Prosecutorial misconduct in New York again

But nobody is to blame, of course

An independent review of the criminal case mounted against Jeffrey Deskovic, who spent half his life in prison for a rape and murder he did not commit, found that a series of investigative and prosecutorial missteps led to his wrongful conviction, including a deliberate attempt to play down the DNA evidence that led to his exoneration in September.

The review, commissioned by the Westchester County district attorney and released on Monday, did not assign blame individually to any of the police officers, prosecutors or defense lawyers who worked on the case, but it offered pointed criticism of their conduct in and out of court. It described the defense as “unfocused,” characterized the prosecution’s behavior as “distorted” and accused the police of exploiting the inexperience of Mr. Deskovic, who was a teenager, to obtain a confession, which turned out to be false.

Law enforcement officials broke no laws and acted without malice, according to the panel of experts that conducted the review, but their mistakes led to an “unjust outcome.” “What happened to Mr. Deskovic was an absolute tragedy and a miscarriage of justice,” said the district attorney, Janet DiFiore. “The entire system failed.”

In an interview, Mr. Deskovic, who was 16 at the time of his arrest in 1989, said the review gave him “some sense of vindication” but did not bring back the years he considers stolen from him.

The full 35-page report is available online at westchesterda.net. Among its recommendations are several measures to prevent wrongful convictions, like videotaping police interrogations and giving defendants the right, before and after trial, to have DNA evidence run through databanks to try to confirm the identity of actual perpetrators. The Legislature has considered similar measures but adjourned late last month without passing any of them.

“This report makes clear that the system has not been fixed to prevent other people from enduring the tragic injustice Jeffrey Deskovic suffered,” said Barry C. Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project, which secured Mr. Deskovic’s exoneration.

The police homed in on Mr. Deskovic within days of finding the body of his high-school classmate Angela Correa, 15, at a park in Peekskill, about 36 miles north of here. Their focus came in large part because Mr. Deskovic seemed unusually distraught after Ms. Correa’s death and had an intimate knowledge of the case, which he was determined to help solve.

Suspicions were amplified by Mr. Deskovic’s fitting a profile of the killer that was prepared by the New York Police Department: He was a white man about 5 feet 10 inches tall and under 19 years of age. Ms. Correa’s real killer, Steven Cunningham, who pleaded guilty in March after DNA recovered from the crime scene was linked to him, is African-American, is more than 6 feet tall, and was 29 at the time of the murder.

The police did not pursue other leads, concentrating instead on building a case against Mr. Deskovic. They met with him many times, even after his mother told them she did not want her son speaking to the police, the review says, and they selectively taped their talks, collecting snippets of conversation that sounded incriminating but that offered jurors no context when presented in court. In one instance, investigators recorded 30 minutes of a four-hour encounter with Mr. Deskovic. And on the day he confessed, after several hours of persistent interrogation, they did not turn on the tape recorder at all.

“The police tactics in dealing with Deskovic did not take adequate account of his youth, naivete, inexperience with the justice system and psychological vulnerabilities,” says the review. It was prepared at no cost by two retired judges, Leslie Crocker Snyder and Peter J. McQuillan; a former Staten Island district attorney, William L. Murphy; and Richard Joselson, supervising attorney of the criminal appeals bureau of the Legal Aid Society in New York City.

The panel also highlighted prosecutors’ concerted effort to discredit the value of the DNA profile retrieved from semen and hairs found at the crime scene, which did not match Mr. Deskovic’s. Prosecutors argued that the hairs could have belonged to workers from the medical examiner’s office, and the semen to another man with whom the victim had sex. In any event, prosecutors under Carl A. Vergari, the county’s district attorney at the time, presented the case to a grand jury before DNA test results were released, ensuring they would not be a factor at least in the indictment phase.

The police and prosecutors suffered from “tunnel vision” at the time, the panel said, so in their eyes, Mr. Deskovic was already guilty and it was all just a matter of selecting the evidence that would help them prove it in court.

Report here



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