NEW YORK’S beleaguered criminal-justice system worked. But only just. Three young men—boys, really—were convicted of rape, robbery, riot, and assault with “depraved indifference” to human life. But this happened only because of unusually effective police work, luck, a tough judge, and a jury that finally managed to avoid deadlock after ten days of name-calling debate. The “jogger trial” threw a harsh light on the racial currents swirling around crime and punishment in America.
The trial of the first three defendants (three more remain to be tried) got under way in mid June with a setback for the prosecution: the forensic evidence turned out to be inconclusive; semen and blood samples failed to link any of the defendants to the crimes. And that left prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer with only one weapon: written, signed, and videotaped confessions in the case of two of the accused, Antron McCray and Raymond Santana, and a highly incriminating oral statement given, a detective testified, by the third, Yusef Salaam. But the confessions, admitted by Judge Thomas Galligan over defense objections, were powerful evidence indeed: McCray and Santana, naming names and incriminating themselves, describing calmly but in revolting detail how they and the others seized the jogger, struck her with a lead pipe and bricks and rocks, held her down, grabbed her breasts, pinned and caressed her legs as the rapists “got on top of her” one after another.
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