Aggressive Defense Continues in Case of Detectives Accused of Rape

NEW YORK — The lawyers for two former New York police detectives who were charged in October with kidnapping and raping an 18-year-old woman continued their aggressive defense Monday, calling the woman a “compulsive liar” in a second motion to dismiss the case that also accused Brooklyn prosecutors of “sanitizing the truth” by using her “inconsistent” stories to seek indictments.

The motion — based on police reports revealed through the discovery process — laid out several discrepancies between accounts the woman gave in the early stages of the investigation and those she told a grand jury that ultimately handed up charges against the two defendants, Edward Martins and Richard Hall. Some of the discrepancies were minor: Initially, the woman said the detectives were driving a black Ford truck when they pulled her over in a car near Coney Island, handcuffed her and sexually assaulted her; later, she said it was a minivan. Others were more substantial: At first, she said, only one friend was with her in the car; later, it was two.

It is a common phenomenon for rape victims, because of shame or trauma, to make incomplete or inconsistent statements in the hours — even days — after their attacks. But the new motion, filed in state Supreme Court in Brooklyn, forcefully attacked the woman’s credibility, noting that at one point she told investigators that she was “high” on the night of the encounter and that many of her recollections were “foggy.”

Though the police reports indicate that the woman’s story did change over time about the clothes she wore, which detective handcuffed her and the configuration of the seats in the police van, one thing has not shifted: She has never wavered from her claim that the two detectives raped her.

From the start of the explosive case, the former detectives’ lawyers, Mark A. Bederow and Peter Guadagnino, have waged a vigorous defense that has often included attacking the complainant’s credibility. In December, they submitted their first dismissal motion, deriding the woman’s report of rape as “patently false” and claiming that the $50 million lawsuit she had filed against their clients gave her a financial motive to lie. That motion was rejected by Justice Danny K. Chun, who is handling the case.

The motion filed Monday continued the attacks against the woman, pointing out that her grand jury testimony in many ways contradicted the early interviews she gave to officers from the 60th Precinct, the 66th Precinct and from the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau.

As for her admission of being intoxicated during the encounter, legal experts said that it could cut both ways if the case goes to trial. On the one hand, the image of police detectives taking advantage of a young woman under the influence of drugs might build sympathy for her with a jury; on the other, her condition could easily be used during cross-examination to sow doubts about her story.

The woman’s lawyer, Michael David, said the motion focused on minutiae, not the issues at the heart of the case. “They brutally raped her,” David added. “Now they’re attacking her for points on the periphery.”

Much of the filing’s angry language was directed at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, which, defense lawyers said, improperly suggested to the grand jury that the woman was a credible witness even though prosecutors knew she had altered her account several times. While the lawyers acknowledged that prosecutors have “wide latitude” in presenting grand jury evidence, they also noted that the district attorney’s office had a duty “to see that justice is done.”

“It is doubtful that the grand jury would have indicted Martins and Hall on any sexual offenses,” the motion said, “if it had known the ‘full story.'”

Oren Yaniv, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office, said in a statement that the defense lawyers’ public attacks against the victim are “inappropriate” and that “we will continue to respond to any motions in court and not in the media.”

The case against Hall and Martins, who quit the force in November, has been bolstered by DNA evidence, proving that a sexual encounter did take place. While Bederow has never stated the encounter was consensual, he said the DNA “does not speak in one way or the other to the central component” of the woman’s claim — that she was forcibly raped.

Complicating matters is that New York state has no law explicitly forbidding sex between police officers and people in their custody, as it does between correction officers and their wards. Last month, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo called that lapse an “egregious loophole” that needed to be fixed.

The new dismissal motion offered hints about where the case might be headed next. It cited an interview that one of the woman’s friends, Mitchell Amshen, gave to the police in which he said he “vaguely remembered that one time she made up a story where she was raped.” The detectives’ lawyers added that based on their own investigation, they had “strong reason to believe” that the woman had made false rape accusations in the past.

The motion also sought to counter a media report from November that claimed a group of officers from the 60th Precinct — where, as narcotics officers, Hall and Martins sometimes worked — tried to intimidate the woman while she was in the hospital and discourage her from coming forward. The early police reports make no mention of the woman complaining about harassment and a report from December said that the while she was “bombarded by questions” from the police, “no one from the 60th Pct. told her verbally to withdraw or not file a complaint."