Incriminating Statements to Be Admitted in N.Y. Jogger Case

Incriminating videotaped and written statements by five teen-agers accused in the 1989 gang rape and near-fatal beating of a jogger in Central Park are admissible as evidence at their trial, a judge ruled Friday.

Six teen-agers are accused of being part of a band of roving youths who attacked an investment banker as she jogged through the park on the night of April 19.

Admission of the statements was critical to the prosecution’s case because the victim has no memory of the attack and cannot testify against her alleged assailants and because there is no physical evidence that conclusively links the suspects to the attack.

The woman, now 29, was raped, beaten and left for dead but has since made a recovery that doctors call remarkable. She has returned to work.

Last fall, DNA tests on blood and semen from the victim and her alleged assailants failed to positively link the youths to the violence, which they allegedly referred to as a “wilding.”

Of six teen-agers charged with attacking the woman, five gave statements to the police that were videotaped.

One of them, Antron McCray, 16, said: “We took turns getting on top of her.” He said he punched and kicked the jogger and that another defendant, Yusef Salaam, 15, hit her with a pipe. McCray, according to a third defendant, Kevin Richardson, 15, “had sex with her.”

The six are charged with rape, sodomy, assault and attempted murder. Four other youths are charged in attacks on male joggers that night.

Attorney Jesse Berman, who is defending one of the youths, complained after the ruling that Judge Thomas Galligan suppressed “next to nothing.”

The only exception to the ruling was a comment made by one of the teen-agers to a police officer at a precinct station house.

After the officer told the youths, “You should be out with your girlfriends instead of being out beating people,” the youth replied, “I got mine,” the policeman has testified. Galligan gave no reason for the exception.

Another defense attorney, referring to the judge’s ruling to suppress a suspect’s statements in another murder case in which the victim was black and his alleged attacker white, suggested that racism tainted Galligan’s decision.

“There is a double standard,” attorney Colin Moore said.