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A Case Of Rape And Murder


Keila Pulinario testified at her 1997 murder trial that Imagio Santana had raped her and then bragged about it to his friends. When she confronted him some days later about it, he laughed and threatened to rape her again. That is when she shot and killed him. She was convicted by a jury and is serving a sentence of 25 years to life, the maximum sentence, at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.

The conviction was affirmed by two New York State appeals courts, but now, five and a half years after the trial, federal Judge Jack Weinstein of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn has granted a writ of habeas corpus -- literally, “release the body” -- ordering New York authorities to either release or retry Pulinario.

The case offers yet another glimpse into the crime of rape, which is the most under-reported crime in the United States. According to Department of Justice figures, two thirds of all rapes are not reported. In New York City last year, according to the New York Police Department, 2,013 rapes were reported, which represents an increase, while most other crimes have decreased.

At the time of the shooting, Pulinario was a 21 year old victim of childhood sex abuse. She could neither read nor write, and had an I.Q. of 70. She had no criminal record, though she admitted she had used and sold drugs in the past. Santana, who had a sex offense charge pending involving a 14 year old girl, was a drug dealer and user; an autopsy identified the presence of heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methadone in his body.

While the prosecution’s theory was that there was no rape and that the defendant was guilty of murder in the second degree, the defense to the shooting was that Pulinario was raped and suffered rape trauma syndrome (RTS) and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The defendant’s legal position was that she was not criminally responsible because of mental disease or defect; that an emotional disturbance caused the defendant’s actions. The defense also claimed that the shooting was a justified act of self-defense.

The defendant’s expert witness, Dr. Linda Ledray, a clinical psychologist, had been prepared to testify that Pulinario was frightened, severely depressed, and suicidal following the rape, and that shooting Santana was a reaction to extreme trauma. But two weeks into the trial, after her lawyer conceded that his client had indeed shot Santana, the district attorney objected to having psychologist Ledray testify.

The trial judge refused to allow this expert testimony as a way of penalizing her for having been untruthful when she had been interviewed by the prosecution’s psychiatrist. She had not disclosed to this psychiatrist that she had had a prior sexual relationship with Santana. (She had disclosed this earlier to officials when reporting the rape).

Federal Judge Weinstein found that this extreme penalty violated Pulinario’s constitutional rights to a fair trial. It prevented Pulinario’s trial counsel, John Ray, from presenting evidence that because of his client’s reaction to the rape she could not have formed the intent to kill, and that, in fear of Santana, she acted in self defense. Ledray would have testified that Pulinario’s conduct including the shooting, her delay in calling the police, the omissions in her statements to the state psychiatrist, her calm demeanor were completely consistent with trauma. The prosecution’s argument that she did not act traumatized was never explained to the jury as being part of the reaction to rape. “The defense was thoroughly sandbagged,” said Barry A. Bohrer, her pro bono counsel, who handled her federal appeal along with David Crow of the Legal Aid Society.

Judge Weinstein wrote, “studies have shown that a rape victim who has a prior sexual relationship with her attacker is less likely to be believed and she may be blamed for having brought the rape upon herself.” If allowed to testify, Ledray would have explained that it is typical of rape victims to blame themselves especially if they know their rapists. Ledray would have testified that it was the defendant’s extreme fear of Santana that caused her to shoot him. The jury would have heard that she lacked criminal responsibility by reason of mental disease or defect or suffered from an extreme emotional disturbance at the time of the shooting, or that she was justified in shooting this man as an act of self defense. The self defense argument was supported by evidence that an open knife was found near Santana’s body.

In addition to omitting the extent of her prior relationship with Santana in her interview with the prosecution’s psychiatrist, the defendant appeared too calm, the prosecution argued, which caused the doctor to conclude that she was a “malingerer,” or not really suffering from an psychiatric problems.

This, Judge Weinstein wrote, “permitted the prosecution to thoroughly exploit the jurors’ misconceptions about the conduct of the rape victim and argue, among other things, that petitioner’s seemingly calm demeanor after the rape and her untruths to the psychiatrist -- which appear to be not untypical of rape victims -- were evidence that she had not been raped.”

No decision has been made on a new trial or an appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in Foley Square.

Emily Jane Goodman is a New York State Supreme Court Justice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Honor Andrew Haswell Green!


 

 
Andrew Haswell Green gets nothing more than a portrait in City Hall and a park bench.

Exactly one hundred years ago on November 13th, Cornelius Williams, a jealous and delusional furnace tender, set out to kill the elderly gentleman he claimed stole his girlfriend. Williams pumped five bullets into the greatest civic hero in New York City history, 83-year-old Andrew Haswell Green.

New Yorkers can be forgiven for not having heard the name, since his murder is not the only injustice committed against Andrew Green. Obscurity has done in a man whose contributions to the city were truly astonishing.

