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Prosecutors have dismissed rape charges against five Brooklyn teenagers accused of raping an 18-year-old woman last month at gunpoint after chasing off her father at a playground in Brownsville, officials said.

Not only did the woman recant her sexual assault allegations, but she told investigators there really was no gun, said Brooklyn DA Ken Thompson.

And to make matters much, much worse , she was actually having sex with her own father, Thompson said.

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“What are we really doing here?” asked Kenneth Montgomery, the lawyer for Denzel Murray, 14. “Have we not learned our lessons from the Central Park Five?”

A smartphone video that its owner and defense lawyers said showed a brief verbal encounter before a suspected gang rape at a Brooklyn playground emerged on Tuesday, another development in an increasingly complex inquiry that has roiled the city.

Police Commissioner William J. Bratton said the Police Department should have notified the public more quickly of the alleged attack, a contention that the mayor had made on Monday.

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Earlier this week a new report from the Women Donors Network revealed that 95 percent of America’s elected prosecutors are white.

For context on this stunning number, I spoke to Melba Pearson, the president of the National Black Prosecutors Association and an assistant state attorney in the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office. Pearson told me about her efforts to recruit black law students into her profession by convincing them that if they really want to make the criminal justice system less discriminatory against black communities, they should become prosecutors, not defense attorneys, because that’s where the real power in the system lies.

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Defense attorney Kenneth Montgomery said he hired a forensic video expert to examine the surveillance footage and determine that the true attacker was on the short side.


“All you have to do is look at this video and look at him. But the NYPD is so confident locking up people of color and letting the DA sort it out,” said Montgomery.

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The letter, signed by the lawyers Kenneth J. Montgomery and Keith White, criticized prosecutors for seemingly placing too much emphasis on surveillance videos that show that the woman and a friend “willingly went to Mr. Rubenstein’s residence to further socialize following a festive evening.”

 

That footage, the lawyers said, had no bearing on what took place inside Mr. Rubenstein’s penthouse apartment.

 

The lawyers also suggest that prosecutors are overlooking the most salient point: The victim “never gave consent because she was incapacitated.”

 

“The results of any toxicology is of no consequence considering the victim’s injuries, statements and lack of consent,” the lawyers wrote.

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The Al Sharpton aide who says she was raped by a prominent Manhattan attorney tested positive for marijuana use in the days after the alleged sexual assault, according to sources.
And her lawyers are now accusing the attorney, Sanford Rubenstein, of feeding her pot-laced cookies.

 

“Any positive test for narcotics in the system of the victim only supports the belief that she was drugged,” the woman’s lawyers, Keith White and Kenneth Montgomery, told The Post in a statement.
“Our client was in her attacker’s home just days before the test and it would be consistent with her ingesting something at her attacker’s home where Mr. Rubenstein gave the victim cookies,” the statement said.

 

White and Montgomery added that their client “does not smoke or do any drugs.”

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