Giuliani On Actually Innocent 'Central Park Five': Somebody Was Doing The Raping!
It wasn't his case, but 9/11
Here's a thing that got buried in the completely appropriate hoo-hah over PussyGrabGhazi this weekend, but it's nevertheless worth a look: the weekend's only functioning Trump Surrogate, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, stepped up to defend not only Donald Trump's rapey locker room banter about rapiness, but also to say Trump had the right call on the Central Park Five, which was that they should have been executed. Trump, you'll recall, insisted last week they were still very much guilty, despite having been exonerated on the basis of coerced false confessions and DNA evidence linking the crime to a serial rapist, who also confessed.
But they were black (and a Latino) teenagers, so there really is no such thing as "actual innocence." Somebody's doing the raping!
Apparently there are no limits to which Giuliani will insert his nose up Donald Trump's ass, because he says Trump got it pretty much right. Not that Giuliani knows all the details, but he knows Trump and he knows Trump couldn't be wrong.
“Do I agree with him that those people were criminals and engaged in criminal activity?” Giuliani said. “Yes. I don’t know the case, it wasn’t my case. I can’t tell you all the details of it. They confessed. Their alibi is they were beating someone else up, which I think is pretty weird.”
As you'll recall, last week Trump said he knew the five young men were definitely guilty, despite having been exonerated in 2002 when serial rapist Matias Reyes confessed to the crime; his DNA was the only matching sample found at the crime scene. The Five settled a lawsuit against the city of New York for $41 million.
“They admitted they were guilty. The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty,” Trump said last week. “The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous. And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same.”
Giuliani insisted Sunday Trump was basically right, even though it wasn't a case he'd prosecuted, because he Knows Things:
“The detectives involved in the case are convinced that they participated in both of the crimes,” Giuliani said on Sunday night. “So I would have to say that Mr. Trump has a pretty solid basis for his conclusion today -- he had a perfectly solid basis when he made the conclusion back then because they had pled guilty. What was he supposed to do? Think that their plea of guilty wasn’t true?
“These guys have lied so many times it’s hard to know what the truth is,” Giuliani said.
That's a pretty compelling argument in support of Giuliani's pal Donald Trump, who lies about as frequently as most people break wind.
Of course, if you want to get all truth-squaddy about it, when Trump "made the conclusion back then" in 1989 and ran an ad calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty, the Five had just been arrested -- they hadn't made their coerced confessions yet. And gosh, their exoneration, the judge's finding that their confessions were invalid, their release from prison, and their settlement with the city might indeed lead a person to think perhaps they weren't guilty. So, what does Giuliani think about the whole "exoneration" thing? Pfft, he's a prosecutor, he knows stuff:
Asked by BuzzFeed News to clarify what mean by “these guys”, Giuliani said, “I mean the criminals. They’re definitely criminals. All we’re talking about is what crime did they commit. Their alibi is that they were committing another crime.”
What about the DNA evidence, though, that helped exonerate them?
“DNA evidence is not absolutely conclusive in all cases, but I think it’s absurd to glorify these people who, even if you believe them, were committing another crime.”
So obviously they have to be guilty, since their alibi was that they were committing another crime. Oh, also, a lesser crime, but let's just assume they're guilty of everything, because you know how They lie.
We're seldom inclined to believe anything Rudy Giuliani says, but he appears to be correct about the alibi given by the Central Park Five. In a 2014 piece in the Daily Beast, former NYPD detective Edward Conlon does say the accused men -- then teenagers -- had claimed they were not involved in the rape of the jogger, but that they had participated in other hit-and-run muggings and beatings that night, so there's that. (Conlon also compares their confessions to those in other infamous coerced confessions; it's a fascinating if inconclusive read.)
For Giuliani and Trump, obviously if these men were involved in crimes they admitted to as an alibi, it only stands to reason that their confessions to the rape and beating of the jogger had to be valid, even if those confessions were coerced, because they were bad guys. And what do you do with bad guys? You execute them, of course. Why would you need any more evidence than that?
We agree with Hillary Clinton: It's awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump -- or Rudy Giuliani -- is not in charge of the law in our country.