Another day, another person who is outraged and offended that former police officer Michael Pena, who had been accused of raping a 25-year-old school teacher at gunpoint while off-duty in Manhattan last August—was not convicted of rape charges. Key witness Ann Bishop, a special education teacher who testified that she witnessed Pena having sex with the victim from her bedroom window, said she couldn't believe jurors dismiss the victims own testimony as well as hers: “I know what I saw,” she told the Daily News. “I am disturbed by the fact that they didn’t come back with a guilty verdict.”
She was incredulous about the three holdout jurors who caused the deadlock on the rape charges (Pena was found guilty of three counts of predatory sexual assault), and who allegedly were caught up on things like the fact the victim couldn't remember the color of a car parked by the courtyard where she was attacked. “That’s ridiculous,” said Bishop. “Perfect cases are only on Law & Order. In the real world, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.”
Bishop had called 911 twice the morning of August 19, and jurors were played those calls: "Hi, there appears to be sex going on that is not consensual in the backyard of the house...It's rather disgusting," she told one dispatcher. Bishop said she'd be willing to testify again if prosecutors choose to re-try Pena on the rape charges, but only if the victim were willing to go through a trial again. And after a trial in which certain jurors dismissed an eyewitness as a "skateboard witness," brushed aside forensic evidence of Pena's semen on the woman's underwear, and chose to not believe the victim's own account of being penetrated ("It hurt"), it's entirely reasonable to question why she'd want to.
“It disturbs me that the landscape of the whole picture was lost,” she told the News. “Some of it you just have to use common sense. When common sense can be so easily swayed, in a big picture, it disturbs me.” As Jane Manning—a former sex crimes prosecutor in Queens who now works for the National Organization for Women—put it, “I don’t think any jury anywhere in the country would doubt that man’s word that he felt a hand shoved into his pants pocket. Here you have jurors actually unwilling to believe a woman would know when a man’s penis is being shoved into her body.”
In response to the Pena case, NY State Assemblywoman Aravella Simotas said she plans to introduce a bill to broaden the definition of rape to include oral, anal and aggravated sexual assault.
