Other Articles & Features on the Manhattan's DA's Expected Bombshell Announcement:
From The New York Amsterdam News:
Will it ever end?
As we go to press, there is every indication, including the impressions of the NYPD, that Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau will recommend that the convictions of the Central Park Five be overturned.
This recommendation, more than any other evidence, will probably be based on the confession of Matias Reyes, who said he is solely responsible for raping the investment banker in April 1989. The Central Park Jogger case, as it has come to be known, was reopened last January after Reyes, 31, who is serving a long prison sentence for raping another woman, admitted he raped the woman and then bludgeoned her to within inches of her life. The victim lost 75 percent of her blood and remained in a coma for 12 days. Later, a DNA test confirmed that semen found on the victim's garments belonged to Reyes.
If justice is given its full measure, as attorney Michael Warren has said often during his representation of three of the five defendants – all of whom have served their sentences for their alleged role in the crime – the young men will also be absolved of the other convictions that the DA could retain, including assaults on other people in the park that night.
''Anything short of complete exoneration would be further miscarriage of justice,'' said Councilman Bill Perkins of Harlem. ''The district attorney has a legal and moral obligation to present the facts and evidence of his investigation in a fair and impartial manner and to render his decision based on such.''
From Newsday:
It's Decision Day
With prosecutors expected today to recommend vacating the convictions in the Central Park jogger case, lawyers for the five men found guilty of the notorious 1989 rape said their clients would accept nothing less than full exoneration.
The attorneys' declarations on the eve of Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's long-awaited move drew support from Councilman Bill Perkins (D-Harlem), who contended that anything short of erasing the five's guilty verdicts for robbery and assault, as well as the brutal sex attack, "would be a further miscarriage of justice."
If Manhattan prosecutors recommend that the Central Park jogger convictions be thrown out, it could be the largest multi-defendant case ever overturned on faulty confessions, legal experts said yesterday.
District Attorney Robert Morgenthau could ask that all or some of the convictions of the five defendants be expunged, perhaps because of problems with their statements to police or on some other grounds.
According to attorney Peter Neufeld, who runs the nonprofit Innocence Project at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in Manhattan, the largest single instance of defendants exonerated after convictions based on a confession involved four teens in Chicago.
Jogger Defendants: Full Exoneration
With prosecutors on Thursday due to say whether they will move to vacate the convictions in the Central Park jogger case, lawyers for the five men who were found guilty of the 1989 rape said they would accept nothing less than full exoneration. The attorneys’ declarations on the eve of the dramatic courtrom development rippled through the city’s political scene, with Harlem Councilman Bill Perkins contending that anything less than erasing the five’s convictions for robbery and assault as well the brutal rape “would be a further miscarriage of justice.”
As co-counsel Eric Seiff put it at an emotionally charged news conference, “If a loaf of bread is 63 pe cent rotten, you don’t nibble at the other 37 percent” — a reference to the men’s central assertion that their confessions to raping the jogger was coerced by the police.
At the center of the gathering drama stands Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who, sources said, is expected, at minimum, to ask the court to toss out the rape conviction.
(Also check out the great graphic accompanying the above article.)
From The New York Daily News:
DA wants to toss jogger verdicts
Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau intends to ask a judge today to throw out all the convictions related to the Central Park wilding attacks, law enforcement sources told the Daily News last night.
And last and most definitely least, from The New York Joke Post:
CLEARED
Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau is expected to ask a judge today to throw out all the convictions against five youths who confessed to sexually assaulting a jogger during a 1989 "wilding" spree in Central Park, police sources told The Post.
{Don't bother believing this preposterous story from the nutjobs at the Post!}
Posted by ronn at December 5, 2002 08:08 AM