Boyz N St. John's

National Review, August 26, 1991 by Lorrin Anderson

THE BOYS beat the rap. WHITE MEN ACQUITTED IN SEX ABUSE TRIAL OF BLACK WOMAN ... OR, WHAT ELSE IS NEW? as the Amsterdam News headline put it.

"One of the greatest miscarriages of justice the world has ever seen," according to the Reverend Herbert Daughtry, advisor to the complainant. . . . A "rerun" out of the Old South, says Congressman Charles Rangel. . . . Mayor Dinkins is "shocked and dismayed." . . . And it is a verdict that will have a "chilling effect" on the willingness of victims to press charges. The New York Times relays a warning from Professor Peggy Sanday: "It's open season on women." There was heightened concern, on Joy Behar's WABC radio talk show, about rampant testosterone poisoning. "Three canny lawyers," Carole Agus writes in New York Newsday, "invented a hitherto unheard-of concept: consensual gang rape."

But it was not in fact a rape: not attempt at penetration was alleged. The three defendants were charged with sexual abuse and coerced sodomy--sodomy, in this case, meaning fellatio, performed by a 21-year-old Jamaicanborn woman who, like the defendants, was a student at St. John's University in Queens.

There is no reasonable doubt that the sexual bout took place at the house eight male students (most of them members of the lacrosse team) shared--an off-campus residence known locally as "Trump Plaza." The question was whether the younng woman was coerced. And the jury decided, after deliberating for six days, that coercion remained unproved. Walter Grabinowitz, Matthew Grandinetti, and Andrew Draghi, all in their early twenties, walked freely out of the Queens County courthouse. They could have gotten 25 years.

It started with a budding friendship, overlaid with flirtation, between the young woman (who has not been publicly identified) and another resident of "Trump Plaza," Michael Calandrillo, who still faces trial.

On March 1, 1990, Calandrillo offered her a ride home from target practice at the rifle club they both belonged to, and sexual bantering that had begun earlier apparently continued in the car. (Had she ever had sex with a white man? Had he every slept with a black woman?) They ended up at "Trump Plaza," where, allegedly, Calandrillo induced her to drink orange soda laced with vodka, persuaded or forced her to administer fellatio, and then drove off to see his steady girlfriend, leaving Miss X in the company of his hospitable housemates. Whether or not she drank more vodka is unclear--her account has varied--but she says she soon found herself being coerced into doing vile things while drifting in and out of consciousness. A couple of days later she confided her humiliation to a counselor, a nun who advised her to stop drinking with strange men and get on with her life. It was two weeks before she went to the police, an interval that rape counselors say is not uncommon.

The jurors said after the verdict that they hadn't thought much of the prosecution's witnesses, particularly the young woman herself--too many contradictory details, they said. And the jurors, including two blacks and two Hispanics (and six women), emphatically denied that race had anything to do with the verdict.

The police and the prosecution soft-pedaled the racial aspect of the case, but the customary claque of black militants was on hand outside the court-house, harassing the defendants and their families and proselytizing the jurors (which may have backfired). The young woman herself comes from an upwardly mobile immigrant family, and she declined at first to put a racial label on the case. But her brother, a Yale graduate who is a teacher and journalist, now says it was racial; his sister, who has left St. John's, has apparently come around to the same view.

New York's criminal-justice system is a mess. And a special judicial commission provided useful ammunition for black paranoiacs and white guilt freaks when it reported earlier this year that the system is "infested with racism." Since the courts are grubby, often humiliating places, and since they have an overwhelmingly black and Hispanic "clientele," as the NEw York Times tactfully labels the criminal-defendant community, well then, it must follow that "the system must be racist." A truly marvelous leap of judicial logic.

In fact you don't have to do any digging at all to recall interracial cases where white defendants had the book thrown at them (Howard Beach, Bensonhurst), and others where juries returned highly dubious not-guilty verdicts in favor of black defendants. The notorious Larry Davis was acquitted of attempted murder after a shootout that left nine cops wounded. In 1987, a young Brooklyn man named Andre Nichols beat a murder rap after admitting that he shot and killed a white Catholic priest. In 1985, enlightened opinion erupted in fury after an off-duty white cop shot and killed a 17-year-old black "honor student' named Edmund Perry. It turned out that Edmund and his older brother Jonah had mugged the cop. There was no question. But Jonah Perry was acquitted of armed-robbery charges.