Harlem Says They’re Innocent: Thomas Clough’s Comprehensive Report on the Central Park Jogger Case, Part IV

Harlem Says They’re Innocent: Thomas Clough’s Comprehensive Report on the Central Park Jogger Case, Part IV

[“I. Preface”;

“II. The Crime: April 19, 1989”; and

“III. Harlem Goes Bonkers.”]

Harlem Says They’re Innocent

In their effort to win complete exoneration for the Jogger Five, those people “who always believed” in the innocence of the convicted rapists can offer no decisive evidence that the convicted rapists are not guilty; they can only offer the time-worn tactic of undermining the public’s faith in the police and the courts. Their friends at the left-leaning New York Times ferreted out one professor of psychology who would be willing to criticize the Jogger Five confessions in print. He is less than convincing.

In his article False Confessions and the Jogger Case Professor Saul Kassin says that “Every confession begins with a simple stripped-down admission: ‘I did it.’ But that’s not enough to prove guilt because people are too easily coaxed into compliance. To tell whether an admission is true, investigators seek proof in the form of a full post-admission narrative – a story from the suspect that tells what he did, how, when, where and why.” So far, so good.

The professor goes on to say that there are ways to assess the believability of a confession. He says we should search for factors that would increase the likelihood of coercion, “like the age and competency of the suspect as well as the conditions of custody and interrogation.” He adds, “Coercion increases the risk of a false confession, but does not guarantee it. Coerced confessions can be true. . .” He says, “A second step requires considering whether the confession contains details that are consistent with the statements of others, accurate in their match to the facts of the crime and lead to evidence unknown to the police.”

Professor Kassin then begins his assault on the Jogger Five confessions by admitting up front that “In the jogger case, the confessions appear voluntary, textured with detail, and the product of personal experience.” He then frets that the suspects were teenagers, “making them more compliant than the average adult.” He then tries to downplay the intimate presence of parents and guardians during the interrogations as though their presence were in dispute. This Williams College wizard is bothered that interrogations were conducted, on and off, for 14 or more hours. He does not mention that at the time of their apprehension the police knew nothing about the woman who was approaching death in a darkened Central Park ravine. The teens were being questioned about their assaults on nine other victims earlier in the night. The teens were near release when word came to the crowded station house that a woman had been savagely beaten; the suspects were then held for further questioning about this additional crime, so the total length of interrogation time was not a police tactic to extract confessions. Linda Fairstein, who resigned in February 2003 as head of the sex crimes unit after 30 years in the DA’s office, insists there was no coercion: “This was not an Alabama jail where two guys who have been partners for years put a guy in a back room and he doesn’t see light of day for three days.” She said that “for most of them, the substance of their admissions came out within about an hour of the time they came in.” The suspects were not handcuffed; they were interrogated in special ‘youth rooms’, not in bare interrogation rooms. She recalled that three of the five suspects went home and had a refreshing night’s sleep before they were taken in and nobody under 16 was quizzed until a parent or guardian arrived. Ms. Fairstein adds: “The consistency from their original admissions to the police, to their written statements, to the final video is really remarkable.” And: “I don’t think there’s a question in the minds of anyone present during the interrogation process that these five men were participants . . .in the attack on the jogger.”

Professor Kassin says, “The Central Park confessions are compelling precisely because they are so vividly detailed. Yet the narratives are filled with inconsistencies, contradictions and errors.” What the professor doesn’t tell us is that all eyewitness accounts of intensely emotional experiences include inconsistencies and errors. This gang rape was perpetrated by a pack of perhaps a dozen sexually excited teenagers at a dimly lit crime scene. They were engaged in a frantic ritual of male bonding, but the professor is bothered by Antron McCray’s mis-remembrance of what the jogger was wearing that night, as though she were his prom date. The professor doesn’t wonder if Antron can remember what the other nine victims were wearing in the park that night. Does Antron remember what the other twelve rapists were wearing? Why would Antron, or any of the other suspects, commit such random details to memory?

