Gray lady

About AntiCoulter
• Why AntiCoulter?
• Who Is AntiCoulter?

Writing On Coulter
• Evil Or Just Stupid?
• Couric, Coulter, Context
• The Misunderstood Liberal
• With Friends Like These...
• Coulter Gets Fired
• Donahue Interview
• Gene Lyons Sums Her Up
• Coulter fascist?
• Old Larry King transcript

Lies, Damned Lies, And Coulter Columns
• 12/18: Democrats Lott

• 12/4: Wilding Part 3
• 11/27: Beauty Pageants
• 11/20: Gray lady
• 11/13: Democrat giving
• 11/6: Voter Intimidation
• 10/30: Muslim Makeover
• 10/23: Wilding Part 2
• 10/16: Wilding
• 10/09: Hot Air on Iraq
• 10/02: Crooked Dems
• 9/25: We hate them
• 9/18: Arabs in a bar
• 9/11: Adolf
• 9/04: Murder for Prophet
• 8/28: Battered Republicans
• 8/21: Gay Marines
• 8/14: Make Liberals...Rare
• 8/07: Nuclear Annihilation
• 7/31: Working families
• 7/24: About Money
• 7/17: Call her Mrs.
• 7/10: More slander

Humor & Miscellany
• T-Shirt Concept, v 1.0
• Coulter vs. Mr. T
• How To Write A Column
• Her Fans Speak Out…
• Coulter Quotes
• Things We Like About Ann

Contacts & Links
• The Mailbag

• Contact AntiC
• Contribute To AntiC
• Links We Like
• Pro-Coulter Links

Media Support Citizenship Awards For Central Park Rapists
by Ann Coulter
December 4, 2002

HOPING FOR A different result, journalists are re-litigating the Central Park rape case in their pages, skipping the fuss and bother of the adversary process. The New York Times recently announced that "so far," there is "almost nothing to back the original findings of guilt." That's if you don't count 10 videotaped confessions and five guilty verdicts rendered by two duly constituted juries.

Look, I know Coulter fans read this thing, so this is to them: Do you really take this woman seriously? This is her THIRD article in a few weeks on the same rape case, and it is as idiotic as the rest of them.

Do you really think that the New York Times, journalists, and liberals in general, really want to find vicious criminals not guilty? Do you buy Coulter's claim that we're all soft on crime? Do we liberal types stay up late at night wringing our hands and saying, "My god, how can we sleep while psychotic rapists still languish behind bars?" Honestly, I don't get this. I think violent criminals belong behind bars. I think New York Times reporters think the same thing. So why make a fuss over this case? It's not because we're eager to see rapists go free. Simply put, there is some evidence, DNA evidence, that the five men convicted for the Central Park rape may in fact be innocent of this crime. That's all. And yet Coulter meanders on in her insanity. I find her increasingly uninteresting (how interesting can a shrill lunatic be?) but I find that her audience's loyalty continues to fascinate. Any of you want to offer up a defense of her on this particular topic?

On the substance of the above Coulter paragraph, I'll point out that the quote she offers up is not really so "recent." It's from an October 20 article which lists the many cases in which a confession was later proved to be false (one case had a guy confessing, and then they found a video camera surveillance tape showing that he was just innocently standing around somewhere else when the crime was committed). It's weird, I know, but true: people falsely confess for a lot of strange reasons. I'm actually grateful to Coulter because the article was an interesting read, covering trials and cases I'd never heard of. For instance, there was the Whitmore case, in which George Whitmore confessed to killing two young girls in a famous case (the "Career Girl" killing of 1963). It was later proven that his confession was completely false. Here's a chunk of the article:

"The Whitmore case weighed heavily in legislative debates in 1965, when the state dropped the death penalty for most crimes. In 1966, the United States Supreme Court mentioned the Whitmore confession in the landmark Miranda ruling, which held that a person suspected of a crime must be informed of the right to a lawyer and of the right to remain silent. In a television movie, the Wylie-Hoffert killings were renamed the Marcus-Nelson murders, featuring a fictional lollipop-licking bald detective named Kojak. A television series ran for years."

But don't fall for the cheap substitute of a trial by jury when there are one-sided accounts available in the pages of the Times!

As part of the media's continuing series on how every criminal is innocent, except asbestos manufacturers and abortion clinic protesters, the Los Angeles Times said of the Central Park rapists: "Jurors were swayed by physical evidence during the trial, such as a blond hair apparently from the victim found on one teenager's clothes. New forensic testing has shown that the hair did not come from the jogger."

If reporters bothered to do research rather than accepting whatever the "Innocence Project" tells them, they would know that the lone hair evidence used against defendant Kevin Richardson could not possibly have "swayed" the jurors.

It was presented as evidence to the jury. Of course it could have swayed the jurors. It is deliberately obtuse for a lawyer like Coulter to say otherwise. The evidence was challenged by defense attorneys, of course, but the jury might choose to ignore the challenging (which doesn't sound very rigorous) and say to themselves: "Well, the blond hair might have come from somewhere else, but it's still pretty darn suggestive."

According to AP reports at the time, the most powerful testimony about the hairs found on Richardson's clothes came from a detective who boldly proclaimed: The hairs "could have" come from the jogger. On cross-examination, he admitted that "he could not determine that a hair definitely came from a specific individual." He also said "that hair could end up on someone's clothing by casual contact or from being airborne."

