Okay, admittedly Ted Rall and Michael Moore give her a run, but for my money there is no bigger idiot in the punditocracy these days than Ann Coulter. Coulter’s column on the Central Park jogger case is simply reprehensible. It’s right up there with Ted Rall’s neverending screed about how the war in Afghanistan is about oil — except that Coulter is a better writer and makes her insanity seem halfway reasonable, whereas Rall writes like the crank that he is.
The short version is five several young men were sent to jail for the rape and near murder of a Central Park jogger in an incident that garnered national attention. Several of the men gave videotaped confessions, witnesses placed them at the scene, and in at least some of the cases, physical evidence such as hair samples, linked the young men to the crime.
None of the young men was helped by the fact that their main defense was a veiled argument that they were busy committing other crimes at the time of the rape (they had apparently gone to Central Park to mug people).
Over the past couple months, however, the case against the men has completely unraveled. Matias Reyes, 31, came forward recently and claimed that he, and he alone, raped the Central Park jogger. Reyes is already in jail on murder and serial rape charges — rapes that took place in Central Park.
It was then a simple matter to compare Reyes DNA to that of the only semen sample obtained from the jogger which had never before been linked to anyone. And it came back that Reyes was telling the truth — he had raped the Central Park jogger.
Similarly, a strand of blond hair was found on one of the men and at trial introduced as possibly belonging to the jogger. But more sophisticated DNA tests have since proved that it did not belong to her at all.
That is more than enough evidence to warrant overturning the verdicts of the five men convicted of the rape — something that even the woman who prosecuted them and still thinks they played some role in the attacks agrees with. But not Coulter. According to Coulter, this is just a case of the liberal media run amok. According to Coulter,
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.
The odds of a jury making a mistake are “basically nil”? What planet is she living on? Coulter slams Barry Scheck’s Innocence Project but fails to note they have found numerous examples of people being sentenced to death who were actually innocent. In non-capital cases, dozens of inmates around the country have been released from prison thanks to DNA tests that showed their convictions were flawed (such evidence is especially useful in rape cases, where more sophisticated DNA tests available today have freed an unsettling number of men falsely imprisoned for crimes they did not commit).
Coulter focuses on the confession of the young men, claiming that,
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.
And yet there are plenty of examples of people confessing to crimes they did not commit. In fact she might wish to read up about the Satanic conspiracy prosecutions of the 1980s where numerous defendants confessed to crimes they could not possibly have committed (and in all too many cases, juries convicted based on these ludicrous confessions).
One of the major problems is that police videotape the final confession, but rarely videotape the questioning period leading up to the confession (some jurisdictions require videotaping of all questioning — this should be mandatory nationwide). So jurors get to see a very accurate depiction of the 30 minute confession, but no such record exists of the previous 14 hours (or longer) of questioning.
Much the same problem exists with eyewitness testimony. People like to imagine that they know what they’ve seen and they like to grant the same courtesy to others, but the reality is that confessions and eyewitness testimony is often extremely unreliable due to the way that police collect such information. A recent study of police suspect lineup and photo lineup techniques, for example, noted that such techniques were often set up in such a way as to dramatically increase the risk of a false positive.
But Coulter dismisses any such consideration with nonsensical claims like, “It is more likely that the Central Park jogger was raped by space aliens than that Matias Reyes acted alone.” Why this idiot is so popular with some conservatives and right wingers continues to amaze me.
Source:
Media support citizenship awards for Central Park rapists. Ann Coulter, WorldNetDaily, December 4, 2002.