Janet Difiore.

Our Readers Respond...


Dear Editor:

Monday at 4:00 Westchester County Correction Officer Benevolent Association’s President Robert DelBene will demonstrate at the County Office Building asking for the removal of Commissioner Rocco Pozzi.Being a correction officer myself, I can’t begin to tell you what’s going on but if you ask the right questions you will get the right answers.

The Journal News refuses to print anything that confronts the issues surrounding the Jail, starting with the firing of Commissioner Bridget Gladwin to make room for GED graduate Joseph Spano to be the next Commissioner of the Department of Corrections.

Follow the Bill which was passed that allowed Joseph Spano to remain in the same retirement. Looking at the bill’s sponsor. Talk to attorney Michael Sussman. Talk to Jim Bostic at the Nepperhan Community Center, and follow the trail.

Talk to the County Police about the visitor who sparked a manhunt at the jail with all surrounding municipalities responding with helicopters and dogs. Then talk to Mr Delbene with all the right questions so that you can print all the right answers.

Name Withheld

Dear Editor,

Once again, Judge Schechter’s decisions have been overturned by the Appellate Division. Judge Schechter’s continued obstruction of justice against Jing Kelly and her child is simply unacceptable.

Judge Schechter must be immediately removed from this case and disciplinary action must be brought against her.”

On August 4, 2006, the Appellate Division of New York State Supreme Court issued a mandamus order against the Judge Schechter after she refused to follow a previous ruling by the higher court allowing Jing Kelly to regain custody of her son. On November 17, 2005, the Appellate Division had unanimously overturned all the Family Court decisions which separated Jing Kelly from her child. I had submitted an amicus brief on behalf of Jing Kelly.

This has been another year wasted where Jing has not been able to see her son, Tristram, who is now six-years-old and has forgotten anything about his mother.”

Robert F. Wayburn, Esq., an attorney who has assisted Jing Kelly in her case, has said, “Once again, Judge Schechter is unanimously reversed on the law. Tristram and his mother and his maternal grandparent should not be denied justice any longer. They have a right to be reunited as a family and it is time to move forward in this direction before Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday season expires.”

John Liu,
New York City Council Member,
Flushing, NY


Dear Editor:

Today I was at a bagel shop in Eastchester and I picked up your paper. This was the first time I had seen it. As I started to read it the first thought that came into my mind was that your paper should have a subtitle under your masthead titled “Tool of the Democratic Party”. No wonder why in Westchester we cannot get any news that is fair and balanced. We have The Journal News, The New York Times and now your paper that only reports not what the news is but what you would like the news to be according to your publisher and Editorial Staff.

A recent report concluded that most people don’t look to newspapers to get their news any longer but to various other media such as TV i.e. Fox News Channel, and the internet, Blogs etc. It’s the only place where you can get diversity. Years ago in a brief conversation with Mary Alice Williams at Fordham University I gave her my opinion that without diversity they CNN would not be long in the market place of ideas. They no longer hold a prominent place as they once did, I am not a soothsayer, they did it to themselves. I just wanted to give you my opinion as a new potential reader who was turned off by the first reading.

Joseph Arlotta
White Plains, NY

Editor’s Note: We are so happy that Mr. Arlotta has found our newspaper. And he is certainly entitled to his opinion. However, as Jack Nicholson once suggested to Tom Cruise in a classic film, some people “just can’t handle the truth.”

In Our Opinion....

Several weeks ago, in the September 28th issue of this newspaper, The Advocate column, An Open Letter To District Attorney Janet DiFiore, called upon her, in light of the Jeffrey Deskovic miscarriage of justice, to “please take under serious consideration” the possibility of “organizing a special investigative unit within your office, perhaps three or four experienced investigators, whose sole responsibility will be to investigate serious claims
of innocence.” DA Richard Brown, of Queens County, has employed such a unit for many years, a fact DA DiFiore was, no doubt, well aware of, but which the letter reminded her of.

