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"Gunpoint Rape" Cop Jurors Dismissed Eyewitness As "Skateboard Witness"
By
Ben Yakas
Published Mar 31, 2012
Modified Mar 31, 2012
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Mar 31, 2012
Modified Mar 31, 2012
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More details to make your blood boil have emerged from the trial of former police officer Michael Pena, who was found guilty of three counts of predatory sexual assault for attacking a 25-year-old school teacher at gunpoint while off-duty in Manhattan last August. A juror interviewed after the judge declared a mistrial on the rape charges told the News the three holdouts didn’t take the testimony of witness Gregory Matherly seriously, dismissing him as the “skateboard witness.” “I know Greg,” said neighbor Eva Okada. “He’s not a liar. Just because he rides a skateboard doesn’t make him a liar.”
Matherly had testified that he saw Pena penetrating the victim, and asked him to stop: “He held up his finger and said, ‘Give me a minute,’ ” Matherly said on the stand. But this was just one of the many eyewitness accounts—including another neighbor and the victim—which couldn't convince those holdout jurors, including attorney Lloyd Constantine.
One of the other details which led to the deadlock was the fact the victim couldn't identify the color of a car parked by the courtyard where she was attacked: “If she doesn’t remember these details, how does she know she was penetrated,” one juror said, according to News sources. Okada, who owns that car, was incredulous: “How do you expect somebody who is being dragged down a driveway at gunpoint to remember the color of a car?”
Jane Manning, a former sex crimes prosecutor in Queens who now works for the National Organization for Women, said she thought the jurors had to "invent" doubt in their mind to be able to not believe the victim: “I don’t think any jury anywhere in the country would doubt that man’s word that he felt a hand shoved into his pants pocket. Here you have jurors actually unwilling to believe a woman would know when a man’s penis is being shoved into her body.”
As for Constantine, who purposefully withheld information about his relationship to Manhattan DA Cy Vance (whom he played tennis with occasionally), former Gov. Elliot Spitzer (for whom he was a longtime advisor), and lawyer Richard Aborn (his former law partner who had once run against Vance), other lawyers and legal ethics experts say he was definitely in the wrong: “He knows better than this,” Thomas J. Curran, a defense lawyer and former prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, told the Times. “By any objective standard, that information should have been volunteered.”
“The critical fact is that while Constantine may have believed that the friendship was not so strong as to disqualify him from the jury, the law gives others the right to make that decision,” said Stephen Gillers, a legal-ethics professor at NYU. Constantine's response to the Times? It was an "easily ascertainable fact" regarding his relationships with these public figures—and therefore, it's not his fault he didn't speak up when asked, “Do you have any friends or relatives in law enforcement, i.e., police, F.B.I., district attorney.”
“Do you think it’s hard for the D.A.’s office to keep track of contributors at the $5k level?” he asked the Times by e-mail.
Tagged
gunpoint rape
inwood
lloyd constantine
manhattan
michael pena
nypd
off-duty
police
rape
Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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