Pubdate: Tue, 26 Jan 2010
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2010 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Kareem Fahim
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Michael+Mineo

MAN TESTIFIES ON POLICE ACTS IN SUBWAY

In court, Michael Mineo told the story of his troubled young life,
reciting the wrongs he had committed against others, and those he said
had been visited upon him.

But Mr. Mineo, 25, insisted that he was telling the truth when he
spoke about what police officers did to him in a Brooklyn subway
station on Oct. 15, 2008. That day, he testified, after he was caught
smoking marijuana and ran, an officer who arrested him shoved
something "hard" between his buttocks -- once, twice, three times, and
then a fourth, this time into his rectum.

"I felt it penetrating me," he said. "Something I have never felt
before."

Another officer told him, "You liked it," using a homophobic slur, Mr.
Mineo said. As they led him from the station in handcuffs, Mr. Mineo
said, he implored the people he passed to help him. Then, Mr. Mineo
said, he was let go with a summons and a warning from an officer not
to visit a hospital or a police station.

"We have your address," Mr. Mineo said the officer told him. "We'll
find you and put a felony on you."

For 15 months, much of Mr. Mineo's story had been told by others. With
its echoes of the 1997 torture of Abner Louima by a police officer,
Mr. Mineo's case garnered enormous attention, along with the details
of Mr. Mineo's arrests, his friends and his lifestyle.

On Monday, in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, Mr. Mineo (pronounced
MINI-o), of East New York, Brooklyn, was given the chance to calmly
give his complete account. But he was also subjected to a blistering
attack by a defense lawyer, Stuart London, and became flustered
several times as Mr. London dug into Mr. Mineo's arrest record and his
statements about the attack.

"I get what you're saying, that I did that to myself," Mr. Mineo said
after one round of questions. "I don't want to be here right now," he
said later. "Do you know how embarrassing this is for me?"

As Mr. Mineo acknowledged in court before Justice Alan D. Marrus, he
was the son of drug addicts and had been homeless. He had worked every
conceivable odd job -- a cappuccino place, a tattoo parlor -- and had
once stolen money from a friend's family. He was a member of the Crips
gang, and had been arrested in a gang assault.

The testimony came in the trial of three officers accused of
misconduct. Officer Richard Kern, 26, who prosecutors said rammed a
retractable baton into the rectum of Mr. Mineo, faces charges of
sexual abuse. Two other officers, Alex Cruz, 28, and Andrew Morales,
27, are charged with helping to cover up the assault.

Their lawyers have portrayed Mr. Mineo as a callous opportunist whose
real interest is in the civil lawsuit he has filed against the city,
which seeks hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. They have said
that medical records do not support Mr. Mineo's claims, and that
statements he made after he was arrested are contradictory.

"This is your payday, isn't it?" Mr. London asked Mr.
Mineo.

He responded, "Even if they gave me a billion dollars, it wouldn't
make up for what they did to me."

Mr. Mineo appeared in court on Monday wearing a purple shirt, a light
gray sweater with stripes and black jeans. As he was questioned by a
prosecutor, Charles Guria, Mr. Mineo's voice was steady, and he looked
at jurors as he gave his answers.

He said he had been on his way to work, at a tattoo parlor in Downtown
Brooklyn, walking with a friend and smoking marijuana rolled inside a
cigar. When he saw police officers sitting in an unmarked car, he
swallowed the "clip," as he called it.

When two officers approached him and asked for his identification, Mr.
Mineo said, he ran into the Prospect Park subway station, in part
because he was out on bail on a previous assault charge.

Inside the station, Mr. Mineo testified, one of the officers stopped
him by striking him on the face and throwing him to the ground. Other
officers formed a "circle" around him, he said, and he was kicked "all
over."

After he was arrested, and despite his handcuffs, Mr. Mineo said he
put a finger down his pants, scraped blood from his buttocks and
showed it to the officers. "You know what you did," he told them, and
asked them to call an ambulance.

Mr. Mineo said an officer told him, "We can't do that."

Mr. London, the lawyer for Officer Cruz, quickly started trying to
undermine Mr. Mineo's credibility. He asked Mr. Mineo to explain the
details of a previous arrest for possessing stolen credit cards and
identity theft. In 2003, Mr. Mineo stole $8,000 from credit cards
given to him, he said, by a friend.

"You're a thief, aren't you, Mr. Mineo?" Mr. London
asked.

"If that's what you want to label me," Mr. Mineo answered. "Everybody
makes mistakes."

For the first 45 minutes of the questioning, Mr. Mineo kept his
composure as Mr. London tried to provoke him with questions about his
habit of smoking marijuana in public and his tattoos, which peeked out
from his collar. Mr. London asked why Mr. Mineo had worn long sleeves
to his court appearance.

"You want to see my tattoos?" Mr. Mineo asked, rolling up his sleeves
and lifting his shirt to show what he said were an angel,
"Frankenstein," a little devil and a Crip tattoo etched across his
midriff.

Mr. London pointed out inconsistencies in statements Mr. Mineo made to
police internal affairs investigators, the district attorney's office
and a grand jury. "Did you lie to Internal Affairs?" Mr. London
demanded at one point. At another, he pointed to Mr. Mineo's seemingly
confident assertions that it had been Officer Cruz who attacked him.

"I assumed," Mr. Mineo said.

"That's not permissible," Mr. London said. "You created a whole
scenario without having any personal knowledge at all." He questioned
Mr. Mineo about the color of his blood that day, and whether he had
concocted a story about a hole in his underwear. "Did you punch that
hole yourself?" Mr. London asked.

Mr. Mineo explained his inconsistencies by saying he was in shock or
on painkillers during his initial statements. He lashed out at Mr.
London several times. A few minutes before 4 p.m., he rubbed his eyes.

"I'm not making this up," he insisted. "What happened to me, happened
to me." 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake