From the Charleston Gazette:
Seven people pleaded guilty for their part in abusing Megan Williams — but now Williams says that abuse never happened.She will hold a press conference Wednesday in Columbus, Ohio, to recant her claims of abuse, attorney Byron L. Potts, who represents Williams, told The Charleston Gazette on Tuesday night.
“She has decided she has been living this lie for approximately two years and she has decided to tell the truth,” Potts said. “She fabricated the story and she did this in retaliation because she was having a relationship with one of them.”
But former Logan County prosecutor Brian Abraham, who was in charge of the case, said no one ever went to jail because of Williams’ statements.
Instead, Abraham said Tuesday night, he decided early in the case not to rely on Williams’ statements, but on the physical evidence and the statements of the co-defendants….
At the time of the plea deals, Megan Williams, her adopted mother Carmen Williams, and her adviser Malik Shabazz criticized the plea agreements, claiming they were too light a punishment. Shabazz, co-founder of Black Lawyers for Justice and a member of the New Black Panther Party, gave Williams and her family legal counsel.
The Williams family, Shabazz and others criticized Abraham for only pursuing a hate crime charge for Burton.
Now Williams claims she wasn’t abused at all, Potts said….
Thanks to Fred Ray for the pointer.
drunkdriver says:
sounds like Mr. Abraham thinks her recantation may simply be her way of getting back at people who solicited donations on her behalf, then pocketed the money. IF that is what happened, which we of course do not know.
October 21, 2009, 2:28 pmSteve says:
Seven people all pleaded guilty to something they didn’t do? Yeah, right.
October 21, 2009, 2:31 pmtroll_dc2 says:
Was she paid off? Was she threatened? Often, that is what provokes the recantation.
October 21, 2009, 2:33 pmSueSimp says:
And keep in mind, everything I’ve seen about the case suggests Megan Williams does have significant cognitive difficulties. I’m not sure “lying then” or “lying now” are the only two possibilities of what’s going on; manipulation or extortion could be at play.
Police did rescue her from the house where the six convicted people were at, and there was plenty of physical evidence that Williams and undergone some sort of trauma.
So it seems she lied about something back then (or is claiming she did), but I don’t see how she could have been lying about everything. Especially when six people did plead guilty and gave similar reports as to what Williams initially claimed.
October 21, 2009, 2:49 pmLior says:
Steve: yes, innocent people plead guilty all the time. Going to trial is a serious risk.
October 21, 2009, 2:49 pmzuch says:
My guess is that “circumstances gave changed” and she’s lying now. You don’t get seven people to plead guilty if nothing happened….
Cheers,
October 21, 2009, 2:50 pmJoe Hooker says:
Lots of unanswered questions here and lots of people scrambling to cover their backsides. We need a KC Johnson to get to the truth of what happened.
As for the guilty pleas, this may be a reflection of the fact that poor people who live in trailers, unlike affluent lacrosse players, can’t afford good lawyers. If you were offered a plea deal for something you didn’t do and the alternative was spending the rest of your life in prison, what would you do?
Overall, though, it sure looks like one of those “too good to check” stories — West Virgina trailer park rednecks kidnap, torture, and rape a black woman. Who would doubt it because, after all, isn’t that what those people do?
October 21, 2009, 2:53 pmSteve says:
Steve: yes, innocent people plead guilty all the time. Going to trial is a serious risk.
Sure they do, but that isn’t what I said. Seven innocent people all pleading guilty together is preposterous.
October 21, 2009, 2:54 pmPatHMV says:
Joe, unlike other such sagas, note here that there was a police force skeptical of the claims, cautious to the fact that the woman’s story changed from time to time, and significant physical evidence of real trauma to the woman. In other words, nobody in law enforcement acted as if this was “too good to check.” They did check it. The men confessed and each gave information about what happened which was consistent with what the other defendants said happened, and which was consistent with the physical injuries to the victim.
October 21, 2009, 2:59 pmPintler says:
Google ‘Tulia Texas’ or ‘Wenatchee sex crimes’ – both cases where more than seven innocent people pleaded guilty.
I should note that I have no opinion on the WV case – I know nothing about it. I am just pointing out when a broken system starts to falsely convict, it may falsely convict many people. A system that is working properly is limited by the number of guilty people; one that has run amok is not.
On a side note, perhaps we can learn something from the Salem witch trials; they only falsely convicted roughly a fifth of the accused; a lower rate that at Tulia or Wenatchee.
October 21, 2009, 3:07 pmDotar Sojat says:
Pretty soon Al Sharpton will accuse the DA of having done it.
October 21, 2009, 3:08 pmSteve says:
Google ‘Tulia Texas’ or ‘Wenatchee sex crimes’ – both cases where more than seven innocent people pleaded guilty.
Many Tulia defendants pleaded not guilty. Same in Wenatchee. I have never, ever heard of a case where an entire group of factually innocent defendants pleaded guilty to a man.
October 21, 2009, 3:14 pmTheBadness says:
As a general statement, I’d say I have to agree with Pintler: it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that seven innocent people would plead guilty.
However, I can’t say I think that’s what happened here; largely because I come to the same conclusion as PatHMV. The dirt is elsewhere, especially when the victim’s initial stor(ies) are unreliable.
I do think there’s good cause to investigate, specifically the “People sent donations that never benefitted the actual victim” bit.
October 21, 2009, 3:21 pmJoe Hooker says:
I agree with Pintler — there have been numerous cases where multiple defendants have pleaded guilty to something they didn’t do, usually as at Tulia and Wenachee because they were unsophisticated and unable to afford decent legal representation. I often wonder what I’d do if faced with a choice like that.
Like him, I do not have an opinion on what actually happened based only on a newspaper article. However, at this point it sure looks flakey, especially since the accuser is well aware she may now be charged.
October 21, 2009, 3:21 pmyankee says:
It’s completely plausible. Because plea bargains typically require people to testify against their alleged co-conspirators, the first to plead guilty increases the pressure on the remaining six. The second to break increases the pressure on the remaining five. By the time six have broken and plead guilty the pressure on the seventh is overwhelming.
October 21, 2009, 3:24 pmRPT says:
Pretty soon some one will blame it on Acorn.
October 21, 2009, 3:25 pmyankee says:
This also seems quite possible. What really happened? I have no idea.
October 21, 2009, 3:30 pmPintler says:
I am not familiar with the pattern in Tulia, but from (rapidly dimming) memory, in Wenatchee the pattern was that a number of defendants pleaded guilty, until one defendant decided to fight the charges despite the apparently long odds. That encouraged others to fight. If the 10th defendant is the one who decides to fight, and you only have seven, no one fights.
Looking at it another way, if 5 had pleaded and two fought the charges, would that have made a difference in your estimation? 5/7 is about 0.714. If we take the odds of being willing to falsely plead as .714, the odds of finding a group of 7 who all falsely plead is .714**7 or 9.4%, so in ten such cases you would expect one where all seven falsely plead.
Humans have a well documented bias in assessing probability. If you flip a coin 7 times and get 7 heads, people will believe the odds against the coin being fair are astronomical. In fact, in 7 flips you’d expect 7 heads in a row about 0.78 % of the time – a small number, but not as small as people guess. Also, note the odds are very sensitive to the underlying probability:
October 21, 2009, 3:50 pm0.5**7 = 0.007812
0.6**7 = 0.027993
0.7**7 = 0.082354
0.8**7 = 0.209715
JeffH says:
From the article, none of the guilty pleas entered here resulted in any jail time. Would you plead guilty to a misdemeanor with a promise of no jail time, to avoid a rape trial where you face an felony conviction and an average of 10 years in prison? I don’t think 7 innocent people pleading guilty is preposterous under those circumstances.
October 21, 2009, 4:26 pmPatHMV says:
That depends, Jeff… had I participated in a brutal gang-bang of a young woman, and my assertion of innocence is based on my subjective belief that she consented to having both her eyes blackened, her hair pulled out, and being cut on the legs in the course of said gang-bang? Then yes. Otherwise, no.
Note that most of the pleas were to felonies and resulted in sentences of 10 years and more.
October 21, 2009, 4:42 pmR Gould-Saltman says:
Steve:
“Seven innocent people all pleading guilty together is preposterous.”
Except there’s no reason to think, from the story I’ve seen so far, that they all “plead guilty together”, only that they all eventually plead guilty.
The police may well tell Defendant number 2 [truthfully or not] “Defendant #1 is pleading guilty, and the victim says you were in on it with him.” They may even add, [truthfully or not] “. . . and Defendant #1 even says you were in on it! You think the jury’s gonna think you’re telling the truth, and they’re both lying?!?”
Once they’ve got #1 and #2 down, selling #3 on the plea becomes that much EASIER, etc…..
October 21, 2009, 4:44 pmLN says:
Uh, Central Park jogger, anyone? Four videotaped confessions and a fifth person admitting involvement, five convictions. And then thirteen years later the real rapist confesses, the DNA evidence is a perfect match, and of course the prosecutor complains bitterly that justice is being overturned.
October 21, 2009, 4:53 pmPatHMV says:
LN, none of the individuals wrongfully convicted in the Central Park jogger case actually plead guilty. Yes, they all confessed, but there’s a world of difference between “confessing” at the end of 17 hours of dogged interrogation by the police and pleading guilty in open court, under oath, while represented by an attorney who is standing right next to you. Steve’s comment referred specifically to guilty pleas, not confessions.
October 21, 2009, 5:01 pmPintler says:
In the interest of clarity, I haven’t heard posters maintaining that these particular people are innocent – based on the evidence other than the shifting stories of the victim they probably are. I at least, and I think some of the other posters, are objecting only to the conclusion that they must be guilty because all seven pleaded guilty. They may well be guilty because of the other evidence, but that’s a different point.
October 21, 2009, 5:04 pmPatHMV says:
To elaborate a bit more, there’s a world of difference in the two. In a confession situation, the cop is probably sitting there saying “if you just admit what you did, everything will be ok, and this will all go away.” The suspect has no lawyer sitting next to him, may be under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and has probably been recently rousted out of bed or otherwise disturbed significantly.
With a guilty plea, the judge says “you understand that by pleading guilty, you are admitting that you did this crime, and I might sentence you to serve 10 years in jail.” You have a lawyer sitting next to you. He may not be the greatest lawyer in the world, but you’re not just sitting alone in an interrogation room with a cop. You’ve had time to sleep, and a substantial amount of time has elapsed since the time you were arrested. You’ve had time to talk with friends and family. The judge specifically asks questions to make sure you understand what is going on and that you are not actually on any drugs or alcohol at the time.
October 21, 2009, 5:06 pmPatHMV says:
Well, Pintler, legally they are guilty because they declined to exercise their right to contest the charges brought by the state and instead chose to admit, in open court and under oath, that they committed crimes against that woman. The burden of establishing their guilt is no longer on either the state or anybody else asserting that they are guilty; they admitted it. At a minimum, I would think it incumbent upon THEM to claim that they really didn’t do it, after all. To the best of my knowledge, none of them have yet done so. But legally, they are guilty of the crimes to which they plead guilty.
October 21, 2009, 5:09 pmLN says:
PatHMV – whenever someone pleads guilty, they are receiving some kind of benefit. Generally speaking, a guilty plea reduces the downside the defendant faces. Because of this benefit, a guilty plea is a less clear signal of guilt than a confession.
A false guilty plea can be the result of a rational cost-benefit analysis. A false confession can only be explained by the strangeness of human psychology. That was my point.
October 21, 2009, 5:12 pmRowerinVA says:
More people than seven were convicted in the string of false child abuse “recovered memory” cases in Florida and in other states in the 1980s and 1990s. A defendant facing sex abuse charges involving a vulnerable person (this alleged victim is mentally special needs) might well take a plea deal under similar circumstances, particularly if facing the additionally explosive and sentence-enhancing allegations of racism that were leveled here. One need only to recall the Tawana Brawley and Duke Lacrosse cases to see how far such prosecutions can go on weak facts. Remember, those cases fell apart only after the wealthy, relatively powerful defendants retained excellent counsel. These defendants had no such advantages. My experience representing poor people is that they are generally very aware of how vulnerable they are, and how disadvantaged they would be in a circumstance such as this.
None of this proves what did or didn’t happen in this case; the default should be to trust the corut process and pleas unless they are disproved by strong evidence. My point is merely that a large number of guilty pleas, under duress, is not necessarily unprecedented.
October 21, 2009, 5:16 pmLN says:
Say you’re an innocent person. You can go to trial and either get off free or get convicted and serve 25 years in prison. The prosecution offers to give you 5 years if you plead guilty and are willing to testify against the other defendants. You know he is offering everyone else the same deal. What do you do?
If you’re holding out let’s say three other defendants have already pled guilty and are willing to testify against you. Now what do you do?
Here’s what you don’t do: don’t complain about any injustice here. The system always works! It never fails! Only a guilty person would plea guilty in this context!
