to State Journal article
http://www.madison.com/archives/read.php?ref=/wsj/2004/04/01/0403310473.php
Chief
misrepresents probe
I
appreciate the Wisconsin State Journal's coverage of the long ordeal of Patty,
a Madison woman who was raped, disbelieved by police and pressured to recant,
then charged with a crime for her original rape report. As the article noted,
Patty's rapist, Joseph Bong, has now been convicted and Dane County District
Attorney Brian Blanchard has apologized to Patty for the charge filed back in
1998.
Your
reporter, Brenda Ingersoll, did an excellent job distilling a very complicated
set of facts. But there is one serious inaccuracy in her story due to a
dishonest representation by Madison Police Chief Richard Williams.
In
the article, as before, Williams asserts that he asked the state Justice
Department review his detectives' handling of the case. This review, Williams
said, showed "we had done nothing wrong."
This,
as I have pointed out in my own paper on several occasions, is simply not true.
The only Justice Department probe ever done was special agent Elizabeth
Feagles' reopening of the rape investigation. Feagles told me this week, as
have others before, "We were not assigned to investigate the cops. We were
assigned to investigate the assault."
The
state never determined that the police did nothing wrong, since this was never
something it probed. In fact, as should be obvious to any observer, the police
did lots of things wrong. That this is still not obvious to the police is
tragic.
--
Bill Lueders, news editor, Isthmus