There were, early on, certain aspects of this case that seemed not well handled by the police and prosecutors, and others that seemed not well handled by the press. It would seem to have been tactically unwise, since New York State law requires that a parent or guardian be present when children under sixteen are questioned, for police to continue the interrogation of Yusef Salaam, then fifteen, on the grounds that his Transit Authority bus pass said he was sixteen, while his mother was kept waiting outside. It would seem to have been unwise for Linda Fairstein, the assistant district attorney in charge of Manhattan sex crimes, to ignore, at the precinct house, the mother’s assertion that the son was fifteen, and later to suggest, in court, that the boy’s age had been unclear to her because the mother had used the word “minor.”
It would also seem to have been unwise for Linda Fairstein to tell David Nocenti, the assistant U.S. Attorney who was paired with Yusef Salaam in a “Big Brother” program and who had come to the precinct house at the mother’s request, that he had “no legal standing” there and that she would file a complaint with his supervisors. It would seem in this volatile a case imprudent of the police to follow their normal procedure by presenting Raymond Santana’s initial statement in their own words, cop phrases that would predictably seem to some in the courtroom, as the expression of a fourteen-year-old held overnight and into the next afternoon for interrogation, unconvincing:
On April 19, 1989, at approximately 20:30 hours, I was at the Taft Projects in the vicinity of 113th St. and Madison Avenue. I was there with numerous friends…. At approximately 21:00 hours, we all (myself and approximately 15 others) walked south on Madison Avenue to E. 110th Street, then walked westbound to Fifth Avenue. At Fifth Avenue and 110th Street, we met up with an additional group of approximately 15 other males, who also entered Central Park with us at that location with the intent to rob cyclists and joggers…
In a case in which most of the defendants had made videotaped statements admitting at least some role in the assault and rape, this less than meticulous attitude toward the gathering and dissemination of information seemed peculiar and self-defeating, the kind of pressured or unthinking standard procedure that could not only exacerbate the fears and angers and suspicions of conspiracy shared by many blacks but open what seemed, on the basis of the confessions, a conclusive case to the kind of doubt that would eventually keep juries out, in the trial of the first three defendants, ten days, and, in the trial of the next two defendants, twelve days. One of the reasons the jury in the first trial could not agree, Manhattan Lawyer reported in its October 1990 issue, was that one juror, Ronald Gold, remained “deeply troubled by the discrepancies between the story [Antron] McCray tells on his videotaped statement and the prosecution’s scenario”:
Why did McCray place the rape at the reservoir, Gold demanded, when all evidence indicated it happened at the 102nd Street crossdrive? Why did McCray say the jogger was raped where she fell, when the prosecution said she’d been dragged 300 feet into the woods first? Why did McCray talk about having to hold her arms down, if she was found bound and gagged?
The debate raged for the last two days, with jurors dropping in and out of Gold’s acquittal [for McCray] camp….
After the jurors watched McCray’s video for the fifth time, Miranda [Rafael Miranda, another juror] knew it well enough to cite the time-code numbers imprinted at the bottom of the videotape as her rebuffed Gold’s arguments with specific statements from McCray’s own lips. [McCray, on the videotape, after admitting that he had held the victim by her left arm as her clothes were pulled off, volunteered that he had “got on top” of her, and said that he had rubbed against her without an erection “so everybody would … just know I did it.”] The pressure on Gold was mounting. Three jurors agree that it was evident Gold, worn down perhaps by his own displays of temper as much as anything else, capitulated out of exhaustion. While a bitter Gold told other jurors he felt terrible about ultimately giving in, Brueland [Harold Brueland, another juror who had for a time favored acquittal for McCray] believes it was all part of the process.
“I’d like to tell Ronnie someday that nervous exhaustion is an element built into the court system. They know that,” Brueland says of court officials. “They know we’re only going to be able to take it for so long. It’s just a matter of, you know, who’s got the guts to stick with it.”
So fixed were the emotions provoked by this case that the idea that there could have been, for even one juror, even a moment’s doubt in the state’s case, let alone the kind of doubt that could be sustained over ten days, seemed, to many in the city, bewildering, almost unthinkable: the attack on the jogger had by then passed into narrative, and the narrative was about confrontation, about what Governor Cuomo had called “the ultimate shriek of alarm,” about what was wrong with the city and about its solution. What was wrong with the city had been identified, and its names were Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Kharey Wise, Kevin Richardson, and Steve Lopez. “They never could have thought of it as they raged through Central Park, tormenting and ruining people,” Bob Herbert wrote in the News after the verdicts came in on the first three defendants.
There was no way it could have crossed their vicious minds. Running with the pack, they would have scoffed at the very idea. They would have laughed.
And yet it happened. In the end, Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray and Raymond Santana were nailed by a woman.
Elizabeth Lederer stood in the courtroom and watched Saturday night as the three were hauled off to jail…. At times during the trial, she looked about half the height of the long and lanky Salaam, who sneered at her from the witness stand. Salaam was apparently to dumb to realize that Lederer — this petite, soft-spoken, curly-haired prosecutor — was the jogger’s avenger….
You could tell that her thoughts were elsewhere, that she was thinking about the jogger.
You could tell that she was thinking: I did it.
I did it for you.
Do this in remembrance of me: the solution, then, or so such pervasive fantasies suggested, was to partake of the symbolic body and blood of The Jogger, whose idealization was by this point complete, and was rendered, significantly, in details stressing her “difference,” or superior class. The Jogger was someone who wore, according to Newsday, “a light gold chain around her slender neck” as well as, according to the News, a “modest” gold ring and “a thin sheen” of lipstick. The Jogger was someone who would not, according to the Post, “even dignify her alleged attackers with a glance.” The Jogger was someone who spoke, according to the News, in accents “suited to boardrooms,” accents that might therefore seem “foreign to many native New Yorkers.” In her first appearance on the witness stand she had been subjected, the Times noted, “to questions that most people do not have to answer publicly during their lifetimes,” principally about her use of a diaphragm on the Sunday preceding the attack, and had answered these questions, according to an editorial in the News, with an “indomitable dignity” that had taught the city a lesson “about courage and class.”
This emphasis on perceived refinements of character and of manner and of taste tended to distort and to flatten, and ultimately to suggest not the actual victim of an actual crime but a fictional character of a slightly earlier period, the well-brought-up virgin who briefly graces the city with her presence and receives in turn a taste of “real life.” The defendants, by contrast, were seen as incapable of appreciating these marginal distinctions, ignorant of both the norms and accoutrements of middle-class life. “Did you have jogging clothes on?” Elizabeth Lederer asked Yusef Salaam, by way of trying to discredit his statement that he had gone into the park that night only to “walk around.” Did he have “jogging clothes,” did he have “sports equipment,” did he have “a bicycle.” A pernicious nostalgia had come to permeate the case, a longing for the New York that had seemed for a while to be about “sports equipment,” about getting and spending rather than about having and not having: the reason that this victim must not be named was so that she could go unrecognized, it was astonishingly said, by Jerry Nachman, the editor of the New York Post, and then by others who seemed to find in this a particular resonance, to Bloomingdale’s.