October 21, 2009, 5:17 pmDavid Nieporent says:
Thirty people in Tulia pleaded guilty, after seeing a handful of defendants get convicted on no evidence and sentenced to decades in prison. Those who pleaded guilty collectively spent years in prison. (The perjuring cop got no prison time, of course.)
October 21, 2009, 5:20 pmpete says:
Having an alabi of your picture from an ATM camera with a timestamp and bank records stating that your were using your ATM card at the time of the alleged attack along with an independent third party witness verify that he drove you to the bank to use the ATM did not hurt either. I think almost any lawyer could get someone off with that sort of evidence.
October 21, 2009, 5:23 pmPintler says:
PatHMV, I would submit that that difference may depend on the defendant. To take limiting cases, if a law professor gets waterboarded in the back room until she confesses (limiting case, remember:-)), I would expect her to recant once safely in court. OTOH, take someone with a room temperature IQ. The whole process is a bit mystifying to them. They are probably used to life dumping on them. Once they confess, they have bought into the idea that this is just another turn of the screw. Now they meet their public defender, and he’s, shall we say, not Clarence Darrow. He is used to pleading out his usually guilty, usually sleazy clients as fast as possible and going home. He’s not going to be making waves here – he’s been handed an easy guilty plea, and he takes it.
Imagine a small town unlucky enough to have a detective, DA, and judge who are all willing to cut corners. In the big city, the detective couldn’t be too sloppy, or he’d get hammered by the good PDs, and the good judges would keep the sloppy DA in line and so forth. In the unlucky small town, they enable each other’s sloppiness.
(and again, I’m not even hinting that happened in the extant case – I’m just suggesting that there are a lot of towns, and some of them will have the unhappy trio, and finding the rare unlucky septet doesn’t seem to exceed the bounds of possibility)
October 21, 2009, 5:31 pmJ says:
“prosecutor Brian Abraham, who was in charge of the case, said no one ever went to jail because of Williams’ statements”
If seven defendants were told this would go away and they wouldn’t do any time if they plead guilty, I have no difficulty at all believing innocent people pled guilty. Also, these defendants were not exactly criminal law profs from top ten schools; it’s entirely possible the prosecutor was able to convince them they did, in fact, commit a crime even though they didn’t.
It’s also possible this came about because of what will probably be the first question prosecutors ask from now on, given the Ndonye case: “If there’s video of this, will it support your version of events?”
October 21, 2009, 5:55 pmgasman says:
Hard to assess the significance of that assumption. One has to compare the sentence obtained through the plea and the range of possible sentences that they could have been reasonably feared should the case go to trial. A rational defendant, even if innocent, should consider the costs of ‘honor’ that rejecting the deal could bring. A guilty plea doesn’t really tell one much about whether there is actual guilt or not.
October 21, 2009, 6:06 pmSteve says:
Thirty people in Tulia pleaded guilty, after seeing a handful of defendants get convicted on no evidence and sentenced to decades in prison.
Right, and I find it completely plausible that innocent people would plead guilty after seeing other people fight the charges and get convicted. I still do not find it plausible that seven people who were all in a room together and know they never raped and assaulted this woman would all plead guilty to doing so without a single one of them putting up a fight, and I expect that prediction to be vindicated when this matter is finally resolved.
If I were actually involved in the case, I would at a minimum want a rigorous evidentiary hearing to ascertain whether there was, in fact, clear evidence of the defendants’ guilt other than the victim’s statements. I’m not claiming to be making anything more than an educated guess here.
October 21, 2009, 6:07 pmSplunge says:
No one not guilty would ever plead guilty?
As I recall, this was the basis for the excellent conviction rate by the Inquisition. See, no one not actually guilty would risk his eternal soul by falsely pleading guilty just to stop the pain. That’s nuts!
The more things change, the more the social mythology does not, huh?
P.S. Yes, I realize quite well some helpful person may jump in here to point out that the Inquisition tortured people with thumbscrews and branding irons, and that’s just totally different from the modern prosecutor threatening you with 20 years of being the baddest con’s “girlfriend” in the state pen, notwithstanding any modern redefinition of “torture” in the Guantanamo context.
October 21, 2009, 6:08 pmPatHMV says:
J, you’re misinterpreting the prosecutor’s statement. He didn’t say nobody went to jail, he said nobody went to jail based on her statements. This was NOT a case where you either plead guilty and went home that day or you took your chances at trial and faced 30 years. People plead guilty and received (and are serving) 10 and 15 year sentences. What the prosecutor was saying is that they did not rely on the victim’s testimony in bringing those charges, because they considered her a somewhat unreliable witness to begin with. They relied on the physical evidence in pursing those charges.
