Networked Knowledge - Media Report

[This edited version of the report has been prepared by Dr Robert N Moles]

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On 3 May 2007 Jonathan Bandlerof The Journal News reported: “Real killer sentenced in Peekskill wrongful-imprisonment case”

He said that convicted murderer Steven Cunningham got 20 years added to his prison term yesterday for the murder of a Peekskill teenager in 1989, a crime for which her high school classmate Jeffrey Deskovic was wrongly imprisoned for more than 15 years. Cunningham, linked to the killing by DNA last year, said nothing as the victim's mother and Deskovic watched him as he was sentenced for the slaying of 15-year-old Angela Correa, who was raped and strangled Nov. 15, 1989, in the woods behind Hillcrest Elementary School. He never looked at them. As prosecutor Patricia Murphy read a victim impact statement from Correa's mother and sister, Cunningham stared straight ahead. "Because of his own inadequacy and failure at life, a man who amounts to nothing took the life of a daughter who meant everything to me," the mother, Angela Vasquez, wrote in the statement.

In the corridor afterward, Deskovic and Vasquez shared a tearful reunion, the first time they had spoken since the days after the killing. Outside the Westchester County Courthouse in White Plains, Deskovic said he was thankful for the empathy she showed him. "She told me she felt very badly for me. She remarked that I was very strong," Deskovic said. "It was a very emotional moment for both of us. (It was) just like I was a son to her."

Deskovic said he was upset that Cunningham "remained silent while I was in prison" but could not waste time feeling anger toward Cunningham because it would detract from his effort to educate the public about wrongful convictions and the danger of capital punishment. Deskovic was convicted based on a false confession he gave a Peekskill detective after hours of interrogation that included a lie- detector test, which he was convinced he failed. He pleaded with Judge Nicholas Colabella at sentencing that he was not the killer. But the judge did not overturn the verdict and gave Deskovic the minimum prison sentence, 15 years to life.

Murphy called the killing a "horrific crime," a tragedy compounded by the conviction of the wrong man. "Fortunately, although very belatedly, science … placed the blame where it always belonged," she said.

Before leaving the courtroom later, Murphy approached Deskovic and told him, "We're as sorry as people can be." Deskovic has enrolled at Mercy College and is completing a degree in psychology that he began while in prison. He hopes to go to law school and eventually work to win exoneration for others who were wrongfully convicted. He is also pursuing a lawsuit against Peekskill, Westchester and New York state for compensation for his ordeal.

Westchester District Attorney Janet DiFiore has asked two retired judges, a retired Staten Island prosecutor and a Manhattan Legal Aid lawyer, to review the investigation and the initial prosecution to determine what went wrong and what lessons could be learned in the case. She is awaiting the panel's report, a spokesman said yesterday.

Cunningham, 47, pleaded guilty in March to second-degree murder in Correa's killing. The new term imposed by Westchester County Judge Susan Cacace will not begin until 2013, when he would have become eligible for parole in the 1993 slaying of Patricia Morrison, his girlfriend's sister. The mother of three young boys was strangled in her Peekskill apartment after she would not give Cunningham money to buy crack or let him sell her videocassette recorder. He pleaded guilty to murder the following year and was sent to prison for 20 years to life. As a result of that incarceration, Cunningham was required to give a DNA sample. When lawyers from the Innocence Project persuaded DiFiore during the summer to have the semen evidence from the Correa slaying retested, it matched Cunningham's DNA in September. Investigators confronted him, he confessed, and Deskovic was freed from prison that week.

Cunningham was smoking crack in the woods near Griffin's Pond on Nov. 15, 1989, when he spotted Correa, who had walked from her Main Street home to take pictures for a photography class. He forced her to have sex and then strangled her with his hands. He said he reached into his pocket for the vials of crack he had left and threw them into the woods before returning to the body, moving it to a small depression and covering it with leaves.

Cunningham said that until DNA evidence linked him to the crime, he had not been confronted about the killing and had not told anyone what he had done - not when police found Correa's body two days later or over the next 14 months as Deskovic was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced. Cunningham said he hadn't known anyone was sent to prison for what he did, a contention Deskovic and Morrison's relatives scoffed at, as the case was big news in Peekskill that year.

But Cunningham's mother, Helen, said this week that it might have been possible that he remained ignorant. "He was so into drugs, and I think what happened is he got more and more into the crack," she said by telephone. "And he probably didn't want to think about what he did." Helen Cunningham said she learned of his involvement in the girl's death when The Journal News reported it in October after interviewing her son in prison. She only talked with him about it once after that. "He was relieved. It was a whole thing lifted from him," she said. "He said, 'Mom, now I can sleep at night. I couldn't sleep before.' It's a shame because he really had changed in prison. His attitude changed; his mood changed."

But Steven Cunningham was not so contrite or doomed by his secret when first confronted in September, investigators from the District Attorney's Office said. When they showed him Correa's picture, he told them, "I never saw that woman in my life," and said he couldn't explain how his semen was found on her body. He changed his tune when Investigator Arthur Mohammed asked him how he wanted to be remembered by his mother and son and urged him to "free Angela's soul and end her family's suffering." Cunningham's mother said she tries not to think about the case, but when she does, her thoughts are with Correa's family and with Deskovic for his ordeal. "Every time I think about her, it hurts," she said. "It's sad all around."

Vasquez would not comment after the sentencing. But in her written remarks, she said she did not want Cunningham to apologize "for his senseless act, because sorry means nothing." "We do not know what kind of a human he is. Not only did he take these lives, but he allowed another child to be blamed and sacrificed like a lamb," she wrote. She wrote of a young girl who dreamed of growing up to be a psychologist, who knelt each morning and prayed to the Virgin Mary, and talked to her mother each evening about her day at school. "There are so many amazing things I had saved in my heart that helped me to continue living without her," Vasquez wrote. "She had the most beautiful soul. She was kind, sweet and had the biggest heart you have ever seen."

Source: 3 May 2007 Jonathan Bandler The Journal News “Real killer sentenced in Peekskill wrongful-imprisonment case”

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