What’s going on in Suffolk County, New York makes me wonder about how justice has been meted out in other parts of the country over the years. It makes me re-think those times a convict looked me in the eyes and said, “I didn’t do it.” As a cynical reporter I’ve often thought to myself, “Yeah, right.”
Well, odds are they can’t all be lying.
For nearly two decades a young man named Martin Tankleff has been sitting in prison, convicted of murdering his parents, murders I don’t believe he committed.
He always said he was innocent. At the tender age of 17 he stood on the courthouse steps looked right into the television cameras and said, “I can’t wait for the whole truth to come out.”
Maybe now it finally can come out.
It’s reported that New York’s State Investigations Commission has been quietly questioning potential witnesses and gathering documents in a probe of the Suffolk County police department’s handling of the original Tankleff investigation. The upshot of this will probably be that a special prosecutor will be named to determine whether charges might be brought against the police!
I say Martin Tankleff is a ‘young man’ – only now he’s not so young. At 36 years old he’s spent more of his life in prison than he has on the outside. But his final step down this torturous path came just today when the current Suffolk County District Attorney, Thomas Spota, announced he will not seek to re-try Marty for the September 1988 murders of Arlene and Seymour Tankleff.
Marty was said by the police to have confessed to the murders. But he hadn’t. This 17 year old boy had just gotten up to go to his first day of classes as a senior in high school and had found his mother dead (and nearly decapitated) and his bludgeoned father hanging on to life. The ‘confession’ cops talked about was written in a detective’s handwriting and was never signed by Marty.
At the boy’s trial it was learned that at the police station Marty was tricked into thinking his father had momentarily come out of his coma to point the finger of blame directly at him. Marty heard the lie coming out of a detective’s mouth and like the upper-class, upstanding kid that he was raised to be – he believed the man in authority. He asked the cop, “Do you think I might have blacked out?” And whammo – the cop, lead detective James McCready, figured he had his man. There never seemed to be another suspect even though Marty immediately told the detectives about his father’s bitter business partner. Jerard Steuerman owed Mr. Tankleff $500,000.00 and Steuerman had been at the Tankleff home that night and he was still there when Marty said he went to sleep!
Jerard Steuerman, certainly acted strange, some might say he even acted guilty. But Detective McCready and his team somehow didn’t think it was fishy when Steuerman left suicide notes a week after the double murder and fled to California to live under an assumed name. They still went after the dead couples’ son.
It is a long ordeal, this story of Marty Tankleff, and I encourage everyone interested in justice to check out the website established on the case.
Or, at the very least, read this excellent account from the New York Times.
Here’s the bottom line. We now know Detective McCready was found to have lied in another major police investigation. We now realize that at the Tankleff trial McCready was protected, in court, by his police union’s lawyer who fought hard so that negative information about the detective would not come out. And, after McCready was off the job this same lawyer represented him when he was charged with assault and robbery and he got him off.
That lawyer’s name is Thomas Spota. That’s right. Spota is now the new District Attorney in Suffolk County, New York and the man who has agreed not to re-try Marty for the murders.
Does Spota and the rest of the ‘gang that couldn’t shoot straight’ finally get it now? Do they understand that they robbed a bright, promising young man of his future – relegating him to live under the cloud of having spent nearly 20 years in prison? Do they admit they didn’t follow proper police procedure? Or will they hide behind some sloppy phrase like, “Well, it’s been 20 years now – too much time has passed to get all the good witnesses back.” From what I’ve heard from Spota so far he’s going to follow the latter track.
Look, as a crime and justice reporter I’ve worked with cops and detectives and District Attorneys a long time. I have great respect for the work these underpaid, overworked folks do for us and our communities. But sometimes they get weary just like the rest of us and they let their guard down. Sometimes they fail to look outside the box, to go the extra step. Sometimes they’re just plain too lazy to do the work.
It’s sort of an incestuous business, this business of justice. The young lawyers in a community grow up to be the judges, prosecutors, or even the District Attorney. They leave a trail of past acquaintances and clients and sometimes the baggage from those relationships can’t be easily shed.
I believe this sort of tangled web of associations helped blind Lady Justice in Suffolk County, New York – at least in the case of Martin Tankleff. And if it happened here is it happening in your community?