At one time it was believed that women made lousy eyewitnesses to crimes, so fictional crimes were staged under controlled conditions to find out why this was so. After the “crime,” male and female witnesses were asked to recall details of the staged performance. It was discovered that women were no worse than men as witnesses, but women tended to remember different details than did men. Men, as a group, were better at remembering the make and model of automobiles, the type of firearm used, dogs, and other men at the crime scene. Women were better at remembering the presence of children and other women and what people were wearing at the crime scene. So Professor Kassin can stop fretting about the fact that Antron didn’t remember that the jogger was wearing black tights and a long-sleeve jersey: guys just don’t remember such stuff and we shouldn’t expect them to remember it. The Central Park crime scene was a mass of confusion, something more akin to a night battle than to a garden party; the perps were concentrating on their sexual excitement, not on their victim’s fashion choices.

The most compelling aspect of the confessions is the fact that each of the suspects places himself at the crime scene, and each of them places other suspects at the crime scene. Inconsistencies between their confessions are largely due to their attempts to minimize their own criminal behavior. Their descriptions of how the jogger was punched, kicked, beaten with a rock and cut with a knife are more consistent with the forensic evidence than Matias Reyes’s assertion that he hit her with a tree stump and a rock. The professor insists that “a confession proves guilt if the accurate facts it contains are knowable only to the perpetrator.” The professor doesn’t mention that Kevin Richardson, immediately after his apprehension, right after he got in the police car, blurted out, “Antron did it.”
“Antron did what?” the cop inquired.
“The murder,” Richardson responded.
Richardson thought the little woman jogger was dead; he and Antron had left her for dead, but the police had yet to discover this crime: it was a fact known only to the perpetrators.

The professor finally admits that “this multi-step analysis does not compel the conclusion that the confessions were false.” Thanks for nothing, Professor Kassin.

Former Judge Theodore Kupferman, who served on the panel that upheld the conviction of Yusef Salaam, said that he doubts the detectives could have obtained false confessions from all five suspects: “The fact that they all seem to jibe seems strange to me if they’re not true.” When Yusef Salaam appealed his conviction, the majority opinion of the Court of Appeals was that the police employed no unlawful “deception or trickery” to obtain his conviction. The lone dissenter was Judge Vito Titone who was troubled that Yusef Salaam, who was 15, was denied the presence of his aunt during the early part of his interrogation, but Yusef had only himself to blame. Under New York law a suspect who is 16 years old can be interrogated alone. Yusef had insisted that he was 16 and he produced a bogus transit pass to convince the police. After Yusef’s aunt convinced the cops that Yusef was, in fact, 15 years old, the interrogation was immediately stopped and the aunt was united with her nephew. It may be that Yusef didn’t want his aunt present during his interrogation; a review of the other interrogations suggests that several of the suspects were uncomfortable about spilling the details of their gang rape in front of their female relatives. To characterize Yusef’s interrogation as an attempt to railroad him is nuts.

Defense attorneys are now seeking to have all the convictions vacated under section 440.10 on the grounds of “new evidence.” The new evidence includes the identification of Matias Reyes as a definite rapist of the jogger. The police have known for 13 years that there was a rapist who got away; they estimate that at least a dozen black and Hispanic teens participated in the gang rape, so this is not really new evidence. The defense will also offer as evidence Matias Reyes’s assertion that he acted alone.

Last of all, defense attorneys hope to vacate the convictions on a technicality, which is this: there was another rape in Central Park two days before the April 19th wilding spree. The police did not inform the defense about this rape because it seemed so different from the jogger attack. The police had arrested Matias Reyes, who admitted committing the April 17th assault. Peter Casolaro, senior assistant district attorney, said of Reyes’s confession to the earlier rape: “He didn’t know when it occurred. He didn’t know what time, the name of the victim.” Said Casolaro to Judge Tejada: “It took a great deal of time to determine that there was a crime. Then witnesses had to be tracked down, sometimes in other states.”

This explains why the defense lawyers weren’t informed of the earlier rape, but it also raises another question: how is it that the psychopath who was so confused about the details of a rape he had committed only two days earlier, now has total recall about the details of a rape he committed thirteen years ago? This just doesn’t pass the smell test. DNA evidence proves Reyes is a rapist, but everything that he says about the circumstances of the rape are questionable. One of Matias Reyes’ former attorneys, Richard Siracusa, told Newsday that Reyes is a classic psychopath who is “fully capable of doing what he has confessed to. I don’t think it’s made up, but you never know: guys like that . . .they can’t separate fact from fancy.” Siracusa represented Reyes after Reyes tried to attack his previous court-appointed attorney. At sentencing, Reyes punched Siracusa in the face.

