TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/082790/0827104.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.9 KB | 87 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 40

Guilty, Guilty, Guilty


Three defendants in the notorious Central Park Jogger case are
convicted of rape but not attempted murder


    Jurors on the case of three black youths charged with raping
and beating the young woman known as the Central Park Jogger
had spun the deliberations out for 10 days. It was enough to
make the prosecution fret about the outcome of its trial in
what prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer called "one of the most
vicious and brutal crimes in the history of New York." And
enough to inspire a futile defense motion for a mistrial on the
ground that jurors as fatigued as these could not arrive at a
fair verdict. Coming after a two-month-long trial conducted in
Manhattan amid sputtering racial tensions, the unexpectedly
long pause provoked the tabloid New York Post to fill its front
page with a boldface question that probably spoke for a great
many New Yorkers: WHERE'S THE VERDICT?

    When at last the jury of 10 men and two women handed it up
at 6:50 p.m. Saturday, it triggered emotional outbursts in the
jam-packed state supreme court. Relatives of the defendants
cheered at the first words of "not guilty" but grew solemn as
a stream of guilty verdicts followed. The jury reached
identical verdicts on each of the three defendants alleged to
have been part of a band of perhaps 30 youths whose maraudings
on the night of April 19, 1989, reached a hideous climax in the
raping and beating of a 5-ft. 5-in., 100-lb. 30-year-old
investment banker accosted while on one of her nightly runs.

    Antron McCray, 16, Raymond Santana, 15, and Yusef Salaam,
16, were found not guilty of attempted murder and sodomy but
guilty of all the other major charges -- rape, assault and
riot. Salaam had given the trial its most surprising twist when
he became the only defendant to take the stand; he was also the
only one of six youths indicted in the case who did not sign
a written confession or make incriminating admissions on
videotape. Each of the three, as a youthful offender, faces a
prison term of five to 10 years.

    As jury foreman Earle Fisher read the verdicts, the sitting
defendants displayed little emotion except for a couple of
sighs and conspicuous slumping. But there were shocked
mutterings of "Oh, my God!" and head shaking among families and
friends. The jogger herself made only one appearance at the
trial, testifying for 12 minutes and telling jurors she
remembered nothing about what had happened to her. Doctors
considered it "miraculous" that she recovered at all from the
bashings with a rock, a brick and a 12-in. metal pipe. Indeed,
her assailants had left her for dead, naked in a mud puddle and
gagged with her bloody shirt. When found, her skull badly
fractured, she had lost two-thirds of her blood, had a body
temperature of only 80 degrees and, doctors said, seemed close
to death. Though the victim returned to work on Wall Street
this year, she suffers a visibly scarred face as well as
lingering disabilities -- double vision, a lost sense of smell,
an unsteady gait from a damaged sense of balance.

    The courtroom had barely emptied before the postmortems
began. Two jurors confided that the attempted-murder charge
gave the panel the most trouble, leading to "shouting and
screaming." One juror, they said, had been holding out for a
not-guilty verdict on the rape and first-degree-assault charges
until the very last phase of the deliberations. Roy Innis,
director of the Congress of Racial Equality, commended the
verdicts as "intelligent," adding that it was "reasonable" that
the defendants were not found guilty of attempted murder,
since they had shown no premeditation. Speaking through a
friend, the jogger refused comment on the ground that other
defendants are still awaiting trial.


By Frank Trippett. Reported by Barbara Goldberg/New York.