The
Friedman case continues to be defined by delay.
Two years after I posed the question, Is Actual
Innocence “Capturing the Friedmans”?, the frustrating answer is: We still don’t know. Below is a tangled story of: evidence
withheld by the Nassau County District Attorney’s office from its own case
advisory panel; a panelist’s subsequent modification of the panel’s original
recommendations; a defamation lawsuit filed by the defense against the DA’s
office; the recent election of DA Kathleen Rice to U.S. Congress; and a judge
set to hear Friedman’s case, though she worked as an Assistant DA with DA Rice
for years.
In the
above 2012 article, I summarized the case background:
On
November 25, 1987, I was sprawled out on my parents' couch, when my favorite
high school teacher appeared on the TV news. Arnold Friedman was a retired NYC instructor
who taught computer classes in his home for local kids. I watched as he and his 17-year old son,
Jesse, were handcuffed and hauled away for horrific child molestation crimes
occurring in their basement. I fell off
that couch in disbelief. Arnold and
Jesse Friedman each pled guilty to avoid a trial, and Jesse learned of his
father's prison suicide in 1995. Since
his release in 2001, Jesse has attempted to clear his name, so he no longer
must register as a Level 3 violent sexual predator. In 2003, new facts about
his case emerged in the Oscar-nominated documentary, Capturing the Friedmans, which examined the
evidence against the Friedmans and questioned whether any of the allegations
against them were truthful. On August 16, 2010, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second
Circuit found
"a reasonable likelihood that Jesse
Friedman was wrongfully convicted" and that "the police, prosecutors
and the [trial] judge did everything they could to coerce a guilty plea and
avoid a trial." That November, the Nassau County District Attorney
appointed a panel of four experts to
review the evidence against Jesse.
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