Janet Difiore.

The Advocate
Richard Blassberg


Blue Ribbon Panel Delivers White Paper DA Asked For Findings Expose Worst-Case Police and Prosecutorial Misconduct


A gesture by Westchester District Attorney Janet DiFiore more than six months ago, described by Jeffrey Deskovic as “almost unprecedented,” last Monday produced a 38-page report entitled Report on the Conviction of Jeffrey Deskovic. The report, generated
by a most distinguished panel of four, retired Judges Leslie Crocker Snyder and Peter J. McQuillan, together with former Richmond
DA William L. Murphy, and New York City Legal Aid Supervising Attorney Richard Joselson, pulls no punches despite having derived
its content from the cold record without benefit of live interviews.

For the most part, it fully corroborates what Mr. Deskovic and this column have shared with readers of The Guardian for many months now. Given that fact, it is not the intention of this column to regurgitate the contents of the report, but rather to place it into proper and meaningful context. It should be stated, up front, that Janet DiFiore’s commissioning of the investigation and report by such an eminently qualified panel, several weeks after the release of Jeffrey Deskovic from state prison, was highly commendable and clearly in the public interest.

She was, no doubt, fully cognizant that some of the most significant wrongdoing likely to be uncovered would involve former Assistant DA
George Bolen, and other ADAs as well as current Peekskill Police Chief Eugene Tumolo, and members of his department. After all, she worked side-by-side with Bolen for some twelve years, and was his boss for eight months, until his retirement last August, just weeks before Deskovic’s emergence from prison. With respect to Tumolo and the Peekskill Police Department, a law enforcement agency her office has daily dealings with, commissioning the report surely was no less uncomfortable.


Coming as it does, on the heels of the Duke University/Michael Nifong revelations, and a host of recent exonerations involving prosecutorial misconduct and police malfeasance in New York State, and across the nation, Report on the Conviction of Jeffrey Deskovic does not fall on deaf ears. Par-ticularly here in Westchester, jurisdiction of the grave injustice visited upon a vulnerable and innocent 16-year-old boy who would be made to spend the next sixteen years of his life behind bars as the result of the mindless and unconscionable abuse of power and public trust by a handful of self-serving adults, the lesson is all too compelling.

It is probably correct to state that the presentation of facts is more than ninety-five percent accurate, what few incorrect statements
there are having somehow worked their way into the record over the years. Nevertheless, despite their commendable faithfulness to the
facts, the panel members would seem to have gone out of their way to avoid specifically noting by name four major players in this most
sympathetic of American Judicial Tragedies; Jeanine Pirro, who, despite her present denials, repeatedly thwarted numerous attempts
by Mr. Deskovic to gain a comparison of the DNA which did not match his, with the State DNA Databank; Carl Vergari, elected District
Attorney at the time of Deskovic’s prosecution and conviction, who allowed ADA George Bolen the latitude to deliver a conviction
of a clearly innocent accused by whatever means necessary; Nicholas Colabella, the trial judge who had numerous opportunities
to prevent the tragic outcome that robbed sixteen years of liberty from a young innocent life.

The fourth unnamed wrongdoer was then-Assistant District Attorney Robert Neary, currently an appointed acting State Supreme Court
Judge, about whom Mr. Deskovic told The Guardian, “Without what he did, what happened to me might not have happened.” Deskovic explained, “He interfered with my right to counsel because once I had consulted with a lawyer, who advised me that he would inform the Peekskill Police, and they, in fact, stopped interrogating me, my indelible right to council had attached. However, when the attorney
was not retained, he called Mr. Neary to inform him he would not be the attorney representing me. And, Neary, in turn, told the Peekskill
Police that they could, again, interrogate me without counsel present.”