It was Green who was as much responsible for the creation of Central Park as its architects Frederick Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. In his position leading the state commission charged with building the park, he secured the adoption of their Greensward plan, defended it from meddlers, kept it on budget, expanded its acreage.

This would have been enough to make him deserving of recognition, but it is only one of his accomplishments. He was largely responsible for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. He brokered the creation of the New York Public Library and co-founded the Bronx Zoo. He added Riverside, Morningside and Fort Washington Parks to the map, too, and threw up a bridge over the Harlem River.

Most importantly, Green masterminded the 1898 consolidation of Greater New York, a fiercely contentious measure that, in a stroke, lassoed the various municipalities of today's Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island within the borders of New York City, enlarging the metropolis fivefold.

"It took Robert Moses, Fiorello LaGuardia and Franklin Roosevelt, drawing upon the combined resources of the federal, state and city governments, to exceed Green's accomplishment," urban historian Thomas Kessner has written. But while Moses has a state park, LaGuardia an airport and Roosevelt a drive named after them, among much other recognition, Andrew Haswell Green gets nothing more than a portrait in City Hall and a park bench. He deserves more.

GOTHAM'S FIRST COMPREHENSIVE CITY PLANNER

Born in

  New Yorkers can be forgiven for not having heard the name of the man responsible for the Washington Bridge (above) and the Bronx Zoo, since his murder is not the only injustice committed against Andrew Green.

Worcester, Massachusetts in 1820, Andrew Green moved to New York as a young man, became a lawyer and developed an interest in civic affairs. In 1857, after a stint as president of the Board of Education (where he railed against unfair state funding of upstate schools at the expense of those in the city!) he landed his position on the Central Park Commission. Honest, hardworking and tight with a buck, Green soon became the driving force behind that body

He convinced the legislature to adopt a series of escalating measures that gave the commission authority beyond just Central Park itself, and allowed it to oversee the development of all of northern Manhattan, the Harlem River and the suburban hinterland we now call The Bronx. In essence Green leveraged the Central Park Commission into the first comprehensive urban planning body in New York City history.

Mindful of growth and economy, two principles that would always guide his proposals, Green insisted on the coordinated planning of all the public improvements under his authority -- roadways, parks, bridges, water supplies, transportation lines and even cultural institutions.

By gaining the trust of public officials and the city's powerful business elite with well-formed arguments and a track record to back it up, Green was able to influence the metropolitan region's physical development to the end of the nineteenth century, long after the park commission was officially dissolved in 1870.

COMPTROLLER AND PRESERVATIONIST

In 1871 Green was enlisted to serve as New York City Comptroller after the Tweed Ring bankrupted the municipal treasury. He immediately put a stranglehold on the city's chaotic spending habits. By trimming unneeded workers, denying fraudulent claims, curtailing public works and sometimes even using his own personal credit to secure funds to meet the government payroll, he restored the city's fiscal health.

Green was a lifelong historic preservationist and champion of urban green space. He chose the location of the Bronx Zoo where it would fell the fewest trees, and even objected to the placement of Grant's Tomb and the New York Public Library - an institution he fought hard to create - on park grounds.

Soon after helping to quash a proposal to demolish City Hall and move the seat of government uptown, Green gathered New York's preservationists into the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, an organization he founded in 1895. In his lifetime and beyond the society created numerous state parks, lobbied to save endangered sites like Hamilton Grange, erected countless historic markers and proposed the name for the Williamsburg Bridge.

OUR INDIFFERENT CITY

 

In 1898 a small island was named for Andrew Green at Niagara Falls in recognition of the preservation work he did there. But incredibly, here in the five boroughs, no park, bridge, building, school or even street bears his name! All he has here is a forlorn and obscure bench in Central Park that was evicted from its original prominent hilltop years ago to make room for a compost heap.

"It is preposterous that the only memory marker recalling Green's contributions to New York is a park bench," wrote Mike Wallace, the Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of Gotham, a History of New York City to 1898.

I agree. And I'd like to propose two significant structures, both in need of a name change, as candidates for a Green monument.

The first is the little-known Washington Bridge, a handsome Harlem River span that Green conceived. Ever since the Port Authority built the giant George Washington Bridge, the name of this other, lesser-known bridge has only confounded drivers.

The other is the Tweed Courthouse, the newly refurbished home of the Department of Education. (Tweed's designation is not "official," some say, but it is literally engraved in stone on the building.) Tweed was perhaps our city's greatest villain and Green our greatest champion; Tweed has a big shiny courthouse, and Green has a sad little bench. Isn't something wrong with this picture?

Michael Miscione discovered Andrew Haswell Green when producing a TV documentary in 1998 about the consolidation of all five boroughs into the City of Greater New York. He has launched a campaign to get a substantial monument named for Green.

