NYPD fires 2 cops acquitted in rape case

A Manhattan jury Thursday acquitted two NYPD officers of the 2008 rape of a drunken woman they escorted to her East Village apartment in a case that police brass had labeled a violation of the department's most basic duty to protect.

But Officer Kenneth Moreno, 43, and Officer Franklin Mata, 29, were both convicted on three counts of official misconduct for three unauthorized post-midnight visits to the woman's apartment on Dec. 7, 2008. The NYPD immediately fired them, and they will also face up to a year in jail on each count at sentencing June 28.

After the dramatic verdicts, an emotional Moreno -- who testified that the woman tried to seduce him but he didn't succumb -- said he harbored no ill will toward his accuser, a 29-year-old Gap designer, but he thought she was a liar.

"I thought she made the whole thing up, to be honest," said the 20-year NYPD veteran, who testified that he visited the woman to counsel her because of his own alcoholism history. "I hope everything works out for her. I wish her no harm."

The verdicts by the seven-man, five-woman jury came on the seventh day of deliberations after a seven-week trial in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. The accuser, who now lives in California, has a civil suit pending.

In tearful testimony, she said that while intermittently vomiting, passing out and blacking out after a night of hard partying, she had a snippet of memory of an officer removing her tights and having intercourse with her on her bed.

Surveillance cameras proved that Moreno and Mata returned to her apartment repeatedly. But the prosecution was an uphill struggle. No scientific evidence showed that the woman had sex or that one of the officers had been in her bed, and she admitted she was so drunk she didn't remember most of what happened.

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Both of the officers testified, in a risky strategic decision that seemed to pay off Thursday. Moreno, accused of having intercourse, denied it. Mata, accused of serving as a lookout, said he fell asleep when his partner was in the woman's bedroom, and he didn't know what happened between them.

Prosecutors did have a secretly made tape of a meeting between Moreno and the woman, about a week after the alleged rape. In it, Moreno seemed to admit that they had sex amid a raft of denials, but he testified that was coerced because the woman threatened to make a scene at his precinct.

After the verdict, Moreno said he took some procedural shortcuts to return to the woman's apartment to try to help her, and "learned a lesson" that other police officers should remember. "I made a judgment call that night, and I paid for it," he said. "Be very careful. Dot your 'i's and cross your 't's, or in one second you can be very close to this."

The defense portrayed the accuser as a disappointed sexual provocateur, a confused alcoholic, and a woman greedy to win a big civil suit but in a statement after the verdicts, District Attorney Cyrus Vance praised her.

"I commend the bravery of the victim in coming forward and in persevering through an often grueling and very public . . . trial," Vance said.

Moreno's lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, said he thought jurors, who did not speak to reporters, were troubled by the fact that the accuser's friends, in statements to police, said she told them "I think I was raped" or "I believe I was raped" on the morning after the incident.

"That is not very comforting," Tacopina said. "That is not a story a jury can embrace."