Central Park Jogger a lesson for gang rape case

There are differences between the notorious 1989 New York case, in which an imprisoned murderer confessed to the rape 13 years after five teenagers were convicted and sent to prison, and the Richmond case, in which six defendants ages 15 to 21 are charged with sexually assaulting a 16-year-old high school student after an Oct. 24 homecoming dance.

But the 33-year-old daughter of the late civil rights attorney William Kunstler, co-director of a documentary film about her father that opened Friday in the Bay Area, says one lesson everyone should have learned from Central Park is not to rush to judgment.

William Kunstler, who represented one of the defendants, "would caution us not to let our horror at the crime blind us to the rights of the people charged," Sarah Kunstler said. "That's when mistakes happen. That's how innocent people end up spending their childhoods in prison."

City enraged

Sarah Kunstler was 12 and her sister and co-filmmaker, Emily, was 10 when Trisha Meili, a 28-year-old accountant, was beaten and raped in Central Park in April 1989. (Meili identified herself in a 2003 book, "I Am the Central Park Jogger," and has become a motivational speaker.)

Police said four black youngsters and a Latino admitted attacking the white woman during a night of what the youths allegedly called "wilding" in the park.

"It happened at a time when the crime rate was spinning out of control in New York, and it captured our fears about evils lurking in the city. People wanted to hang these young men up a tree," said Sarah Kunstler, now a defense attorney in New York.

Defendants vilified

Public officials, from Mayor Ed Koch on down, vilified the defendants. Donald Trump took out full-page newspaper ads urging the state to reinstate the death penalty.

As William Kunstler's client, suspect Yusef Salaam, then 15, recalled in the recently filmed documentary, "I was that person who was the worst person that ever lived."

At the time, Sarah Kunstler said, both she and her sister believed the youths were guilty and didn't know why their father was representing Salaam.

"He told us that everybody deserves a lawyer," she said. "He told us that the case reminded him of lynchings in the South, when black men were killed after allegations that they had raped white women."

Shied away from law

His daughters were unconvinced. Several years later, they told a television interviewer that they were committed to social change but would never become lawyers.

All five defendants were convicted, based largely on their confessions, which they claimed had been coerced. Salaam, represented by Kunstler at sentencing and in his unsuccessful appeals, got a seven-year term. The others received up to 13 years.

William Kunstler died in 1995 at age 76. In 2002, Matias Reyes, serving a prison term for murder, said he had committed the rape and acted alone. A DNA test confirmed his guilt.

A judge then overturned the five original defendants' convictions at the request of District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who - over Police Department opposition - said their confessions were inconsistent with each other and with the known facts.

Salaam, who has spoken to audiences at screenings of the Kunstler documentary, is now a hospital communications worker in New York and a father of four. He and his fellow defendants have sued the city for damages.

Uneasy interviewers

Interviewing Salaam for the film "was frightening for us," Sarah Kunstler said. "We had to acknowledge to him that we hadn't believed him and hadn't supported him."

She said he was neither angry nor bitter. "I think it's turned him into an activist," concentrating on opposition to the death penalty, she said.

The Richmond rape case, which has also generated local as well as national furor, differs from the New York case in one important respect: the availability of numerous eyewitnesses, possibly including the victim. Meili, the Central Park victim, suffered brain injuries and had no memory of the attack.

Suspending judgment

Sarah Kunstler said she doesn't know the details of the Richmond case, but added, "I know that my father would have been concerned that the young men arrested would have been convicted in the court of public opinion before they ever made it into the courtroom.

"I think it's one of the hardest moments, when you have to suspend judgment and have patience and look for the truth."

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