DNA Evidence Exonerates Hitler!

Again a service for our readers in a hurry, Speed Coulter...

Title: DNA Evidence Exonerates Hitler!
Anti-Death penalty people bad.
Central Park rapists still bad people.
Liberals and the New York Times still support rapists.
Everyone convicted of anything is guilty.

Now if you still feel the need to read more, here it is:

Phony DNA exoneration project? Is DNA phony? Or is Coulter just saying that the cops and district attorneys never get the wrong guy? This is bizarre. All rational people know that mistakes are made, in both directions. Sometimes a guilty guy gets off (think OJ) and sometimes an innocent person gets railroaded.

And it never seems to occur to Coulter that some of these guys might actually be innocent.

Ok, forget DNA. Take the case of Anthony Porter. Convicted of murdering a couple in Chicago in 1982 and put on death row. There was NO physical evidenced, DNA or otherwise, tying him to the case. All the police had was the eyewitness testimony of one man named William Taylor, and Taylor had only named Porter after an all-night interview session with police--originally he had denied being able to see the shooter (who was some dozens of yards away at the time of the shooting). Taylor later recanted his testimony, claiming police coercion.

Investigators (anti-death penalty zealots, Coulter would say) tracked down the girlfriend of the actual murderer, who confessed when confronted by video-taped testimony by his girlfriend. The murder turned out to have been revenge for a bad drug deal.

Porter, a retarded man, had been represented by a lazy lawyer who had actually fallen asleep during the trial (and had done nothing to free his client after his conviction). Porter was finally released in 1999, after 17 years in prison.

The real murderer, Alstory Simon, was convicted later that year and sentenced to 37 years in prison.

There are many cases like Porter's. And others which are less clear, of course. No one is saying all death row inmates are innocent, but the risk that we might kill an innocent man is certainly one reasonable argument against the death penalty. If you're a reasonable person, that is. And I'm not saying that this argument is sufficient--you might think the risk of wrongful death is small enough to not be important--but it is pig-headedly blind of Coulter to pretend the argument has no validity because all these guys are really guilty.

Again!?! Ok, for those of you out there outside of New York, this is NOT a big story. Today's New York Times, for example, had NO articles on the Central Park case. None. Over the past weeks there has been some coverage, mostly on the back pages. This is not a big media issue. Most people are more concerned with the Washington sniper, with Iraq, with bombings in Israel, with the coming election, etc. Moreover, the tone of the coverage has been tame. No strident calls for release, just the facts about new evidence suggesting that these guys might not have been the real rapists.

Also, keep in mind that these guys were convicted and they have served their time. Nothing that goes on will free a rapist; guilty or innocent, these men are already free. So why is Coulter so obsessed? Interested, sure, but back to back articles?

And again, DNA evidence proves he did rape her. (Whether alone or not is, of course, harder to prove.)

What fanatics? Can Coulter name some names of involved anti-death penalty fanatics? As far as I can tell from the coverage, the only ones interested in exoneration are the men and their families, who are, naturally enough, biased.

How exactly does one link this rape case to anti-death penalty fanatics? Take me, for example. I am opposed to the death penalty. I am also in favor of putting rapists away for long prison terms. I'm not soft on crime, I just think it's not a good idea to kill guys who might be innocent. Put them away in prison and later on, if you've made a mistake, you can let them go. There are no do-overs with the death penalty.

Do I need to spell this out? Murders, rapists, robbers are bad! They should go to prison! We all think so, conservatives and liberals alike.

• Reyes' claim to have acted alone is supported by the fact that he does not know the five animals already convicted of the crime.
  
  This is preposterous. It is undisputed that about 30 savages were rampaging through Central Park the night of April 19, 1989, engaging in wolfpack attacks on joggers and bicyclists. The 30 savages didn't know one another any more than the mob of hoodlums molesting women after the 2000 Puerto Rican Day parade knew one another. Two defendants, Antron McCray and Raymond Santana, had never met their co-defendant, Yusef Salaam, until the night of the attack and did not know his name. This did not cause the jury any consternation before voting to convict all three.
  
