It’s not that the Hofstra false rape case is the most important ever, but that the 5 o’clock Friday effort to bury the story over the weekend by Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice shouldn’t be allowed to succeed. Whether you agree with the decision not to prosecute the false rape accuser or not, at least someone should know.
Given that Rice is up for election, which appears to be her primary motivation in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion, it’s only right that her opponent for the job be given her say.
The candidate, Joy Watson, who headed sex-crime prosecutions under former District Attorney Denis Dillon, said the seriousness of the accusation and the impact on the accused men warranted a criminal prosecution.
“I certainly would have held her to the charge,” Watson said while campaigning in Westbury. “I would have charged her and let the probation department and the court make a determination as to the appropriate sentence.”
“If the system is going to say, ‘You’re troubled, so you’re not going to get charged,’ what kind of reverberations does that send through the entire judicial system?” asked Watson, who is running on the Republican and Conservative lines. Rice is a Democrat.
Well, I’m not quite sure what is meant by “reverberations”, and unfortunately Joy Watson doesn’t tell us. Considering that she’s running for District Attorney, it would have been a better idea to tell us what she thinks rather than asking an obtuse rhetorical question. One informs. The other, well, doesn’t.
This would have been an enormously significant opportunity for Joy Watson to stake out her position on what she would do as DA, particularly since she was once the bureau chief of sex-crimes in Nassau County. While the false accusation isn’t a sex crime, the debate surrounding the decision to decline prosecution is all about sex crimes. Who better to shine some light on the subject? But she didn’t.
And Rice, not being shy, replies:
This would have been an enormously significant opportunity for Joy Watson to stake out her position on what she would do as DA, particularly since she was once the bureau chief of sex-crimes in Nassau County. While the false accusation isn’t a sex crime, the debate surrounding the decision to decline prosecution is all about sex crimes. Who better to shine some light on the subject? But she didn’t.
And Rice, not being shy, replies:
Rice spokesman Eric Phillips said the district attorney “got to the truth quickly, got four innocent guys out of jail and held their accuser accountable.” He called Watson “a candidate . . . whose political pandering has given us all an insight into her ‘Shoot first and ask questions later’ philosophy of justice.”If one squandered opportunity is bad, two is worse. What the heck is Eric Phillips talking about? It makes no sense. First, he ought to know that Rice should never raise the issue of political pandering, her being a carpet bagger brought in by Suozzi from Philadelphia to fill the slot on his ticket that would have otherwise gone to someone he really couldn’t stand. And second, when it comes to political pandering, nothing can top what Rice has said about drunk driving, pandering in its purist form.
Then comes this “shoot first” quote. You mean like Rice throwing four innocent men in jail for a rape that never happened? There’s nothing about what Joy Watson’s said that bears any connection to that characterization. Maybe he was caught without a decent quote at hand and did the best he could?
For reasons that should be clear to anyone, the elected District Attorney’s decision is one that she will be forced to live with, if anybody remembers it after her deft media handling. For reasons that should similarly be clear to anyone, Rice’s opponent doesn’t appear to either have any clear vision of how and why discretion should be exercised either, or else her lack of experience in speaking with the media prevented her from making her position clear.
There is one additional possibility, though I hesitate to believe that it could be true. Perhaps Joy Watson had something meaningful to say about the decision not to charge Danmel Ndonye, but Newsday, whether author or editor, decided to leave that part out of the story. If so, I invite Joy Watson to let us know. Of all the various possibilities, that would be the one that is most damaging.
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I welcome this opportunity to spell out my reasons for outrage over the DA Rice’s failure to prosecute. The false allegation is indeed a crime. Failure to charge sends a message to those who make false allegations – if you lie, and in this case potentially sending young men to prison for 25 years, but are troubled, the DA will give you a pass from the criminal system. Why do we need judges? Why do we need police? Let the DA handle everything. And isn’t it fair to say that anyone who would falsely accuse someone of rape is troubled? Is the DA, by her conduct, suggesting anyone who makes such an allegation gets a pass??
More importantly, Rice’s decision downplays the impact on the lives of these young men and their families. They are the true victims of a false allegation motivated by a young woman unable to explain her whereabouts and condition to her boyfriend. The focus should stay on the criminal conduct, the only criminal conduct in this case, that of the false accuser.
To suggest that charging this woman would deter true victims of rape is illogical and wrong. The prosecution of false accusers will provide greater support to those who are true victims because the public will come to realize that false allegations will not be tolerated.
For Rice’s spokesman to categorize my reaction as “shoot first and ask questions later” is also illogical and ignores my 20 years as a Nassau prosecutor, handling Sex Offenses for over 7 of those years. While false allegations in Nassau might be new to Rice, I have handled such cases, resulting in arrests, exactly as I proposed in the media.
There could be an entire new thread about the expense to the taxpayers of this County caused by this false allegation, but that’s another story. As is Rice’s failure to mention that her office signed off on the charges before they were brought.
Without comment, Rice’s camp attacked my motives as political. I am proud to be a candidate for DA. The mishandling of this case is additional evidence of why I should be elected on November 3rd.