New York City
Tompkins County DA Declined Gang Rape Evidence To Avoid The Inconvenience Of Finding Something
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
The Tompkins County District Attorney's office has confirmed, through documents it did not read, that it is satisfied with the outcome of an investigation it declined to finish.
ABC News reviewed internal documents showing that Cornell University police gathered additional material related to an on-campus gang rape probe and submitted it to the DA's office for review. The DA's office declined to look at it. This is being described by nobody, officially, as a choice.
The documents do not record a reason. They record a direction: away.
A spokesperson for the office said the DA "stands by the integrity of the process," which is a sentence that can mean anything and was almost certainly chosen for that reason. The process, in this case, involved receiving evidence in a file, setting the file somewhere, and then not opening the file, which is a workflow more commonly associated with a homeowner who received a jury summons than with a law enforcement body investigating sexual violence.
Cornell University police, for their part, did the thing they are supposed to do. They gathered material. They organized it. They sent it to the people with the power to use it. This part of the system worked, which made it possible for the next part of the system to not work, which is how institutional failure usually gets produced: one department does everything right so that another department has something concrete to ignore.
Tompkins County, for the unfamiliar, is a small upstate New York county anchored by Ithaca and by Cornell, which is the kind of elite institution that produces both future senators and ongoing arguments about what the word "community" means when the community is mostly 21-year-olds and the people responsible for them. The DA's office covers both, presumably, though recent evidence suggests a narrower operational scope.
Legal observers noted that declining to review evidence is not, technically, illegal, which is the most useful thing about being the office that decides what is illegal.
"We take these matters extremely seriously," the spokesperson added, in a statement that was not accompanied by any action consistent with taking these matters extremely seriously.
The additional materials remain, presumably, wherever materials go when no one will touch them. A filing cabinet, an inbox, a drawer in the room where ambition goes to wait for retirement. The case remains unresolved in the way that cases tend to remain unresolved when the office responsible for resolving them decides, at the moment of resolution, to leave the room.
The women involved have not commented. There was no one asking them to.
The story we are making fun of: https://abcnews.com/US/tompkins-county-das-office-declined-review-additional-material/story?id=136973934