Might somebody plead guilty to a heinous crime they didn’t commit if doing so let them walk home that day, or perhaps serve a year or two, in order to avoid the risk of 30 years in jail? Perhaps. Might somebody plead guilty to a heinous crime they didn’t commit if doing so guaranteed them serving 10 to 15 years in jail, in order to avoid the risk of 30 years? I really doubt it.
October 21, 2009, 6:22 pmMatt_T says:
her adviser Malik Shabazz
I knew something stank.
October 21, 2009, 6:52 pmKirk Parker says:
PatHMV,
I thought there wasn’t really any question that some rough sex happened, only whether it was consensual or not.
(Obligatory ‘Eeeeeewwwwwwww’ omitted due to obviousness.)
October 21, 2009, 6:55 pmSteve says:
No one not guilty would ever plead guilty?
Not a single person in this thread has offered up that strawman.
October 21, 2009, 7:06 pmMalvolio says:
Uh, difference is, those guys actually did it. They had one extra accomplice, who confessed once the statute of limitations had expired. Wait, maybe that isn’t a difference.
October 21, 2009, 8:03 pmOrder of the Coif says:
“Someone posted: “With a guilty plea, the judge says “you understand that by pleading guilty, you are admitting that you did this crime, and I might sentence you to serve 10 years in jail.” You have a lawyer sitting next to you. He may not be the greatest lawyer in the world, but you’re not just sitting alone in an interrogation room with a cop. You’ve had time to sleep, and a substantial amount of time has elapsed since the time you were arrested. You’ve had time to talk with friends and family. The judge specifically asks questions to make sure you understand what is going on and that you are not actually on any drugs or alcohol at the time.”
Yes, and in the real world, I’ve seen people with REAL defenses which would have taken lawyer’s skill, effort, and priceless time and, of course, money for an expert; plead guilty because the “deal” was sooooooo good and the PD was beating on the client to grab it before it gets revoked. Hell, I once reviewed a case where the police report itself verified that the client fit into a statutory exception but the PD was too lazy to read alllllll the way to Subdivision 9 and, besides, she didn’t like guns. Yup, true story. Too bad the unsophisticated client waited three years to complain.
BTW, in my state the Supreme Court has decided that public defenders cannot be civilly sued for malpractice. The only remedy is reversal for inadequacy of counsel (which is NEVER found to occur). That S. Ct. decision is an injustice.
October 21, 2009, 8:10 pmrichard says:
The story makes reference to her holding a press conference today. Did that happen? It seems to me that we are not anywhere near to hearing the entire story. And are we sure that none of the people who pled guilty got jail time?
October 21, 2009, 8:16 pmLN says:
Uh huh. And conveniently the secret accomplice who didn’t confess was the only guy who actually left any physical evidence (semen) at the crime scene. But yeah, they’re guilty! Are you Linda Fairstein by any chance?
October 21, 2009, 8:29 pmjccamp says:
Richard –
There was a press conference but the woman was a no-show. Her new attorney presided, and said nothing new (from his previous statements as reported in the media).
Seven persons were convicted in this case. One pleaded to a misdemeanor and received no jail time. The other six received sentences ranging from 10 years to 40 years in prison.
Pat @6:22 pm has the correct context of the prosecutor’s statement.
October 21, 2009, 9:52 pmSammy Finkelman says:
A couple of thoughts:
1) I didn’t read anything about this case so far except what I see here in this post, but it seems that something happened.
Quite possibly she was lying (in differennt ways) both THEN and NOW. Why does it have to be EITHER then or now?
If the stories changed right from the start, the details may never have been right (besides the people taking down her story getting things wrong too) and if she says now nothing bad or wrong at all happened that could be a lie – if that is what she is saying, because this is all third hand and more.
Many things are possible. If she feels one or more wrong people got punished she may not know any other way to correct this except to deny everything. It might also be that one sort of thing happened and people were accused mostly of another sort of thing.
If anything like that is true, almost certainly somebody guilty got off and maybe some others got accused of more than what they did.
Besides any of that, she may have been motivated by some people to start accusing all kinds of people of doing all kinds of things. First one lawyer, Malik Shabazz, pushed her one way, perhaps now, if she is recantinbbg everything, I don’t know, another lawyer, Byron L. Potts is pushing her another way. Or maybe it just sounds like he might be doing that.
