did not return a message seeking comment.
The proposed deal comes not long after the city settled another longstanding legal case, involving the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk practices. In that litigation as well, Mr. de Blasio reversed the city’s long-held position, and he agreed to sweeping court-ordered reforms that the Bloomberg administration had tried to block on appeal.
[The order of the federal judge Shira Scheindlin, who ordered the so-called reforms, was thrown out on appeal, and she was removed from the case, based on an appeals court panel’s ruling that Judge Scheindlin was prejudiced and unethical. Thus, de Blasio did not agree to “sweeping court-ordered reforms,” but rather made a purely political decision, analogous to the way the Obama/Holder Justice Department won its case on default against the Nation of Islam’s New Black Panther Party division for violating white citizens’ voting rights in Philadelphia in 2008, but instead acted as if it had lost the case.]
The mayor made that announcement at a news conference in Brownsville, Brooklyn, where stop-and-frisk tactics had been widely used. He appeared with Mr. Carter; the police commissioner, William J. Bratton; and, in a show of unity, lawyers with groups that had sued the city.
Over the years, the men have consistently maintained their innocence in the rape of the jogger, Trisha Meili, who was left with no memory of the attack. (Years later, Ms. Meili revealed her identity and wrote a book, “I Am the Central Park Jogger.”) In prison, three of the men — Mr. Richardson, Mr. Salaam and Mr. Santana — maintained their innocence in the rape at parole hearings, where such a stance hurt their chances at a reduced term. At the hearings, the men acknowledged being in the park as part of a group of teenagers, some of whom committed assaults unrelated to the attack on Ms. Meili, and most expressed regret for the events, without going into specifics, transcripts show.
Mr. Santana indicated [“Indicated”? The word is, “confessed.”] in his hearing that [he] the larger group was out to rob people. “I took part in with the beatings of that man,” he said of one victim, adding, “If I could go back in time and not do it again, you know, it would have been a whole different story.”
The men’s lawyers have long said that their clients committed no crimes in the park that night.
In recent years, the case remained in the public eye, largely through a documentary, “The Central Park Five,” made by the filmmakers Ken Burns; his daughter, Sarah Burns; and her husband, David McMahon.
As recently as last Friday night, about 100 people gathered at the Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Brooklyn to view the film and to hear a talk by one of the men, Mr. Salaam. He described the stigma of living with the brand of being a rapist. “It wasn’t a popular thing to be one of us,” he said. The film, he added, “really gave us our lives back.”
At one point, he addressed the lawsuit. “Mayor de Blasio has said that he will settle this case for us and there has been some positive motion,” Mr. Salaam said, adding, “We’ve been waiting for 25 years for justice.”
[Salaam is the one who, at the time said, “It was fun,” and who three years later, in a 60 Minutes interview in jail claimed his victim was “faking” her injuries.]
Jim Dwyer contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on June 20, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: 5 Exonerated In Jogger Rape Agree to Settle .
6 comments:
NYC has insurance to pay for the "damages"
That will mean the taxpayers will pay an increased amount for the raise in the premiums.
I would like to see the victims [those attacked in the park] also sue the culprits for damages as well. I supposed some sort of statute of limitations apply however. They will get nothing.
Those fools will squander the money and do so pronto. Then claim they are indigent.
Burns and his crew have a definite affinity for the American negro.
Jack Johnson, Jazz, etc.
This is another sign of the decline and destruction of this society. This liberals(communists evils) are traitors to USA.
Great job on reporting the facts, as usual. If you really want to be outraged go to dailymail.uk and read their story and then the comments. It proves, once again, that "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
Nicholas, you're welcome and i thank you for the notice. Like you I remember the atrocity, having been living with my wife on E. 76 st. at the time, in my thirties and affiliated with the police dept. back then. You do a great service reminding people of the truth, which is being distorted for political reasons.
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