PX11 reports that they were convicted of a knifepoint kidnapping and brutal rape 27 years ago, but it never happened.
It was only on Monday that VanDyke Perry, 48, and Gregory Counts, 46, were officially declared innocent of the trumped up crimes that dogged them both for more than a quarter century, and which kept them behind bars for a total of 39 years between them.
“It kept going on,” said Counts in court on Monday afternoon. “It was like a locomotive train that kept going full throttle.”
As his co-defendant, Perry, said at the hearing to vacate their convictions on Monday, “I’ve got a lot to talk about. Almost 30 years to talk about,” he said, when the judge invited the two men to speak on the record.
They both indicated that the hearing to vacate was the first time since 1991 in which they’d been in court and gotten justice.
Cy Vance, the Manhattan District Attorney, elaborated.
“These two men,” Vance said on the record, before the judge, “were convicted of kidnapping, rape and sodomy because of the testimony of a complainant who recanted her testimony just two weeks ago.”
Vance spoke about the case on which his office worked with The Innocence Project. Its founder, Barry Scheck, was in court, and handled the case personally, along with Innocence Project attorney Seema Saifee.
In the case in which they’d been convicted, a woman in Harlem accused the two men of kidnapping her at gunpoint, and then violently raping her, while they drove around the neighborhood and Central Park in a car.
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