Justice Uncoiled

"A disgrace," said the Brooklyn district attorney. The judge heartily agreed, as he vacated the attempted-rape conviction. Thus last week George Whitmore, 28, was finally released from a Dickensian legal nightmare in which police, courts and prisons had entangled his life for nine long years.

In 1963 Janice Wylie, a Newsweek research assistant and niece of Author Philip Wylie, and her schoolteacher roommate, Emily Hoffert, were sadistically beaten and stabbed to death in their Manhattan apartment. Picked up eight months later for questioning about another crime, Whitmore, a black laborer, had a picture of a white girl on him that looked to police like Miss Wylie. Within hours, interrogators had extracted a confession not only to the Wylie-Hoffert murders, but also to another stabbing murder and to an attempted rape.

Whitmore was never tried in the Wylie-Hoffert case, however, because another man was found and convicted of the killings. Accordingly, that charge was dropped, and so was the other murder charge after a trial ended in a hung jury. Nonetheless, the state tenaciously prosecuted him three times for the attempted rape; the third time, his conviction survived appeals. It was that verdict that fell last week after the prosecutor's office learned that the victim had picked out a mug shot of her assailant at a time when no mug shot of Whitmore was in police files.

"It just became very important for someone to stick him with something," commented Selwyn Raab, a New York City reporter who dogged the case over the years and helped turn up the evidence that finally liberated Whitmore. The honor of the police was at stake." Though his wife divorced him and disappeared with their two daughters -and though he was imprisoned for nearly four years -Whitmore claimed he was not bitter toward anyone. Less forgiving, his lawyers were considering suing the city or state for malicious prosecution.

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