- Albert Ramos
-
- $5 Million Cannot Undo
7 years:
- City settles over
wrong conviction
By Sean Gardiner, Newsday
STAFF WRITER, December 17, 2003
Alberto Ramos, who will receive
$5 million for a wrongful conviction - the largest such settlement
in state history - said yesterday that no amount of money is
worth going to prison with the tag of "baby rapist."
"That was a nightmare
on a daily basis," Ramos, now 40, said of the seven years
he spent in prison from 1985 to 1992. "When you go to jail
for a crime like this, you're treated like scum. I would have
rather gone to jail for murdering someone then go to jail for
the crime I was convicted of."
When he was 22, a college student
and aspiring teacher working in the Concourse Day Care Center
in the Bronx, Ramos was convicted of raping a 5-year-old girl.
The case started on Feb. 19,
1984, when a mother bathing her little girl saw redness around
her daughter's vaginal area. The girl initially claimed a 5-year-old
classmate sexually abused her. The mother reported her daughter's
allegation.
The city's Human Resources
Agency, which oversees day care programs, and the Bronx district
attorney's office investigated. The first doctor to examine the
girl ruled out sexual abuse.
An agency investigation found
that the girl told other students about sexually explicit movies
she watched at home, acted out intercourse using dolls and had
a history of masturbating in class.
The Bronx assistant district
attorney who prosecuted Ramos never called that doctor and ignored
the agency's findings. The prosecutor also didn't turn over the
agency materials to defense attorneys, as the law requires.
For unknown reasons, the agency
report sent to the prosecutors also omitted the facts that the
girl initially denied she was sexually abused and then later
told agency investigators that her abuser was a dark-skinned
black man. Ramos is a light-skinned Hispanic.
Without knowing about the agency's
findings, another doctor examined the girl and later testified
that she could have been sexually abused. Ramos' lawyer, Joel
Rudin, said the doctor later testified that her determination
was based in part on the fact that a 5-year-old would not have
the knowledge to recreate sexual activity unless she had been
sexually abused.
The agency closed out the investigation,
concluding the allegations were unfounded.
In March 1984, the girl's mother
came forward again, this time saying that her daughter was now
saying it wasn't another classmate but a man named Alberto who
had sexually abused her.
What happened next, Rudin said,
is that Ramos got caught up in a nationwide "hysteria"
about sexual abuse at day care centers.
Former Bronx District Attorney
Mario Merola, who is deceased, tried to seize on that hysteria
in looking to "one day run for mayor," Rudin said.
Due to false information provided
by the Bronx district attorney's office, Ramos was tried and
convicted in the media before he was even indicted, Rudin said.
The lawyer pointed out a newspaper story from the time that was
headlined "Teacher Hunted As Sex Abuser" which quoted
a district attorney's spokesman as saying Ramos was hiding from
a police manhunt. It wasn't until years after he was released
from prison that police officials admitted that they knew where
Ramos was the whole time and that he was cooperative. The Bronx
district attorney's office declined to comment on this story.
"Imagine what it must
have been like for Alberto Ramos to live in the Bronx in 1984
after that headline," Rudin said.
Ramos was convicted of rape
in May 1985. Before handing down the maximum 8 1/3 to 25 years,
Judge Howard Goldfluss lamented that he wasn't able to sentence
Ramos to life.
Ramos was first sent to Downstate
Correctional Facility in Fishkill, where, he said, a guard ordered
him to strip naked and in front of 30 inmates and announced that
Ramos was a "baby rapist." The guard then threatened
to sodomize Ramos with a nightstick, he said.
"From then on, things
got much worse," Ramos said.
For the next seven years, Ramos
left his cell as little as possible for fear of being attacked.
He said prison guards would
unlock his cell door and look the other way while inmates set
upon him.
"I was verbally abused,
I was sexually abused, I was harassed by prison officials, by
other inmates," Ramos said. "It was a situation where,
eventually, I had to fight to live. I had to fight back."
Ramos' exoneration started
with an ironic twist. In 1991, Anthony Judge, an investigator
for an insurance company representing the city and the day care
center in a civil lawsuit brought by the parents of the 5-year-old,
uncovered the Human Resource Agency's documents. He gave those
papers to Ramos' mother, who hired Rudin.
The attorney filed an appeal,
and Ramos was released from prison in June 1992 after a judge
overturned the conviction.
It took 2 1/2 more years for
the Bronx district attorney's office to drop its appeal and dismiss
the charges against him.
"What happens in case
after case after case is nobody wants to admit a mistake was
made and the district attorney defends the conduct of his office
virtually no matter what," said Rudin, who added that the
prosecutor was never disciplined.
Rudin spent the next nine years
trying to sue the city for Ramos' wrongful conviction.
In August 2001, Rudin won the
right to sue the Bronx district attorney's office, claiming that
the prosecutor's "misconduct resulted from a policy at the
district attorney's office to tolerate or permit this kind of
conduct to occur."
Instead of going to trial,
the city settled, taking two years to finalize the terms.
After his release, Ramos worked
for a time at a homeless shelter. With prison causing a seven-year
gap on his resume, it was the only job he could get, he said.
In 1997, in part to "escape the neighborhood," Ramos
joined the Army and served there until two weeks ago, when he
was discharged.
His dreams of being a teacher
are gone, he said. Now he wants to go back to school and maybe
become a cook and take care of his mother, Flor Cupeles, who
never lost faith in her son even when one of her Mott Haven neighbors
told her that Ramos "deserves to die for what he did."
Ramos said the settlement is
an official acknowledgment of his innocence, though a begrudging
one.
"I know that New York
City would not be paying me this settlement unless it recognized
the horrible wrong that was done to me and that I am innocent,"
he said. "But I remain deeply hurt and angry that no public
official involved in this case - none of the prosecutors or social
workers, no attorney for the city, no city official - has had
the decency to apologize."
Copyright © 2003, Newsday,
Inc.
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Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