  

That Reyes did not know any of the other men is not proof of anything, but it is not a lie either. It is negative evidence, in that it doesn't prove other guys weren't involved, but it would be very suggestive if he did know them. So the non-connection is a point worth making, if a minor one.

• Reyes is 31, much older than the defendants, "all of whom were 16 or younger at the time," as the Associated Press reported.
  
  The animals varied in age, but all were teenagers. In 1989, so was Reyes.
  
  

Again, proof of nothing, but suggestive. 18-year olds tend not to hang with 15/16-year olds.

• In the words of the criminal defense bar's sock puppet at the New York Times, Reyes had committed a "nearly identical crime" nearby days earlier.
  
  "Nearly identical" evidently refers to the fact that both crimes were: (1) rapes, (2) in a park. That's where the similarity ends. In the first rape, Reyes casually approached a woman doing tai chi in Central Park in the middle of the day and began chatting her up. When she moved away from him, he pounced, beating her about the head and raping her. Her screams attracted a man who broke off the attack.
  

  The gang rape of the jogger two days later was at night. It was an ambush. The victim was dragged 200 yards, rendered unconscious and left in a coma. The crimes are so dissimilar that, under the rules of evidence, one rape could not have been admitted into evidence in a trial of the other.

Keep in mind, we know that Reyes raped both women, differences notwithstanding.

• Reyes' claim to have committed the rape by himself is supported by the fact that acting alone "was typical of [Reyes'] other crimes" – as the New York Times put it.
  
  Reyes' "other crimes" include: rape, sodomy, robbery, burglary, raping and butchering a pregnant woman in the presence of her three children, a sexual attack on his mother, rape at night, rape in broad daylight, rape in a park, rape in a home, rape on a street, rape of a woman doing tai chi, attempted rape, simple rape and rape plus murder. The only "typical" characteristic of Reyes' crimes is their utter bestiality, which is not inconsistent with a gang rape.
  
  

A bestial loner. Again, no proof, but suggestive.

• As the New York Times' sock puppet excitedly reported, the rapes of the woman doing tai chi and the jogger "were the second and third of the year in the Central Park precinct."
  
  The idea that rape is such a rare occurrence in New York that only one rapist could possibly be responsible for both rapes is insane. There were 3,254 reported rapes in New York in 1989. Prolific though he was, Reyes had some help from other New York rapists.

But rape is rare in the park (believe it or not, Central Park is a low crime area); so a guy committing rape in the park may be part of a pattern. Rapists tend to use a set pattern in their attacks. Again, proof of nothing, but neither is this a "lie," as Coulter says.

"Every criminal exoneration"? How can Coulter spew this obvious lie? As for the Central Park case, the media is hardly trying to peddle anything in this case. Truth is, most of us don't know whether these guys are guilty, but we do know that confessions and witness statements are not always true, and so we wonder. But not very much. Among my liberal/radical/progressive/pinko friends there has been ZERO conversation on this issue. We'll spend our time bashing the president, but we aren't jumping up and down to see the Central Park convictions over-turned. Coulter is creating a media frenzy where there is none.

She also needs to get a lot less dependent on Lexis-Nexis for her ideas. (Although, I'll confess, ripping her ideas apart would be a lot harder for me if I didn't have access to Lexis-Nexis myself; it's a great tool, especially for a lazy writer.) Lexis-Nexis is not a repository of "facts", it is a database of articles. Written by journalists. You know, those liberally biased mendacious fellows Coulter so often condemns. What Lexis-Nexis proves all depends on which articles you choose to believe. And which you choose to ignore.

Finally, I didn't make a big deal of Coulter's use of borderline racist language ("savages" "feral beasts") because, well, it's mostly besides the point and I'm just worn out by her.

©2002 Carl Skutsch. All rights reserved.
All opinions expressed herein are those of the author unless otherwise noted
(and it goes without saying that they make more sense than Coulter's opinions.)

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