2) What we really need to do is look at early news stories about all of this. Then we might piece things together. Start from not what is more important but what is more certainly true
3) It is not true that some other person helped the people initially convicted in the Central Park jogger case. Somebody else beat and raped her all alone. The idea that they were there but somebody else helped them or got involved is what the District Atttorney said at the end. It’s not likely.
After it became public that this was all untrue (something the Manhattan District Attorney’s office found very hard too believe but they had conclusive evidence that somebody else not in the group had raped her) and also after I had read some articles, I thought about this.
As I understood it for myself, what got them to confess was this:
In reality, they had been attacking a variety of people and weren’t all together at the same time. They were indeed “wilding.” They had beaten and assaulted and robbed a number of people during this approximate time frame, but they’d split up from time to time as this went on.
Now, there was this woman who had been attacked and might soon be dead. Each one wanted to clear himself of responsibility for her murder and for the rape. They were anxious to get the policemen questioning them to beleive their story. The police were acting g skeptical about everything, on general principles.
It was impossible for them to claim they had done nothing wrong (and maybe they tried at first) because it wasn’t true and provable in a number of ways and they knew it.. Somebody else might say something.
The police not believing any of them that they were not at the scene, they said they were there but they didn’t take part, since they didn’t want to be the one thought to be murderer or principle murderer (The murderer, of course, they reasoned, would deny everything, even being there, and none of them wanted to look like the murderer!!)
One or two or more of the boys even changed their story as this went on to make themselves more culpable because the first stories weren’t being believed.
All of this was to clear themselves of responsibility for the murder which they believed happened (none of them, age 17 or sdo, were familiar with the felony-murder rule) They would confess
to just about anything just so long as they were not confessing to acts that could have killed someone and sso long as whatever they did admit to was much less serious than murder. (maybe not legally but as far as they would guess or hope the law was)
It no longer was about the truth. It was about gaining credibility. And the truth – that they didn’t know a thing about the attack – wasn’t too credible, given the other incidents they had been involved in, given also their reluctance to admit anything else. There were witnesses to other incidents and the police could tell them some details about them.
It was about what the police would accept as credible – while also of course trying to minimize their own role even in the rape in the process.
So they confessed to being there basically, and maybe taking a small part in the attack.
The big problem with all of this is that not one of them was there, but certainly at the start they didn’t know that.
They were probably very happy at the time that the police were no longer so skeptical of what they said. And they thought they were only admitting to something much less serious and probably would not get much jail time.
What they had confessed to was enough for a legal case, whicch is why the police had stopped requestioning them, although all of the people confessing probably thought at the time that they had escaped the worst – remember they had thought they might be facing a murder charge.
When they were prosecuted, I don’t think the prosecution really tried to say who had done what.
Later on I think none of them testified under oath which is a big mistake for almost any not guilty person – of course there might be a delicate matter of trying not to get prosecuted for something else they have to admit to, but if the District Attorney doesn’t really believe it, it won’t happen.
Anyway the truth is, people really need to testify in situations like this.
October 21, 2009, 10:26 pmDave N says:
An unanswered question is whether any of the seven has sought any kind of post-conviction relief, claiming that their pleas were involuntary and that they were coerced into making them.
October 21, 2009, 10:34 pmMalvolio says:
They were arrested at the scene. They confessed, on camera (not a guilty plea, they just confessed). They faced a jury of their peers and were convicted. In the intervening decades, nothing but the self-serving statement of a conscienceless scumbag exculpates them.
Not as far as I know.
October 21, 2009, 11:00 pmdfb says:
False confessions are a known issue in our justice system. People are threatened with greater crimes and it has been established time and again people will rather take the known (5 years time) rather than the unknown (trial, 10 years, 15 years, whatever else they are threatened with). This works similar to the scenario in game theory called prisoner’s dilemma.
The Innocence Project is likely to get involved in this case and will evaluate which of Williams’s stories is more likely true and whether there were procedural defects in the way the 8 people were intimidated/interrogated that would have led to false confessions. There are a slew of recommendations on how to prevent false confessions that few states, including California, have taken seriously or implemented even after assembling expert panels.
October 22, 2009, 2:07 amSammy Finkelman says:
How cann anyone say nothing ut self-serving statements exonerates them.
