They’re “rape cops” no longer — but the NYPD is looking to fire them anyway.
In a courtroom stunner this morning, Officers Kenneth Moreno and Franklin Mata were cleared by a Manhattan jury of all felony charges of rape, burglary and falsifying business records — but the police department said they will waste no time getting rid of the officers.
“The guilty verdict warrants immediate termination from department. We will pursue that today,” Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said at a news conference this afternoon.
The two officers were each convicted only of three misdemeanor counts of official misconduct after jurors found that they knowingly refrained from their duties during three caught-on-video return trips to the drunken accuser’s East 13th Street apartment in December 2008.
“The charges that these officers were convicted of are enough to kick them out of the NYPD, which we’re moving to do,” Mayor Bloomberg said.
Sentencing is set for June 28. Both men face anywhere from zero to one year in jail.
“I believe in my heart of hearts justice was served,” Moreno’s lawyer Joseph Tacopina said.
The two cops remain suspended pending an internal review, but given the misdemeanor conviction their policing days are over, the lawyer added.
Prosecutors claimed Moreno, 43, had raped the woman, while his partner Mata, 29, served as a lookout.
“I think she made the whole thing up,” Moreno said, with just a hint of bitterness in his voice as he stood at the microphone stands outside Manhattan Criminal Court after the verdict had been read.
“To be honest, I believe she made the whole thing up,” he added, describing how it felt to sit at the defense table and hear the woman testify tearfully to waking up from a semi-conscious, drunken state to find herself stripped and prone on her bed with the on-duty Moreno, in her words, violating her.
Still, he said of the woman, who still has a $57 million federal lawsuit against him, “I hope everything works out for her. I wish her no harm.”
Jurors struggled six days with the complicated case, in which prosecutors strove to win a conviction despite a lack of rape forensics and a he-said, she-said scenario where the woman was reduced to pitting her the booze-obliterated memory against the witness-stand protestations of innocence by the two officers.
The woman had testified tearfully and compelling, and prosecutors did posses formidable circumstantial evidence — most notably a secretly-recorded tape in which Moreno admitted to the woman that he’d used a condom and that it was “just me,” not his partner too.
Prosecutors also had incriminating sidewalk surveillance video when they were dispatched to help her out of a taxi outside her apartment.
The video showed the cops using her key to let themselves back inside the drunken woman’s apartment three more times.
But the same video showed the woman walking under her own power to her door — even turning to make what looked to be a conversational gesture in Mata’s direction.
Her blood alcohol level after a nightclub Vodka drinking binge hovered at that point near four times the legal limit, and she would continue vomiting all night, yet she was able to climb five flights of stairs under her own power, defense lawyers argued — proof that, four hours later, she would have metabolized enough alcohol to have not been physically helpless had any sex transpired.
The verdict, read in an almost triumphant voice by the middle-aged jury forewoman, left the two cops looking stunned beyond any visible display of emotion.
But their mothers, who sat together in the second row of a Manhattan Supreme Court courtroom, appeared thrilled, particularly Mata’s mother.
Mata had faced the same maximum of 25 years prison if convicted of conspiring in the “rape” by acting as his older partner’s lookout.