Saturday, June 23, 2012
Lawyers Say Rape Case in Brooklyn Won’t Go On
In a startling reversal in a case
that raised questions about misconduct in the Brooklyn district
attorney’s office, defense lawyers for two of the four men from Crown
Heights, indicted last year on charges of raping and forcibly
prostituting a neighborhood woman for nearly a decade, said that
prosecutors notified them on Wednesday that they were planning to drop
all charges in the case.
The district attorney’s office declined to comment, but two former
members of the office with close ties to people who still work there
said the indictment could be dismissed as early as Tuesday, when a
hearing in the case is scheduled.
The charges, brought against the men last June, created an initial shock
not only because the victim complained of being attacked beginning at
age 13, but also because she was a member of the Chabad Lubavitch
community of Orthodox Jews and the accused were older black men in the
same neighborhood, where those two groups coexist, but rarely interact.
Announced with great fanfare at a news conference by Charles J. Hynes,
the district attorney, the case was immediately questioned by friends
and relatives of the defendants: Damien Crooks, Darrell Dula and two
brothers, Jawara and Jamali Brockett.
Then in April — 10 months after the men were imprisoned awaiting trial —
the district attorney’s office announced that it had improperly
withheld a police report in which the victim recanted
some accusations she had made, a fact that had not been shared with
defense lawyers. Additional documents were subsequently turned over to
lawyers for the men, including medical records that suggested the
accuser had a history of mental illness.
Shortly after the police report was produced, Abbie Greenberger, a
prosecutor on the case who had quit her job, said that her boss, Lauren
Hersh, the chief of the district attorney’s sex-trafficking unit, had
pressured her to move forward despite concerns about inconsistencies in
the case. Weeks later, Ms. Hersh herself resigned after facing questions from an internal ethics panel.
After news of the exculpatory statements first emerged, Justice John P.
Walsh, of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, ordered Mr. Dula and Mr.
Crooks to be released from Rikers Island although they still faced
charges at that time. The Brocketts remain in prison on unrelated
charges.
On Wednesday, Mr. Crooks’s lawyer, Elliot S. Kay, said his client was
thrilled by the news that the case against him would be dropped.
“Damien’s pleased that he can put this matter behind him and get on with
his life,” Mr. Kay said. “And he’s pleased that the D.A.’s office
realized that the just thing to do is to dismiss all charges.”
The victim’s father, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to
not to expose his daughter’s identity, said he was extremely
disappointed with the district attorney’s office.
“They basically wrote this case off in a manner that sends a really bad signal to other victims,” the father said.
The case reached a crisis on June 5 when Mr. Dula’s lawyer, James
Phillips, filed a motion to dismiss the charges based largely on the
withheld evidence. In answering the motion, the district attorney’s
office would have had to acknowledge its own misconduct, but that would
not be necessary with a dismissal, said one of the former prosecutors.
Jerry Schmetterer, the chief spokesman for the Brooklyn district
attorney, declined to comment on the case other than to say, “We will be
in court on Tuesday morning.”
Even after Ms. Hersh quit her job, a steady stream of new information
continued to emerge. Weeks ago prosecutors handed over to the defense
recordings that the accuser had secretly made of telephone calls she
placed after the indictments. In the calls she can be heard discussing
elements of the case in an apparent attempt to bolster the account she
had presented to the grand jury. At times, she discussed what sounded
like misgivings.
“I care for him and I have feelings for him and I feel closer to him
than anybody out there,” she told one person she spoke to, adding, “I
wish I could just like, I don’t know, just say forget it, just work it
out with Crooks.”
Mr. Phillips, the lawyer for Mr. Dula, said he was happy to hear that
the charges would be dismissed but added that he could not help feeling
that justice delayed was justice denied.
“Nobody was a winner in this case,” Mr. Phillips said. “Darrell Dula, an innocent man, was jailed for almost a year.”
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