Fuels Debate on Death Penalty : Attack on Jogger Becomes Symbol of Urban Violence

The case of the 28-year-old investment banker who was raped while jogging in Central Park last month by a gang of black teen-agers has joined Kitty Genovese, Son of Sam and subway gunman Bernhard H. Goetz in a macabre New York club: as shocking national symbols of personal fear and urban violence.

The crime is now fueling an angry debate over bringing back the electric chair in New York state and demonstrates once again the broad reach of the media and the potency of crime as a racial and political issue.

“Ever since the ugly rampage in Central Park, people in the city--and millions beyond--have been first stunned, then angered and now confused about fundamental and frightening realities,” Gov. Mario M. Cuomo said Monday in announcing a series of tough new anti-crime measures for New York City.

”. . . Now the city and the state--and the nation beyond--ask what is it? Why do they do it? How do we change things? And the questions are not just about Central Park, they are about all the wildness, the madness, the violence, the despair of drugs in Washington, D.C., in Los Angeles, in Chicago, all across the country,” he said.

Cuomo, who opposes the death penalty, promised to send at least 60 more state police narcotics investigators to New York City. He suggested tapping funds of the Municipal Assistance Corp., created to help the city recover from its 1970s fiscal crisis, to fund 250 more city policemen and proposed building up to nine additional prisons before the end of 1991.

Cuomo added that, with the Legislature’s cooperation, he would bring more judges to New York City to handle criminal cases, would turn state properties into courts, would order the state police and New York City police to acquire 9-millimeter semi-automatic pistols and additional body armor. Some specialized city police units already carry such weapons.

“We need to arm all of our police better than they are armed now,” Cuomo said in a speech before the Bar Assn. of the City of New York. “It’s cruel to send an officer up creaking stairs in a dark, musty tenement hallway with a simple .38-caliber pistol--especially when he or she knows an AK-47 may await on the next landing.”

“I don’t recall anything like the kind of violence that we nearly take for granted now,” Cuomo told the assembled lawyers. “It has changed life in the city dramatically, creating concern and fear and anger.”

Talk of Crime Grows

Cuomo’s language was hardly surprising in a city where talk of crime has escalated dramatically. Millions of people for two weeks have awakened each morning and gone to bed each night hearing the latest television reports of the jogger’s condition, and tabloids this weekend trumpeted how drug dealers critically wounded and tried to execute an undercover narcotics officer.

Cuomo’s promised veto of the death penalty faces its stiffest challenge in the weeks ahead, with just one more vote needed in the New York Assembly to bring back the electric chair. Some legislators believe that if the jogger takes a turn for the worse, or if there is another well-publicized terrible crime, the vote will be there.

The last criminal executed in the Empire State was in 1963, and New York is one of 13 states without the death penalty. But law enforcement groups are lobbying vigorously for its return--a campaign being opposed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and other groups.

Ironically, the death penalty debate has no direct bearing on the jogger case, because a murder was not committed. But six youths have been indicted in the savage attack on the jogger, who was beaten with a brick and a lead pipe before being gang-raped on April 19 and left for dead.

The brutality of the crime--more than 30 teen-agers had swept out of Harlem into the park on a night of “wilding,” attacking anyone who looked vulnerable--shocked even crime-hardened New Yorkers.

The woman emerged from her coma last week and is in critical but stable condition. As she struggled for survival in the intensive-care unit of Metropolitan Hospital, the attack aroused New York and the nation. Newspapers and news magazines reported on the crime, and television programs as diverse as “This Week With David Brinkley” and “Phil Donahue” sought to analyze the deeper meaning of what had occurred.

“The ripples of the jogger became bigger than the jogger,” said a state official, well-versed in the workings of the news media.

The coverage was fed by a number of factors, including the crime’s location--Central Park, New York’s principal playground--the victim’s socioeconomic status and the callousness of the teen-agers, who whistled at policewomen and sang a rap song in a precinct holding pen.

Privately, some veteran detectives were shocked at the behavior of some of the parents of the accused attackers, who showed little interest in their children’s behavior even while their youngsters were confessing on videotape.

Adding to the attention and the controversy, billionaire developer Donald Trump took out full-page advertisements in New York’s newspapers, decrying “the complete breakdown of life as we knew it” and calling for tougher police and a return to the death penalty.

The barrage of coverage also has led members of minority communities to point out that equally savage crimes in poor neighborhoods often receive far less attention.

Gradually, new facts have emerged in the case. Some of the youths had attacked other joggers in the park with far lesser consequences during the rampage. The Village Voice, in an article that law enforcement sources said was accurate, reported that some of the youths had previously terrorized their own neighbors.

And a policeman, patrolling the park, disclosed that he had warned the jogger on several occasions that it was too dangerous to run at night near the deserted area where she was assaulted.

Harassment of joggers by teen-agers is nothing new in Central Park. Last spring, a woman jogger was accosted by 15 youngsters, ranging in age from 8 to 12 years old, as she emerged at 92nd Street after running around the Central Park reservoir.

The group surrounded her and fondled her, but not with apparent rape in mind.

Karate Expert

“It was a game they were playing,” the jogger said. The woman, who holds a fifth-degree black belt in karate, formed a fist and prepared to fight. Then she looked at one of the boys, who could not have been more than 8. She thought if she hit the child, she would kill him.

“Because they were so young, I was able to grapple myself free and just run away,” the jogger, who asked not to be identified, told The Times. “They (the children) just were laughing. They were so young. I just imagined someone said, ‘I dare you to.’ ”

But the jogger said that on other occasions she and her friends have run into far more serious incidents while running when men actually tried to accost them in the park.

Clearly, the brutal rape of the investment banker has struck a deeper chord, joining the roster of New York crimes that have touched the nation because of their universality.

In 1964, when Kitty Genovese’s cries for help on a Queens street were ignored by 38 neighbors before she was killed, it touched deeper national fears of how deserted and impersonal some streets had become.

When Bernhard H. Goetz shot four teen-agers who he believed were about to rob him on a subway train, it set off a national debate over self-defense and the right to carry weapons in crowded urban areas.

When a gang of white youths in Howard Beach in Queens chased Michael Griffith to his death on a busy highway because he and his black companions had entered their neighborhood, it symbolized the enclave mentality of some isolated communities and the racial turbulence often lurking just beneath the surface in many big cities.

The Son of Sam killings by David Berkowitz in 1976 and 1977 symbolized how a deranged stalker can generate widespread fear.

The attack on the jogger not only has left the word wilding firmly fixed in New York’s dictionary of fear. It has brought home how cheaply life can be perceived by some teen-agers.

In his speech Monday, Cuomo sought to analyze some of the deeper causes of what happened in the park.

“Perhaps even more harrowing is the occasional revelation of young people killing, not out of desperation, but out of a grotesque insensitivity to the dignity of life and the most basic requirements of civilized conduct,” he told the lawyers.

”. . . We were left with the terrible possibility that we have, by our failures, produced young people who have learned to disdain simple principles of right conduct, principles so basic to our good order, that we never contemplated their being rejected.”