Unfortunately, it was this same sort of collegial courtesy displayed by the panel to Pirro, Vergari, Colabella and Neary that all too often contributes to the perpetuation of injustice within the justice system. Without needing to fully review the circumstances that led up to the
wrongful arrest, prosecution, and conviction of young Jeffrey Deskovic for the rape and murder of a 15-year-old female schoolmate, Angela
Correa, it is, however, necessary and constructive to note the key players whose misconduct contributed more to the tragic outcome than that of the others, if a clear and workable understanding of what actually occurred is to be teased from the facts. Without a doubt, Eugene Tumolo, former Detective Lieutenant, now Chief of the City of Peekskill Police Department, who choreographed and engineered the outrageously unconstitutional, and unlawful harassment, interrogation, manipulation, and arrest of Jeffrey Deskovic, a youth who he admittedly knew to be innocent by March 2, 1990, was one of two individuals most responsible for the pain and suffering inflicted.

Equally responsible, and as cruelly self-promotional, was Assistant District Attorney George Bolen, who maliciously rushed into the grand
jury on February 27, 1990, to get an indictment, knowing full well the DNA test results that would have defeated that indictment would be
announced within 72 hours. Then, having received those results he proceeded as if they did not exist. At trial, he would tell the jury that the
fact that the DNA found in the fifteen-year-old’s vagina and hairs found on her body did not match accused Jeffrey Deskovic, really didn’t matter because “she had had consensual sex earlier.”

How badly did Mr. Bolen need to convict a sixteen-year-old boy who he plainly knew to be innocent, that he would tell a jury, and all those in the courtroom, including poor Angela Correa’s parents and sister, that it didn’t matter that the Defendant’s DNA didn’t match that found in the vaginal cavity of her limp body because she had had prior unprotected sex with another? On this score, the panel was not imaginative enough, unfortunately working only with the cold record, to realize why clothing exhibits disappeared from the courtroom in the middle of the trial, never to be seen again.

We are told there were issues regarding the pull-over-type sports bra the young victim was wearing, in that it would not have lent itself to
the kind of violent removal by the Defendant that the Prosecution had theorized to the jury. The jury had, in fact, realized that and had called for an examination of the bra during their deliberations, but were compelled to settle for a mere photo of the bra because somehow, mysteriously, the District Attorney’s Exhibit Bag containing all of the clothing found on, and near, the body of Angela Correa, had disappeared. The point missed by the panel, however, involved the victim’s panties.


Mr. Bolen realized he needed to make her clothing disappear once he told the jury that she had had unprotected consensual sex prior to her rape and murder, because if, indeed, she had had such an encounter with someone else prior to the incident, and the semen found in her vagina was not the Defendant’s - and it was not - then clearly there should have been some residue in her panties. Otherwise, the semen found in her vagina must have come from the rapist, and it didn’t match Jeffrey Deskovic’s DNA!

Of course, in fairness to the panel that did a wonderful job; they were not re-trying the case. However, the outrageous disappearance of key evidence, coupled with the willingness by Prosecutor Bolen to do whatever it would take, no matter how unlawful, to obtain a conviction, is what must be learned and fully understood by legislators and concerned citizens everywhere. Mr. Bolen’s conduct was not atypical of him, as those who have observed him over the years, are well aware. Nor was it atypical of the conduct of any number of other ADAs who have worked in the Westchester District Attorney’s Office over many years.

If anything meaningful, and promising can truly be taken from this report, thoughtfully, and bravely, commissioned by DA Janet DiFiore, it
is the fact that there is a compelling need for legislation, both state and federal, to make the kind of prosecutorial misconduct and police malfeasance, exposed in its pages, punishable by financial and incarcerative penalties severe enough to dissuade even the most ambitious self-serving prosecutor, or police officer.

Jeffrey Deskovic has been exonerated, as have more than two hundred innocent individuals rescued by the Innocence Project alone. The sad
truth is that there are literally thousands of innocent persons languishing in prisons across this nation, put there by misguided, self-serving police officers and prosecutors. As tragic as that reality is, we must not forget, as was the case with Mr. Deskovic, having intentionally put the wrong person, an innocent person into prison, the actual rapist and murderer was left free in the community to strike again, and strike he did.


Little more than three years after the wrong man was sent to prison for his crimes, Steven Cunningham, a violent crack-addicted menace to
society, once again struck in Peekskill, murdering Pat Morrison, sister of his girlfriend, under circumstances similar to Angela Correa’s murder. Neither Bolen, nor Tumolo, apparently ever gave thought to Jeffrey Deskovic who would remain in prison for another dozen years.