Kathy Boudin is a former terrorist with the Weather Underground who went to prison for her role in the 1981 Brink’s robbery, in which one security guard and two police officers were murdered. Today she is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work.
Elizabeth Lederer is an assistant district attorney in New York who prosecuted the so-called Central Park Five, who were accused of raping a jogger. Like Boudin, Lederer is also an adjunct professor at Columbia, though at the university’s law school.
Guess which one is now receiving death threats and is the subject of a petition to get her sacked from her teaching job at Columbia?
If you guessed Lederer, you’d be right. Yesterday, The Post reported that she has received more than a dozen phone and e-mail death threats. They come in the wake of this month’s airing by PBS of Ken Burns’ explosive documentary on the case. The film is aimed at pressuring the city to settle a lawsuit filed by the five black and Hispanic youths initially convicted in the 1989 rape of a white jogger in Central Park.
Their convictions were vacated when a serial rapist later confessed to the crime. Now their advocates, including Burns, are charging that the defendants’ confessions were coerced by overzealous prosecutors. Each is seeking a $50 million settlement.
The city continues to fight that, for good reason: There is strong evidence to support the city’s contention that the five youths were involved in violent attacks in Central Park that night — and zero evidence the prosecutors or police coerced anything.
Wouldn’t it be nice if all those folks who defended making Kathy Boudin a Columbia professor spoke up against the injustice being done to Elizabeth Lederer?