british study shows false rape claims are complicated matters

[niyad]

44. this from The Nation about this case (you are correct, it has NOTHING to do with the victim)

 
On April 16, PBS broadcast The Central Park Five, a film by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon. The documentary, based on Sarah’s book of the same name, reviews the hysteria that accompanied the 1990 trial of five young men accused of raping and beating Trisha Meili as she was jogging. Those young men—Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray, Korey Wise and Kevin Richardson—were exonerated in 2002 when convicted murderer Matias Reyes confessed, and his DNA was found to match the evidence from Meili’s rape and a string of other unsolved rapes in or near the park.



I sat in on the trial and have written in these pages about my concern that there was no evidence linking the defendants to the crime (“Reasons for Doubt,” December 12, 2002). The footprints and semen didn’t match; there was no blood or mud on the defendants’ clothing; their supposed confessions were factually wrong; and one police officer testified that the wording in three of the written confessions was his own. A forensic expert testified that the hair samples were “more consistent” with Caucasian than African-American hair, but the prosecution successfully argued that this meant they were not inconsistent. Even after their exoneration, prosecutor Linda Fairstein maintained that the young men had to have been responsible for a number of other park muggings that night, but the timeline does not add up, and none of the victims of those muggings were able to conclusively identify any of the defendants. Finally, no less than Bob Herbert called the victim “the single most effective and sympathetic witness I have ever seen.” Sympathetic she surely was. Except that she didn’t “witness” anything related to the defendants; her injuries were so severe she could remember nothing about the attack.

If ever there was a cautionary tale about why our system presumes innocence, this was it. Yet as Herbert has reflected, in 1990 New Yorkers, including himself, “wanted them to be guilty. And when a desire is strong enough it can overwhelm such flimsy stuff as facts and truth. Reality is a funny thing. It is what we say it is.” Alas, that’s not the definition of reality: it’s the definition of a lie, imposed violently, carelessly, with the full power of the state. So what is the takeaway from the ruined lives of five young men?

. . . .

http://www.thenation.com/article/173910/lessons-central-park-five#