Guilty, Guilty, Guilty

By Frank Trippett

Jurors on the case of three black youths charged with raping and beating the young woman known as the Central Park Jogger had spun the deliberations out for 10 days. It was enough to make the prosecution fret about the outcome of its trial in what prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer called "one of the most vicious and brutal crimes in the history of New York." And enough to inspire a futile defense motion for a mistrial on the ground that jurors as fatigued as these could not arrive at a fair verdict. Coming after a two-month-long trial conducted in Manhattan amid sputtering racial tensions, the unexpectedly long pause provoked the tabloid New York Post to fill its front page with a boldface question that probably spoke for a great many New Yorkers: WHERE'S THE VERDICT?

When at last the jury of 10 men and two women handed it up at 6:50 p.m. Saturday, it triggered emotional outbursts in the jam-packed state supreme court. Relatives of the defendants cheered at the first words of "not guilty" but grew solemn as a stream of guilty verdicts followed. The jury reached identical verdicts on each of the three defendants alleged to have been part of a band of perhaps 30 youths whose maraudings on the night of April 19, 1989, reached a hideous climax in the raping and beating of a 5-ft. 5-in., 100-lb. 30-year-old investment banker accosted while on one of her nightly runs.

Antron McCray, 16, Raymond Santana, 15, and Yusef Salaam, 16, were found not guilty of attempted murder and sodomy but guilty of all the other major charges -- rape, assault and riot. Salaam had given the trial its most surprising twist when he became the only defendant to take the stand; he was also the only one of six youths indicted in the case who did not sign a written confession or make incriminating admissions on videotape. Each of the three, as a youthful offender, faces a prison term of five to 10 years.

As jury foreman Earle Fisher read the verdicts, the sitting defendants displayed little emotion except for a couple of sighs and conspicuous slumping. But there were shocked mutterings of "Oh, my God!" and head shaking among families and friends. The jogger herself made only one appearance at the trial, testifying for 12 minutes and telling jurors she remembered nothing about what had happened to her. Doctors considered it "miraculous" that she recovered at all from the bashings with a rock, a brick and a 12-in. metal pipe. Indeed, her assailants had left her for dead, naked in a mud puddle and gagged with her bloody shirt. When found, her skull badly fractured, she had lost two-thirds of her blood, had a body temperature of only 80 degrees and, doctors said, seemed close to death. Though the victim returned to work on Wall Street this year, she suffers a visibly scarred face as well as lingering disabilities -- double vision, a lost sense of smell, an unsteady gait from a damaged sense of balance.

The courtroom had barely emptied before the postmortems began. Two jurors confided that the attempted-murder charge gave the panel the most trouble, leading to "shouting and screaming." One juror, they said, had been holding out for a not-guilty verdict on the rape and first-degree-assault charges until the very last phase of the deliberations. Roy Innis, director of the Congress of Racial Equality, commended the verdicts as "intelligent," adding that it was "reasonable" that the defendants were not found guilty of attempted murder, since they had shown no premeditation. Speaking through a friend, the jogger refused comment on the ground that other defendants are still awaiting trial.

With reporting by Barbara Goldberg/New York