Word: sharptons
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Dates: during 1988-1988
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...frustrating legal cases inside out. Almost since the first report last November that Brawley, a black teenager from Wappingers Falls, N.Y., had been abducted and raped by six white men, officials investigating the matter had been stymied. The reason: at the prompting of three controversial advisers -- the Rev. Al Sharpton and Attorneys Alton Maddox Jr. and C. Vernon Mason -- Brawley and her family had refused to cooperate with the inquiry. Seeming to confirm growing suspicions about the case, Perry McKinnon, a private investigator and former assistant to Sharpton, told the New York Daily News that the whole story...
...decorated Viet Nam veteran and former policeman who rated high marks in a previous job as a hospital security chief, McKinnon, 39, was denounced as a "pathological liar" by Sharpton. McKinnon was quickly subpoenaed to testify before the special grand jury investigating the case in Poughkeepsie. Attorney General Robert Abrams, special prosecutor in the case, declared that "if Mr. McKinnon is right, then Attorneys Mason and Maddox and the Rev. Sharpton have been consciously perpetrating a hoax...
McKinnon told the Daily News that he quit his job as Sharpton's aide five weeks ago because he could not "live with all those lies" the Brawley advisers were concocting. Interviewed later on New York's WCBS-TV, he repeated his charges while hooked up to a lie detector. The polygraph, said the operator, indicated that McKinnon was telling the truth. According to McKinnon, the Brawley advisers did not really believe her story of abduction and rape. He said that when he personally offered to investigate, they showed no interest. "I don't care about no facts," he quoted...
...said earlier that the allegations against the three Brawley advisers demanded a "whole new look at the situation." In a strongly worded letter to the attorney general, Cuomo warned that the judicial process could not be "deliberately and contemptuously violated." Meanwhile, U.S. investigators began probing to see whether Sharpton, Maddox and Mason had committed any federal offense while raising funds by mail. As for Brawley, currently living quietly in Monticello, N.Y., how she came to be found last November, wrapped in a plastic bag and covered with scrawled racial epithets, remained a mystery...
This is a good idea, but the tactics of Sharpton, Mason and Maddox--refusing to cooperate with authorities while publicizing a non-crime to advance their political ends--will undermine not just their own credibility, but also the credibility of Black victims of racial crimes...