Friday, December 06, 2002

Is Ann Coulter afraid of losing her precious law license, and the bragging rights it affords her in the pundit wars (hey she’s not a dumb guttermouth, she’s an attorney!)? After reading her third recent column on the Central Park jogger case (the first two are here and here), I can’t help wondering.

She doesn’t want the verdicts in the case overturned. Her beef, it seems, is with Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau, who yesterday asked a judge to overturn all of them. Yet she never criticizes Morgenthau -- she’d rather blame the effort to overturn the verdicts on liberals, or on The New York Times, or on the Innocence Project (which seems to have little or nothing to do with the case). Would aiming one of her typical ad hominem verbal muggings at a fellow lawyer, particularly an esteemed district attorney, violate legal ethics? I’m not a lawyer -- I don’t really know. Nevertheless, I’m sure she believes she has Right and Truth on her side, and if so, shouldn’t she have the guts to criticize the person actually responsible for what she sees as an injustice, consequences be damned?

The full text of Morgenthau’s filing is available as a PDF file here. I wish every Coulter fan would read it.

Here’s Coulter, in her first column on the subject:

…the new DNA tests are also consistent with the version of events presented in court, subjected to attack by defense counsel, and believed unanimously by two multiracial juries…. No new evidence contradicts the five guilty verdicts.

Here’s Coulter, in her second column on the subject:

In the words of the criminal defense bar's sock puppet at the New York Times, Reyes had committed a "nearly identical crime" nearby days earlier. "Nearly identical" evidently refers to the fact that both crimes were: (1) rapes, (2) in a park. That's where the similarity ends.

Here’s Morgenthau:

A self-confessed and convicted serial rapist -- who habitually stalked white women in their 20's; who attacked them, beat them, and raped them; who always robbed his victims, and frequently stole Walkmans; who tied one of his victims in a fashion much like the Central Park jogger; who lived on 102nd Street; who beat and raped a woman in Central Park two days before the attack on the transverse; whose DNA was the only DNA recovered inside and alongside the victim; whose narrative of events is corroborated in a number of significant ways; who had no connection to the defendants or their cohorts; and who committed all his sex crimes alone -- has come forward to say that he alone stalked, attacked, beat, raped, and robbed a white woman in her 20's, who was set upon on the 102nd Street transverse, was missing her Walkman, and was left tied in a way that has never before been explained. Had this evidence been available, the defendants' attorneys would have had an arguably compelling alternative to the People's theory of the case.

Read the filing if you don’t believe that Morgenthau backs this up, and thus makes an extraordinarily strong case for vacating at least the convictions relating to the jogger.

POSTSCRIPT: In the new column, Coulter calls the five convicted men "animals" twice, "savages" once, and "beasts" once. Here’s her racism scorecard for the three columns:

"savages": five occurrences

"animals" five occurrences

"beasts": two occurrences (once "feral beasts")

"primitives": one occurrence

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