Two men served a combined 36 years for a rape that never occurred

By Frederick H. Lowe
Contributing Writer

(Special from NorthStarNews Today) – Two men, who served a combined 36 years in prison for a 1991 kidnaping and gang rape that never occurred because the woman lied, on Monday had their convictions vacated. Though the woman lied under oath in court and robbed both men of years of their lives, will not be prosecuted because the statute of limitations for the case has expired.

Gregory Counts and Van Dyke Perry had their convictions vacated by a New York Supreme Court judge after DNA testing identified another man’s semen in the complainant’s underwear.

The semen sample led to a joint reinvestigation of the rape by the Innocence Project, the Office of the Appellate Defender and New York County District Attorney Office’s Conviction Integrity Unit which discovered that law enforcement failed to investigate the case fully.

Counts, represented by the Innocence Project, served 26 in prison before he was paroled last year. Perry, represented by the Office of the Appellate Defender’s Reinvestigation Project, served 10 years in prison and was released in 2001.

“We are grateful to the New York County District Attorney’s Office for working collaboratively with us and moving quickly to restore justice for Mr. Counts and Mr. Perry,” said Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project, which is associated with Cardozo School of Law.

“This case paints a very dark picture of the criminal justice system in New York City, especially at that time and continuing today,” said Seema Saifee, a senior staff attorney with the Innocence Project. “Like so many other cases that have come to light in recent years, these young Black men were aggressively prosecuted and given lengthy prison sentences with very little care for finding the truth.”

Counts was 19 and Perry was 21 when the woman lied during court testimony that the two men and a third man, Leonard Jones, abducted her at knife point near a Queens subway station.

She claimed the men sexually assaulted her in the backseat of their car near Central Park. Police never arrested Jones. The woman claimed the men repeatedly raped her, sodomized her and punched her in the face, but an examining physician did not find any evidence of the alleged acts of violence. The semen found in her underwear was never DNA tested, and the car where the alleged sexual assaults took place was never searched for evidence.

Based on her testimony, Counts and Perry were convicted and sent to prison, although they had confirmed alibis.

Following the joint investigation, investigators spoke again to the woman who admitted that rape never occurred, that she had engaged in unprotected sex with her then boyfriend on the night of and on the morning after the alleged rape had taken place and that her boyfriend forced her to lie because he had dealt drugs with both men and owed them money.

This article originally published in the May 14, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.