Elaine Cassel wrotes here: (among other things)
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/cassel/20021217.html
1) No physical evidence linked them to the crime (i.e. the only thing was that they had committed other unprosecuted crimes tht night in Central Park – this is a key fact that some people overlook.)
2. None of them admitted to having intercourse with the victim.
3. Their confessions weere mutually contradictory.
4. The several years older man, who confessed a dozen years later, was linked to the crime by DNA evidence.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-goldblatt121602.asp
Mark Goldblatt says among other things that there probably wasn’t enough time for them to do all those other crimes AND the attack on the jogger. They had beaten two men into unconsciousness in two separate incidents with a metal pipe, stones, punches, and kicks to the head, besides also chasing after bicyclists and assaulting other pedestrians. They couldn’t have done all of that AND also nearly kill the Central Park jogger, dragging her 225 feet in the process, in the space of half an hour or so, and none of them ever mentioned a a 19-year stranger whom they would have no reason to protect that we know of.
However, this is a little bit wrong as altogether 32 schoolboys were involved in at least something, and a 6th (14 year old) boy, in addition to the five 14 to 16 year olds charged, was nearly charged with the assault and rape.
October 22, 2009, 2:52 amFederal Farmer says:
As far as cases go, how about an 18yo woman with an order of protection? Could be grounds for quick legal action.
That said, the McDonald v Chicago case managed to blaze through the courts in record time. It looks to come in at right around 3 years.
October 22, 2009, 9:36 amLN says:
Yes, only the self-serving statement of a scumbag. Oh yeah, one more thing — there was only one man’s semen, and by a remarkable twist of fate it happened to belong to the conscienceless scumbag. SPOOKY!
October 22, 2009, 10:00 amPer Son says:
New Black Panther Party says it all. They are a viciously racist organization (please note that I am a left liberal) that is closer to a cult than a political party. I could see them pressuring her or taking advantage of a situation to push their agenda.
Why did 7 folks admit guilt? I do not know, but as soon as I saw “Malik Shabazz” I smelled some really bad stank.
October 22, 2009, 11:05 amBama 1L says:
This case made me think of the childcare sex abuse scare of the eighties and nineties. The incidents complained of–lurid rituals of sexual exploitation at daycares–did not take place anywhere outside the children’s tampered-with imaginations. But there were convictions. So I looked back over the dispositions: were there any guilty pleas?
I found none. In a couple cases, defendants entered “no contest” or similar pleas, but no one at all pleaded guilty and thus affirmed the charges. Furthermore, these pleas followed convictions of other defendants connected with the same alleged crime rings.
October 22, 2009, 12:52 pmSammy Finkelman says:
What may be the case is that she was beaten, but not treated in the way she said, and it was not a racial incident. She was not a stranger to them.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/race_attack_victim_lied_o4Fa3YxxfmGo3P3nHo9AQO
“Williams, who is developmentally challenged, said she was pressured by her adopted mother to make the false allegation and the two had collected $70,000 in donations, including $1,000 from Sharpton.”
One of the seven white people whom she said “held her captive in a trailer where she was stabbed, beaten, sexually assaulted, scalded and taunted with racially charged epithets” was her boyfriend.
And the whole family in general was bad.
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20070912/ZNYT02/709120776/-1/ZNYT
“The Brewster family and their trailer has a history of violent crime, the police said.
Mr. Brewster killed his stepfather there when he was 12, the authorities said, and served time at a juvenile correction facility.
In July 1994, Mrs. Brewster shot and killed an 84-year-old woman she was looking after, also in the trailer, according to court records.”
Megan Williams apparently exaggerated – as well as put into a racial template – what happened to her (she wanted them to be punished severely) – although it may not be that the only wounds not self inflicted were bruises on her face. That may not be true. But she was held prisoner.
They might have pled guilty to whatever they did hear as part of pleas bargain. They might have faced also things like revocation of parole.
October 22, 2009, 5:14 pmMalvolio says:
Nobody is claiming the scumbag is innocent. Normal people tend to doubt the word of scumbags, so we tend to doubt that this one’s unsupported claim that he acted alone.
How is any of this exculpatory?
This is at least marginally exculpatory; that is, the time element makes it somewhat less likely that these six boys joined in the rape. On the other hand, it demonstrates that they are subhuman wastes of oxygen who are therefore more likely to have joined in the rape. Overall, I’d go for a wash.
October 22, 2009, 9:24 pm