Bank Robberies On the Rise


After notorious bank robber Willie Sutton was released from prison, he filmed a commercial in 1970 for a Connecticut bank, touting the bank's new photo credit card, a security measure. Now three decades later, at a time when everybody else -- from airports to government agencies to office buildings - are emphasizing their metal detectors and scanners and beefed-up security personnel, banks seem to be taking the opposite tack: They apparently prefer to be seen as friendly rather than secure.

Is it a coincidence that, almost as soon as Commerce Bank opened 17 branches in New York City, 16 of them were robbed?

Commerce Bank has the distinction of being the most targeted bank for robberies in New York this year. But it is probably unfair to single it out for criticism. It is certainly not alone. Bank robberies have more than doubled in the city this year so far, compared to 1999. By the beginning of September, there were 312; in all of 1999 there were just 141.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has blamed the surge of robberies in New York banks on their lax security, and security experts agree. Tom Reppetto, president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City, says that many banks have cut down on the number of armed guards and do not have such standard security equipment as bullet-resistant barriers, closed circuit television, and "dye packs" - stacks of cash that explode with an ineradicable dye minutes after the robber leaves. Diana L. Taylor, the New York State Banking superintendent, has complained that many banks tell their employees to acquiesce to the robber's request. "This posture sends a clear message to the criminal that the institution is an easy and convenient mark for robbery," she wrote. And Robert McCrie, professor of security management at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, after analyzing the police department's latest bank robbery statistics, concluded: "Senior management in banking firms is blocking the imposition of needed controls They are resisting approving security measures that could make a difference."

Why Would New York Banks Be So Casual?

First, it is important to point out that few bank robberies in New York bear any resemblance to "Dog Day Afternoon" or "Bonnie and Clyde." The majority are committed without an actual weapon, just a note, and result in payoffs under $2,000. Most bank robbers nationwide, according to security consultant John Kennish, "do not case the bank prior to the attack, wear any kind of disguise to hide their identity, or have a post-attack plan in place prior to the attack." Violence is rare, though it does occur: In the course of 7,127 bank robberies committed nationwide in 2000-2001, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, eight people were killed.

This may help explain why, in an interview with Crain's New York Business, Vernon Hill, the chief executive officer of Commerce Bank, which is based in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, could apply a cost-benefit analysis to such security measures as bullet-resistant partitions: "If we get 11 million customer visits and if we get robbed five to six times during the same period," he said, "am I going to design branches for the 11 million, or for the five to six robberies?"

Cost-consciousness is part of the equation. So is an apparent fatalism. The New York State Bankers Association says it encourages its members to implement what are called Best Practices strategies including dye packs and bullet-resistant barriers to reduce crime, but the association's general counsel Roberta Kotkin sounds less than confident about the efficacy of such a measure: "A study showed that 89 percent of banks that have bullet-resistant barriers were robbed," she says. Then why is it considered a best practice? "It's a deterrent," she replies, but no fail-safe antidote to robbery. "We have the best interests of our customer in mind. We do what we can. Bank robberies can't be eradicated."

This does not mean banks are completely indifferent. Some banks have strengthened individual branches where robberies have taken place, though, in order to keep costs down, have opted not to make wholesale improvements in their branch network. North Fork, which had 27 robberies in its 78 branches, upgraded its security by installing digital cameras that display the customer's photo on a flat screen as a deterrent. Still, Edward Hausdorf, the director of security at North Force Bank, said, "If someone is intent on robbing a bank, they're going to rob the bank."

But Commissioner Kelly and the others say there is plenty more that the banks could be doing. Kelly recently railed at a Chase Manhattan Bank manager who took 15 minutes to dial 911 after a robbery took place. "They don't get it," Kelly told the press. "They have a security guard, and he said he didn't see anything." Kelly wondered why Emigrant Savings Bank, which was robbed by the same perpetrator several times, did nothing to alter its security practices.

In Europe, banks have been installing "people traps" in which customers must enter the bank through an enclosure that includes a metal detector and takes considerably more time to exit. A security guard can press a button and trap the robber before he can escape.

In the absence of such obvious preventive measures by banks here, the police themselves are employing such strategies as stakeouts and special surveillance at branches that have been struck numerous times, according to Reppetto of the Citizens Crime Commission.

Meanwhile, Taylor, the New York State Banking superintendent, is trying to apply pressure on banks by informing them that bank examiners will be focusing on "safety and soundness" during their examinations. They will be looking to see that corrective action is taking place.

"If banks don't make the move toward better safety practices, they may find themselves on the road to a legislated solution," Taylor says, "whereby compliance with a set of standards is legally mandated by the New York City Council and/or the state legislature."

Gary M. Stern has written articles for the Daily News, NY Post, and NY Observer, and newsletters for JPMorgan Chase.

 



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