THREE LEGAL DECISIONS AFFECT EAST ENDERS

By Dan Rattiner

The wheels of justice turn slowly, but they do turn. And during this past week, there were three examples of how a legal wrong got to be a legal right. And all of them involved the East End.

Perhaps the most outrageous of them involved the case of a sick and dangerous man who, for several years, assaulted women on the beaches in East Hampton, Southampton and Quogue while wearing nothing but a ski mask. Why it took the police three years to figure out how to arrest this man is another matter, but the fact is that he was caught and he confessed to the assaults, which were almost always of a sexual nature. It is estimated that during three years he assaulted at least 23 women.

It took a year to bring him to trial on one of the counts and he remained in jail as his lawyer tried to work out a plea bargain. Finally, a month ago, the plea bargain was announced. He would serve a 20-year prison sentence — reduced probably to 13 if there was good behavior — and then he would likely be deported back to his native Colombia. He is here illegally. So that would be the end of that. As for the other charges, they would be wrapped up within this decision.

But when this arrangement was brought before the judge in the case in Riverhead last week, he did something very unusual. He threw the plea bargain out. You’re not supposed to do this when lawyers spend all this time working out a compromise. (Otherwise, why plea bargain?) But he did. Writing that the arrangement was not in the interest of justice, he demanded that the trial go ahead. This man, if convicted, will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars.

The second decision, which seems to go a long way toward righting a wrong, involves the State Bar Association of North Carolina. Two summers ago, we had working for us here at Dan’s Papers, a college boy who was a member of the Duke Lacrosse Team. Three members of this team, attending a party, were subsequently accused of gang raping a woman at the party who had, along with another woman, been hired for the evening as a stripper. Our employee was at this party but was not one of the ones charged.

Although the only evidence of this crime came from the testimony of the stripper, a District Attorney named Mike Nifong, up for re-election, held a press conference to announce the indictment, claiming that the woman had identified her attackers in a lineup and that DNA studies were being prepared that would prove the accusations.

As a result of this, the three boys were jailed, thrown out of school and the rest of the Lacrosse season cancelled.

Two weeks ago, the case against the boys began to come apart. Nifong, who had been re-elected largely on the strength of his apparent diligent prosecution, was, at his own request, being removed from the case.

Now, the North Carolina Bar Association is moving in the direction of disbarring him. The lineup he had arranged for the accuser consisted entirely of members of the Lacrosse team. There was nobody else. So no matter who she identified, it would have the effect of proving that the rape took place. Also, at the time of Nifong’s press conference, he already knew the results of the DNA test. The tests showed male DNA from several men on her body, but none of it matched anyone from the Duke Lacrosse Team. The event never happened. And though several other charges remain, the rape charge has been dropped.

The third event in the news this week involves two East End commercial airline pilots, who were involved in a plane crash in Brazil. The men are Jan Paladino, 34, of Westhampton Beach and Joe Lepore, 42, of Bay Shore, who were piloting a private jet with four passengers aboard over the jungles of South America last September. Seven miles up, its wingtip hit a Boeing 737 airliner operated by the Brazil National Airlines Gol, sending it spinning to the ground. The private jet landed safely with damage to its wing. The crash of the Gol jetliner killed all 154 people on board.

After the crash, the two pilots were relieved of their American passports and, without charges lodged against them, told to stay in Brazil during the investigation of the crash. They stayed at a hotel in Buenos Aires and were treated well, but they were there three months. Only last month were they finally allowed to go home, although they were told they might be charged with homicide and that would require their return. Much of Brazil, egged on by the press, seemed to think at the time, it was the actions of these pilots that caused the crash. The planes collided at 37,000 feet, the altitude allowed for the Boeing. The transponder for the private jet, which displays the altitude, was found to have not been on at the time the private jet landed, and it had no record of ever being on during the flight. The press in Brazil concluded that the pilots had turned it off.

The news last week was that homicide charges would not be leveled at the pilots, but instead at the air traffic controllers in Brazil who were responsible for the airspace occupied by the two aircraft. Some of them are to be charged with crimes that could result in 12 years in prison.

What has been found is that the controllers on the ground were not looking at their screens during the minutes before the crash or maybe even for hours before the crash. The private jet pilots requested permission from them to go from 36,000 feet to 37,000 in order to save fuel two hours before the crash, a request often asked of controllers when there is little aircraft activity about. This request was granted, even though the air traffic controllers should have seen that to allow this would put the two planes on a collision course.

As for the transponder, the controllers were not receiving reports from it and should have noticed that it was not working. Meanwhile, in the cockpit, though it wasn’t issuing reports and was not keeping a record, the pilots report that it WAS giving them altitude readings. That the transponder could not perform some of its other functions could not be determined by the pilots. To them it appeared to be working just fine.

In Brazil, investigators both from Brazil and the U. S. continue to look at the transponder to see how much of the unit was working and what kind of defects or faults it had.

There could be negligence charges prepared against the American pilots. But even if there were, since both of these men were and still are military personnel on loan to the jet charter, these charges would have to be forwarded to the American Defense Department for final determination.