The police have been criticized for not linking Reyes with DNA taken from a semen stain on the jogger’s sock. This is unwarranted. According to Barry Scheck, head of the Innocence Project, the computerized database which today automatically matches identical DNA evidence from different crimes did not exist in 1989. Without this computer-enabled ability to make such matches was not humanly possible for the police to make such a connection between the two crimes.

In their desperation to pin the responsibility for the jogger’s brutalization on Matias Reyes, and on him alone, the defenders of the Jogger Five have created a fictional version of Mr. Reyes that varies wildly from his true self. For example, defenders of the Jogger Five say that Reyes must have acted alone because he acted alone during his other rapes; they want you to believe that this psychopath had a perfectly consistent and unvarying modus operandi, that he was locked into only one mode of criminal behavior. But Reyes’ criminal history demonstrates that this is nonsense; there is no consistency to his behavior; he’s just nuts. He approached a woman in broad daylight, chatted her up, and then tried to molest her; he attacked a pregnant woman in her home and butchered her in front of her children; he raped his own mother; he committed a robbery; he committed a burglary; he committed a sodomy attack; he assaulted people indoors and outdoors, in daylight and at night. Joining a gang rape would have been just the next nutty thing for him to do. Reyes was 18 years old at the time of the Central Park gang rape; he would have fit right in. The suspects said that a guy they knew only as “Tony” committed the actual vaginal penetration. Reyes was using the nickname Tony at the time of the rape. Furthermore, the Jogger Five have said that the gang of about twelve teens who attacked the jogger included strangers whom they could not identify. The fact that this roving mob did not know one another is not unusual. The mob of creeps that molested women after the 2000 Puerto Rican Day parade didn’t know each other either; they were just sharing the spirit of the moment. There were 3,254 rapes reported in New York City in 1989 which averages almost nine every day; the real number is certainly higher. The notion that rape is a rare occurrence in New York City or that Matias Reyes must have raped the jogger all by himself because he had once before attempted to assault a woman in Central Park all by himself is simply preposterous. It’s high time the New York Times stopped stroking the defense team by reporting that Reyes had committed a “nearly identical crime” days earlier. It just isn’t so. And the math-challenged Associated Press should shut up about Reyes being 31 years old and therefore much older than the defendants, “all of whom were 16 or younger at the time.” Who writes this crap! Matias Reyes was 18 years old when he raped the jogger; Kharey Wise is 30 years old today. At the time of the gang rape they were all teenagers. Does an applicant have to fail an IQ test to get a job at the AP?

I. Preface
II. The Crime: April 19, 1989
III. Harlem Goes Bonkers
IV. Harlem Says They’re Innocent
V. The Harlem Spokesfolks Mobilize
VI. Three Detectives Remember
VII. A Prosecutor Remembers
VIII. The Star Witness
IX. His Story Stinks
X. The Confessions
XI. How Guilty is Harlem
XII. The Forgotten Victim
XIII. Update to the Central Park Rape Case
XIV. The Victim’s Doctor Breaks His Silence
XV. The Jogger Rape Saga Continues
XVI. Thursday, December 5, 2002
XVII. The Matias Reyes/Kharey Wise Connection
XVIII. Don’t Be Fooled
XIX. The End Game
XX. Here Comes the Judge
XXI. Is Nancy Ryan Trustworthy?
XXII. Nancy Ryan’s Twisted Vision
XXIII. Twisted Justice


Additional Material

Stix: “‘It Was Fun’—Robert K. Tanenbaum vs. the Central Park Five, 25 Years Later”; and

Stix: “Ken Burns’ The Central Park Five: The New To Kill a Mockingbird—Fiction Designed to Induce White Guilt.”

(N.S.: These were not the first reports I wrote on the Central Park Jogger case. I’d already written many, going back at least to 2000.)

“The Report That Ken Burns Doesn’t Want You to Read: The Armstrong Report on the Central Park Five’s Many Violent Crimes, and Matias Reyes”