Trisha Meili
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Trisha Meili (b. June 24, 1960), often described in the media as the Central Park Jogger, was the victim in a high-profile rape case in New York City in 1989. Raised in New Jersey and Pittsburgh, Meili received a B.A. from Wellesley College and an M.B.A. and M.A. from Yale University. She worked at the Wall Street investment bank Salomon Brothers, but went into seclusion for fourteen years following the crime. In 2003 she revealed her identity to the media, published a memoir, and began a career as an inspirational speaker.
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[edit] The crime
On April 19, 1989, the 28-year-old investment banker was violently assaulted while jogging in New York City's Central Park. In addition to being raped, she was beaten almost to death—when found, she was suffering from severe hypothermia and blood loss, and her skull had been fractured. The initial prognosis of her physicians was that she would die or remain in a permanent coma due to her injuries, but she recovered fully, with no memory of the event.
The crime, one of 3,254 rapes reported in New York that year, was unique in the level of public outrage it provoked. New York Governor Mario Cuomo told the New York Post, "This is the ultimate shriek of alarm."[1]
According to a police investigation, the culprits were gangs of teenagers who would assault strangers as part of an activity that became known as "wilding."[citation needed]
April 19 was known to have been a night when such a gang attack occurred, in which the suspects had gone to the park from Harlem with over 30 acquaintances. The group had indeed assaulted many parkgoers.
While many teenaged suspects were identified (or identified themselves) as assailants that night, only five were tried and convicted in 1990. Four of the juveniles charged officially confessed to the crime, and each implicated the others. (A fifth suspect, Yusef Salaam, made verbal admissions, but refused to sign a confession or make one on videotape. Salaam was, however, implicated by all of the other four, and convicted).
After the verdicts in 1990, one of the defense attorneys acknowledged that a strong defense was virtually impossible, because the only way he could have come up with an alibi for the defendants would have been to argue that they had been in a different part of the park assaulting and robbing other parkgoers at the time of the attack on the jogger.[citation needed]
Salaam's supporters and attorneys charged on appeal that he had been held by police without access to parents or guardians, but as the majority appellate court decision noted, that was because Salaam had initially lied to police in claiming to be 16, and had backed up his claim with a bus pass that indeed (falsely, as it turned out) said that he was 16. If a suspect has reached 16 years of age, his parents or guardians no longer have a right to accompany him during police questioning, or to refuse to permit him to answer any questions. Once Salaam changed his story about his age, police permitted his mother to be present.[citation needed]
Salaam later suggested to reporters from 60 Minutes that the victim was "faking" her injuries.[citation needed]
Over ten years later, the suspects' supporters claimed that the four suspects who had officially confessed had been coerced, even though each had confessed on videotape in the presence of a parent or guardian.[citation needed]
Yusef Salaam allegedly referred to the assault as "fun," while others described the assault in graphic detail. No DNA evidence tied the suspects to the crime, so the prosecution's case rested almost entirely on the confessions.[1]
One of the suspects' supporters, the influential Reverend Calvin O. Butts, of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem told the New York Times, "The first thing you do in the United States of America when a white woman is raped is round up a bunch of black youths, and I think that's what happened here."[1]
[edit] Convictions vacated
In 2002, convicted rapist and murderer Matias Reyes, serving a life sentence for other crimes but not, at that point, charged with this one, declared that he had committed the assault, and that he had acted alone. DNA evidence confirmed his participation in the crime. Supporters of the five defendants claimed their confessions had been coerced.
Based on Reyes' confession, and at the request of District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau, New York state justice Charles J. Tejada vacated the convictions of the five defendants on December 19, 2002. The decision was strongly opposed by Linda Fairstein who had overseen the original prosecution.
NYPD detectives complained that when they sought to re-open the case, following Reyes' public statement, representatives of District Attorney Morgenthau's office ordered inmates who knew Reyes to refuse to cooperate with the detectives, and that when D.A. Morgenthau's representatives interviewed detectives who had worked the case 13 years earlier, they forbade the detectives from consulting their notes.
Four of the defendants, having been tried as juveniles, had received shorter prison sentences and had already been free at the time. One remained in jail convicted for a later, unrelated crime.
[edit] Identification by the media
Because of continuing stigma associated with being the victim of a sexual crime, and the trauma that victims of such crimes often face, the American media generally do not reveal the identity of sexual assault victims. Thus, Meili was identified as the "Central Park Jogger" in most media. However, local television stations did release her name in the days immediately following the attack, and two black-owned newspapers, the City Sun and the Amsterdam News, and black-owned radio station WLIB continued to do so as the case progressed.[1] In 2003, Meili revealed her identity in an effort to help other victims and released a book I Am the Central Park Jogger ISBN 0-7432-4437-0
Contrary to normal police procedure, which stipulates that the names of suspects under the age of sixteen are also to be withheld, the names of the juveniles arrested in this case were released to the press before any of them had been formally arraigned or indicted, including one fourteen-year-old who was ultimately not charged.[1]
[edit] References
- ^ a b c d e Didion, Joan (January 17, 1991) "Sentimental Journeys" in The New York Review of Books, later collected in the book After Henry
[edit] External links
- Trisha Meili's professional site
- Connor, Tracy (October 20, 2002) "48 hours: Twisting trail to teens' confessions". New York Daily News [1]
- Michael F. Armstrong, et al. (January 27, 2003) "NYPD Review of the Central Park Jogger Case" [2]
- Timothy Sullivan (1992). Unequal Verdicts: The Central Park Jogger Trials. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-74237-X.
- Ryan, Nancy E. (December 5, 2002) "Affirmation in Response to Motion to Vacate Judgement of Conviction" [3]
- "Central Park Revisited" New York Magazine.
