Elizabeth Lederer
Columnist Jim Dwyer, one of the brighter lights at the New York Times, had an exceptionally dim moment on Friday (5/3/13)—comparing sending innocent teenagers to prison with holding the prosecutor who did so accountable.
Dwyer was writing about a petition that asked that Manhattan assistant district attorney Elizabeth Lederer—the lead prosecutor in the case of the Central Park Five, young African-Americans who were falsely convicted of rape—lose her part-time teaching position at Columbia Law School. Dwyer presented this petition as being a repetition of the kind of wrong done to the exonerated young men:
It was a simple task to discover Elizabeth Lederer on Google, just as those boys were easy to find in the park. The petition has found someone to blame, repeating the very mistake of the injustice it deplores.
It shouldn’t be necessary to spell out the absurd moral reasoning here, but apparently it is: Sending the Central Park Five to prison for a crime they hadn’t committed was wrong because they hadn’t committed the crime. Equating an attempt to hold a public official to some kind of account for her actual actions to locking some kids up for someone else’s crime is grotesque and offensive.
Jim Dwyer
The rest of Dwyer’s argument makes just as little sense. “The petition against Ms. Lederer, in part, reduces her life in public service to a single moment, the jogger case,” he writes—as if prisons aren’t full of people who have been judged on a single incident, as if our society usually doles out punishments based on a holistic appreciation of an individual’s entire life.
“Designating a single villain completely misses the point and power of the documentary,” says Dwyer. “The jogger case belongs to a historical moment, not any one prosecutor or detective.” And therefore no one should face any consequences for it, apparently.
“No one lives without error,” Dwyer notes. Well, sure. But most of us somehow manage to go our whole lives without robbing five people of more than 60 collective years of life by misrepresenting evidence.
The bottom line is that sending innocent people to prison is a terrible thing—in the same way that murder and rape and kidnapping are terrible things. It happens far too often in large part because it’s treated, when it’s discovered, as a regrettable accident—and not as an act of villainy that people deserve to be punished for.
UPDATE: Here’s a better link on the issue of Lederer misrepresenting evidence—to an article written by Dwyer himself in 2002.
I from the UK so I’m probably not understanding your judicial system so this might be dumb but isn’t it the lead prosecutor’s job to convict people surely it’s the defense lawyers that should be sacked.
@ Jimmy – this is not about ‘a person doing their job’, this about a person who used their power to either ignore or suppress evidence that seriously damaged the testimony of the people who were already lying. This can help a little.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/central-park-five-documentary-justice-breakdown_n_2308107.html
No one is saying that prosecutors should go after criminals and convict them, yes that is there job. But the Prosecutors in many of these courts, not only downplay, suppress or outright destroy evidence that would show a person to be more than likely, not guilty in order to make a name for themselves. And it happens far too often.
Maybe Elizabeth and Jim are from the same tribe.
Hey Jimmy: See the movie “The Thin Blue Line” if you want to really understand what’s wrong with our system here. You will also be treated to one of the greatest sayings ever: “It takes a good lawyer to convict guilty man–and it takes a great lawyer to convict an innocent one.” This country is filled with “great” lawyers . . . .
@ Jimmy – Obviously, you have not seen “The Central Park Five,” a documentary introduced at the Cannes Film Festival in May, 2012, and shown in this country by the Public Broadcasting System in November, 2012, and again in April, 2013. The lead prosecutor in the case, Elizabeth Lederer, put a gloating police officer on the witness stand and introduced coerced confessions to convict five black teenagers of a rape and severe beating that occurred nowhere near them on the night they were arrested. The most revolting sight I have ever seen on television was the chief of detectives, the late Robert Colangelo, offering his blatantly dishonest testimony to the court.
In convicting these obviously innocent children, Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Thomas Galligan cited their “cowardly, mindless mob-induced violence.” The only cowardly, mindless mob-induced violence in the case was that of the police, the prosecution and the judge himself.
Next time you offer an opinion on this site, I would suggest that you become at least marginally informed about the subject at hand.
If evidence suppression by the DA or perjury by the individual officers can be proven, by all means prosecute them.
Sadly, studies of “confirmation bias” indicate that police focus on what they consider “relevant” evidence and disregard other, perhaps exculpatory, evidence. By the time defense counsel enters the picture the crime scene has pretty much been sifted over and potential exculpatory evidence removed or destroyed.
The typical DA has a powerful pro-police bias, as police tend to be either the official state witnesses or those who find witnesses for the state in every single case. Naturally, most DA’s implicitly tend to believe every *plausible* word written and said by “their officers.”
So if an officer or officers mislead, lie, fabricate evidence or perjure themselves, how is the trusting DA to ever know? The DA also has a built in professional bias to “bring justice” and therefore to want to *believe* the evidence is solid, complete and not fabricated.
The DA’s bias and belief may be correct 98 out of a 100 case, but the other two may be sufficient to re-open an investigation with a second unit independent of the first.
Our system is imbalanced from the start. The prosecutor and defender should be on equal ground but they aren’t. In fact the prosecutor represents the full weight and power of the state, the defender does not. The disparity is enormous.What we have is a following of the letter but not the spirit of the Law.
Despite what has been said you are guilty until proven innocent. Even then if you seem guilty then you already are. When the whole system is corrupted by the need to find everyone guilty no matter what you get such outcomes. What if only 50% are not corrupted how would you know? Also I have been wanting all those involved in the crimes to be prosecuted but so far they are immune. Even to having people put on death row then executed. That constitutes premeditated murder.
How can we trust any case? With doubt comes many more problems. How will we repair such a thing? For one the Defender has to have the same prestige, experience, power and backing as the Prosecutor.
How does such a douchebag dumbass become a columnist at the NYT, you ask? The fish stinks from the head down.
Dwyer’s defense of Lederer is so convoluted my head is spinning. The better comparison would be that she should be punished for her wrong-doing, just as we punish criminals for theirs.
This article is very far from the truth. What is true is that the evidence was so flimsy that only the hysteria of Linda Fairstein could make it plausible at all. None of the fellows was even close to guilty. None of the “confessions” comported with any other of the confession. Quasi-Stlainist methods were used to give any sign of truth to the entire concoction. The defendants were lied to, told that they coulod go home right after they made these preposterous admissions, in which every one of them claimed to be innocent, admissions that were fictitious, so that the feminists could claim a victory ove rapists.
Fairstein and Lederer should havce been sent to jail for corrupting the judicial system.
Given that FAIR has an entire recurring section called “Gender Focus” which only focuses on one gender, I can only imagine their heads must be exploding: we must severely punish false accusations of rape?? The name of that section is purposefully misleading. Issues which affect men and boys will never find their way into any of its stories. FAIR certainly does NOT live up to its name when it comes to issues which affect the male gender…such as false rape accusations and the women and people who perpetrate -those- crimes.