A 163 Year Sentence

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“The dad raped them when they were 2 years old,” he said, “and they were too young to be witnesses when they were 2. The guy not only did it once, he did it twice.” Cooper, who left the office in 1998 and works as a personal injury attorney for Cellino and Barnes, called the appeals on the basis of ineffective trial counsel “nonsense” and used the term “revisionist history” to describe any portrayal of Okongwu as innocent. He denied that the twins were given a script to follow, though it came up during the trial when a defense lawyer asked Chendo how she had learned some of the words she was using, “privates,” for example. “We have this script,” she answered, “and we read it over to refreshen our mind so we would know what to say the next day.” ‘Constitutionally deficient’ During an interview in January 1992, the girls told an employee of the Child and Adolescent Treatment Services agency that they wanted to ask their “Uncle Louis” if he knew “what our father did to us.” The statement did not jibe with the girls’ claim that Eze, too, had abused them in the basement of Okongwu’s apartment. Eze’s defense lawyer never introduced the contradiction. She feared the jury might think Eze failed to constantly monitor the visits. The federal judge who reviewed her performance in 2003, William M. Skretny, did not fault her for that decision. But he did for others. For example: • Jessamine Ingrid Jackson, who had never represented someone charged with child abuse, told Skretny that she “probably” reviewed medical literature regarding the sexual abuse of children. “However, she never visited a medical library and could not recall the names of the articles or texts that she reviewed,” the judge wrote later. • Jackson and the rest of the defense team – J. Glenn Davis and the late Edwin Gonzalez, whose heroin addiction was publicly exposed four years before the criminal trial began – never lined up a medical expert to counter the prosecution’s doctor. The doctor concluded the girls had been raped based on a physical examination and on the girls’ statements. But medical studies questioned whether hymenal exams could reliably indicate abuse and, as Skretny noted, the local medical community was raising “serious questions” about methods used in the Okongwu case. Yet the defense never called its own doctor. • More importantly, defense lawyers passed up the chance to wipe out the prosecution’s physical evidence. The district attorney’s doctor admitted he also examined Chendo Okongwu in the 1988 case. Surprisingly, his findings in 1988 were virtually the same as his findings after the supposed rapes of 1991. A defense lawyer asked about Nnedi’s comparison, but prosecutor Cooper objected because a different doctor examined Nnedi in 1988. Judge Rose LaMendola, now retired, agreed with Cooper and sustained his objection. The defense team never returned to the subject to show that findings for Nnedi, too, had not changed. In a case that came down to credibility and some physical evidence, there was no physical evidence. “Looking back on it now, I probably could have done more to coordinate the defenses than I did,” said Davis, who represented Okongwu. Davis said he always knew the three were not guilty. Skretny determined that Eze’s representation was so “constitutionally deficient” it denied him the right to a fair trial. The decision in 2003 helped Wosu and Okongwu eventually win their appeals, which at the time were only sputtering in the state courts. Eze is soft-spoken, with a wide build and an easy manner. In prison, he kept his head down, stayed busy and treated it almost like he did the boarding school he attended in Nigeria. Sometimes he talks bitterly about his life being uprooted. Other times, he seems to take it in stride. “The only reason I was involved in that case was because I was appointed by the State of New York to supervise the visitation,” he said. “I had just finished out of college. I had a job, and I was doing well, and all of a sudden, everything breaks loose, and I was taken away from my job and my life. The whole nine yards.” To Eze, the twins are still family. Sometimes he gives Chendo a ride to work, he said. He picks her up in the house on Poultney Avenue. Even with all that has gone on, Chendo still lives there.
Interviewing today The art of interviewing children in cases of child abuse has improved since 1992, in part to heed the lessons of the McMartin Preschool case from California and other injustices, in which parents and caregivers were locked away because of false or coerced testimony from children. In Erie County, most interviews are conducted not at police stations but inside a repurposed mansion on Franklin Street. The Lee Gross Anthone Child Advocacy Center, a unit of Child and Adolescent Treatment Services, opened in 1994, the year Okongwu, Wosu and Eze were packed off to prison. Interviewers are expected to, among other things, keep concepts simple; to avoid leading questions or questions that elicit only yes or no answers; to let children know it’s OK to answer with “I don’t know” if they don’t know; and to ensure they understand the difference between truth and lies. In their statements, the Okongwu twins said they were shut down any time they tried to retract the accusations and correct the authorities. Even today, a child who changes his or her story – who “recants” – faces skepticism because officials tend to assume the child feels pressure to change course. “When faced with a victim’s recantation, prosecutors should seek out evidence that will rehabilitate and corroborate the victim’s initial, truthful disclosure,” says a September 2011 article in “Strategies,” a newsletter for prosecutors. The article leaves little room for the possibility that the child’s latest statement is the truth. “There are instances again that we have seen where family members pressure the child to recant their allegations because they don’t want the breadwinner to be kicked out of the house and go to jail,” said Judith Olin, director of the child advocacy center. “And unfortunately children are often put under a lot of pressure in that regard. It is very sad.” Jeffrey Deskovic doubts that interviewing has improved much. He was convicted at 17 of raping and murdering a fellow high school student in Peekskill. After 16 years in prison, he was cleared by DNA evidence that identified the real killer, who meanwhile had murdered again. Once released, Deskovic earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and, with money received for his wrongful conviction, began a foundation in New York City that helps others serving time for crimes they did not commit. Naturally, police and prosecutors want to protect kids and want to know whether physical or sexual abuse occurred, Deskovic said, but the system often presumes guilt because of the revulsion triggered by sex crimes against children. Sometimes, he added, police and prosecutors are fueled by a “cosmic justice mentality’’: They believe their suspect breaks the law and want a conviction “for one thing or another” to get them off the street. It’s the very dynamic that Okongwu says was at play in his case. Officials believed he was guilty of abuse in 1988 but didn’t convict him. They were determined that the trial in 1993 would end differently. Sedita’s view Kevin M. Dillon, the district attorney when Okongwu was convicted, remembered little of the case. But today’s district attorney, Frank A. Sedita III, sees no miscarriage of justice. He said the women were asked after their father won his appeal to testify in a second trial. According to Sedita, the Okongwu twins did not claim they had been railroaded back in 1993. They even said their recent affidavits were false. Then they stressed that they would not testify again only because, Sedita said, they wanted to avoid reliving the matter. Sedita and his team adamantly deny that the girls were coached or coerced. They say the girls made clear statements to the authorities back in the early 1990s and the horrific details were strong enough to bring charges and take the case to trial. Stachowski, the lawyer who argued Okongwu’s final appeal, says he knows the women were truthful in their two sets of affidavits. The first was completed in 2010, after the appeal was won. The second came in 2013, after charges were dropped and their father prepared his lawsuit for the Court of Claims. Stachowski says the statements to the DA’s staff should not be taken as genuine. The women feared they would be charged somehow if they did not testify and wanted to free themselves from the prosecutors’ demands, he said. “In late 2011, when I was 26 years old,” the women say in identical statements, “the Erie County District
Page 1 and 2: Emeka Okongwu
Page 3 and 4: As children in an adult world, they
Page 5: of Eze and called him Uncle Louis.
Page 9 and 10: Monday October 19, 2015 The Buffalo

A 163 Year Sentence

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