Approximately ten days after publication, having received no response from Ms. DiFiore, The Westchester Guardian forwarded a copy of the column to her, by certified mail, and received a return receipt for its delivery dated October 11, 2006. A month having passed since our District Attorney formally received that suggestion, without any response from her Office, We now view her announcement last week, that she had appointed an “independent panel” to study “what went wrong, and what lessons could be learned,” with her self-described “righteously investigated and prosecuted” case, as most interesting.

To her credit, DA DiFiore had acknowledged, upon the release of Mr. Deskovic several weeks earlier, “the fallibility of the criminal justice system.” And, given her admitted very limited personal experience, as an assistant DA, in the actual preparation and presentation of felony cases over the years, it is understandable that she might not be prepared to accept the notion that some police agencies in Westchester, the Peekskill Police Department amongst them, are quite capable of extracting false confessions from those who they may charge with homicide and/or other major crimes.

Nevertheless, We believe that if DA DiFiore was sincere and truthful when she declared, “The work we do here is to make sure we get justice,” she must realize that the mere appointment of a “blue ribbon panel” to study the circumstances of one particular miscarriage of justice is a woefully inadequate response to a problem that she ought to know has been pervasive in Westchester County for many years. If, in fact, as Mr Deskovick has stated, the Peekskill Police Department forced a false confession from him, which resulted in his conviction
for Rape and Murder, despite his actual innocence, that police department is not alone in that heinous, and malicious practice. And, the District Attorney’s Office knows that!

The Mount Vernon Police Department, for example, has been extracting false confessions from innocent individuals for years in their notorious so-called “Conference Room” in the basement of Police Headquarters, and Mayor Ernie Davis, and his new Police Commissioner David Chung have each been made aware of the fact. Selwyn Days, now serving 50 years for a “double-homicide” that was really a Murder/Suicide, and Kareem
Bryan, serving 43 years, as Mrs. Pirro’s “Bedroom Bandit,” because the Mount Vernon Police let the actual perpetrator escape, each underwent the same 36 hours in handcuffs, in a chair, until they would say anything they were told to say to turn off the torture.

Juries find videotaped “confessions” just too compelling to resist, even when the accused makes 37 different statements totally inconsistent with the police account, and the Prosecution’s theory of the case, as with Selwyn Days. And, it doesn’t seem to matter a bit to judges or juries that these videotaped confessions somehow never, ever, include a reading of Miranda Rights to the accused. After all, if the Defendant is actually volunteering
a confession why wouldn’t the police want the giving of Miranda warnings on the tape?

DA Janet DiFiore knows only too well that there have been numerous miscarriages of justice in Westchester, particularly under the Pirro Regime. That’s how New York City Police Officer Richard DiGuglielmo got convicted of Depraved Indifference Murder for saving his father from a bat-wielding assailant, and Anthony DiSimone got convicted of Depraved Indifference Murder in the death of Louis Balancio, even though the DA had a confession from the actual murderer six days after the incident.

Miscarriages of justice have been pervasive in Westchester, in part because of insufficient screening of complaints on the part of the District Attorney’s Office, and their willingness to charge and bring to a grand jury for indictment, all too quickly, whatever police and civilian complainants allege. So many of the “he said / she said” Rape and Sodomy cases brought to indictment by Jeanine Pirro should never have gotten out of the Complaint Room; complainants who when asked, under cross-examination by defense attorneys, “Did you ever say No?” all too often had to admit they hadn’t. One need only ask any of those defendants who, despite being acquitted, if their personal and professional lives were ever the same again?

We renew the call to DA Janet DiFiore to consider establishing a special investigative unit for the sole purpose of investigating Serious Claims Of Innocence, brought by defense counsel who are prepared to present reasonable, and significant, evidence in support of their client’s claim of actual innocence, as well as guaranteeing the full cooperation of witnesses and the accused. If DA DiFiore is truly sincere in her professed desire to “make sure we get justice,” she should make the effort to discover “mistakes,” willful, and otherwise, before proceeding with a miscarriage of justice, rather than after.