On the other hand, evidence tending to implicate Richardson included this:

-- He led prosecutors to the scene of the crime. -- There were dirt and grass stains in the crotch of his undershorts. -- He confessed on videotape to being at the scene of the attack. -- He gave a detailed description of the attack. -- He admitted that the deep scratch wound on his cheek was inflicted by the jogger.

Did Coulter actually read that Oct 20 New York Times article? Whitmore also confessed, gave detailed descriptions, and described his exact route in killing those two girls who he didn't kill.

But wait! The "Innocence Project" has produced an 11th-hour confession from a sixth rapist, Matias Reyes. Stunning no one but gullible reporters, he claims he acted alone. As is always the case with surprise confessions exonerating others, Reyes faces no penalty for this confession. To the contrary, Reyes is surely the toast of his cellblock -- where, by happen stance, he is serving time with another Central Park rapist, Kharey Wise. The statute of limitations has run on the rape and Reyes is already serving life in prison.

And DNA evidence absolutely links Reyes to the rape. He raped her, that's a fact. Could other people have helped him? Sure, that's possible, but there's evidence that suggests otherwise (including the lack of any DNA links to any of the convicted men).

Compare Reyes' new confession to the videotaped confessions of the five animals back in 1989. Their confessions would land them in prison. These were "statements against interest" in the strongest sense of the phrase. And yet, they still confessed. Their confessions were tested in court, attacked by defense counsel, and believed by two unanimous juries.

And, again, many people have falsely confessed in the past.

Here's another case (recently made into a movie for the Court TV channel):
"In California, Michael Crowe, 14, and two friends confessed in 1998 to murdering his sister in her bedroom. When the defense lawyers argued that the confessions were coerced, the prosecutor raised an obvious rebuttal: How could three people each give a false confession to the same crime? Part of the explanation, say social scientists who examined the case, is that the teenagers were tricked and told that they had failed a "voice stress" test that showed they were lying. They were also told that their friends were implicating them in the crime. Under those circumstances, the social scientists say, a false confession may seem like an exit ramp from an impossible predicament, just as a bear might chew off its own foot to escape from a trap."
"As it turned out, the police had already collected the clothing of a mentally ill 31-year-old man who had been knocking on doors in the neighborhood that night. Three spots of the victim's blood were found on his clothes. That man was charged with the killing in May. The charges against the teenagers have been dropped, and the state attorney general says they were not involved in the murder."

Does Coulter have an answer for that one? I wonder.

But liberals treat these confessions as laughable frauds. Only Reyes' literally inconsequential confession is treated like Holy Scripture.

Inconsequential? Yes, it's true that the statue of limitations has expired for this rape, but this doesn't make his confession, BACKED BY CONCLUSIVE DNA EVIDENCE, any less accurate.

The odds of an innocent man being found guilty by a unanimous jury are basically nil. When the media assert a convict was "exonerated," they mean his conviction was thrown out on a technicality. Up and down the criminal justice system, guilty criminals are constantly being set free. Evidence of guilt 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, in court, evidence of guilt is not actually prohibited.

That is one of the stupidest sentence I've ever read. "The odds of an innocent man being found guilty by a unanimous jury are basically nil." In the previous "Wilding 2" article commentary I gave an example--and there are many, many, many examples--of a man not only exonerated, but whose crime was later laid at the door of another man, who was then convicted for that same crime. How does Coulter solve that paradox? Two men separately convicted of the same crime? I guess the chances of that happening would be, well, about nil.

Consider only the odds of a false confession leading to a conviction. If the judge believes a confession is not an expression of free will, the confession will be thrown out. If the jury believes a confession is not an expression of free will, the confession will be thrown out. If an appeals court finds the confession was not voluntary, it will be thrown out. If the police fail to read the suspect his Miranda rights, the confession will be thrown out. If the defendant lyingly claims he was not read his Miranda rights and gets some appeals court to believe him, the confession will be thrown out. If the police question a juvenile outside the presence of his parents, the confession will be thrown out.

The videotaped confessions of the animals convicted in the Central Park attack were not thrown out. They were admitted into evidence and believed by two unanimous juries.

In 10 videotaped statements, members of the wolf pack implicated one another as well as themselves. They corroborated aspects of one another's stories. The police obtained statements from literally dozens of teenagers who were in the park the night the jogger was attacked. In the end, only five of those who gave statements were prosecuted for the attack on the jogger.

Anton McCray: "We was at the tennis courts and then we seen this lady jogging lady. She had on blue shorts and a white, white shirt. (The crime took plays almost half a mile away from the tennis courts and the jogger was wearing a white shirt and long black running tights.)

Consider that when the savages confessed, it was still possible that the jogger would emerge from her coma, remember everything, and identify her attackers with blinding clarity. Of course, if that had happened, we would now be reading copious articles in The New York Times about how head injuries can easily distort memory and render eyewitness testimony unreliable.

It is more likely that the Central Park jogger was raped by space aliens than that Matias Reyes acted alone. But through their loud-mouthed lobbying in the media, criminal defense lawyers are determined to turn these beasts into their latest Sacco and Vanzetti case.

This woman has no respect for the truth. If you can think well of her, I can have no respect for you.

Again, I don't know if these men were connected to the crime, but it is a blatant falsehood to say that false confessions do not occur and do not convict innocent men. It is a blatant falsehood to say that the hair evidence, put before the jury, could not have swayed them. It is a blatant falsehood to say that juries never convict innocent men. It is a blatant falsehood to say that the media is eager to turn criminals free. This article is a story of distortion from start to finish. It is intellectually dishonest, and I can say no worse of any writer.

graphics & design by pixelforge