A man accused of an atrocious crime -- violently mugging a three-year-old girl -- was cleared and set free today by a Manhattan jury.
The jury acquitted Anthony Faison, 33, despite what would typically be iron-clad evidence of guilt: the microscopic speck of his DNA recovered from the little girl's dress, and his signed confession to having yanked the girl's gold chain from her neck last year on the roof of an Upper East Side housing project.
But the case against Faison just didn't add up, his lawyer, Roy Miller, had told jurors in summations.
The girl had wandered away from her caretaker in the project courtyard. She was developmentally delayed, but had insisted repeatedly that she'd been attacked by "The boys."
"The boy took my chain," she'd sobbed to cops. And indeed, a neighbor had told cops that the girl was being shoved around and bullied by a pack of 10- and 11-year-old boys when he found her on the roof of the E. 106th St. complex an hour after she'd wandered off.
Her gold chain was recovered, snapped in two, elsewhere on the roof.
As for the DNA, Faison's lawyer successfully argued that so little genetic material was recovered -- just 50.4 picograms, with one picogram being a trillionth of a gram -- that it must have transferred onto the dress by accident or laboratory error.
Faison, who lived in Middletown, NY, was at the complex visiting his mother that day. The girl could have come into contact with his spit while playing in the courtyard, the lawyer argued. Or his saliva could have rubbed off his discarded water bottle and onto a used diaper cops later pulled from the trash in a failed search for additional DNA evidence.
Meanwhile, Faison -- an unemployed truck driver and father of his own pre-school-aged son -- also testified, believably, that cops had threatened to charge him with sexually assaulting the girl unless he confessed to the chain snatch.
"At some points, I gave up," Faison said, outside the courthouse, of the 10 months he'd stayed in jail awaiting trial. "I just kept my faith in God." Faison had faced up to 14 years prison if convicted.
Now then, here's the quiz: Like the famous question; Where does Mr Faison go to get his reputation back? And more importantly, who is going to aggressively investigate his allegations about the cop threats that trying to force his confession?
The answer to both, unfortunately - is nowhere and nobody!!
