New York Will Investigate Tankleff Case

This is certainly good news but it should have happened sooner. Martin Tankleff paid a hefty price for this oversight.

New York State has begun an official inquiry into Suffolk County law enforcement’s handling of the investigation into the 1988 murders of a Long Island couple, Arlene and Seymour Tankleff, according to people involved with the inquiry.

The commission is taking special interest in the Tankleff case as a follow-up to its investigation of Suffolk County law enforcement in the 1980s, which found entrenched misconduct among the police and prosecutors. “This is certainly an outgrowth from the commission’s 1989 report,” said the person associated with officials at the agency.

One police officer named in that report, K. James McCready, became the lead detective in the Tankleff murder case. The report had cited him as having lied as a witness in another murder trial.

May the guilty rot in hell for what they did to this young man.

Prosecutor won't budge in the Martin Tankleff Case

Although the appellate court has granted Martin Tankleff a new trial, the stubborn prosecutor has failed to acknowledge that they convicted an innocent man.

The Suffolk County district attorney’s office says it may appeal the ruling, but will retry Mr. Tankleff if the ruling stands. Despite his demands for a new inquiry, the prosecutors said they would not reopen the case to investigate Mr. Steuerman and the ex-convicts.

“That’s not going to happen,” Leonard Lato, an assistant district attorney, said this weekend. Referring the appellate ruling, he said: “Has this changed our theory of the murderer to someone other than Tankleff? No. The Appellate Division didn’t say these other guys did it. All it said was: If the jury had all this other evidence, Tankleff probably would have been acquitted.”

It is ashame that the innocent have to suffer because the prosecutor wants to save face.

Detectives Used Trickery to obtain confession in Martin Tankleff's Case

How far will some unscrupulous detectives go when trying to solve a case?

In the case of Mr. Tankleff, who was 17 at the time of his parents’ murders and who quickly recanted his confession, one detective’s ruse had an especially dramatic flair. He faked a phone conversation with a hospital worker that Mr. Tankleff could hear, saying, “No kidding, he came out?”

The detective then told Mr. Tankleff that his father had regained consciousness briefly and had identified his son as his attacker. The performance was so convincing that another detective testified that he believed the call was real.

Should these detectives face some sort of sanction? Let's weigh in on this behavior.

Defense Case Begins On Modern Day Slavery Case

A Long Island couple has been accused of keeping slaves. According to prosecutors two Indonesian women were made to sleep in closets of the sprawling, multimillion-dollar home of their employers.

They were forced to work day and night, threatened, tortured, beaten with rolling pins and brooms, deprived of adequate food and never allowed out of the house except to take out the garbage.

Although the women were able to articulate that the couple had them say "Master" and Missus" the defense lawyers have characterized the two women as liars, practitioners of witchcraft, and inventors of a false claim designed to win them fast-track advantages that federal immigration law grants certain victims of torture and abuse. Whatever injuries the women may have suffered, the lawyers said, were self-inflicted in the practice of a traditional Indonesian folk cure known as kerokan.

Their employers, Varsha Sabhnani, 35, and her husband, Mahender, 51, naturalized citizens from India, have been on trial in U.S. District Court here for the past month. They are charged with what the federal criminal statutes refer to as involuntary servitude and peonage, or, in the common national parlance since 1865, the crime of keeping slaves.