I KNOW WHAT I SAW
Key witness rips rape cop verdict
THE KEY witness in the NYPD rape case said Saturday she was disappointed by the jury’s stunning failure to find the cop guilty of rape.
Amy Bishop testified that she stared out her Inwood window last August and saw a man — former NYPD Officer Michael Pena — having sex with an unwilling woman.
“I know what I saw,” Bishop told the Daily News. “I am disturbed by the fact that they didn’t come back with a guilty verdict.”
A Manhattan Criminal Court jury convicted Pena of sodomizing the woman but did not convict him of rape after three holdouts said they doubted Bishop’s claim — simply because she did not remember the color of the car near the crime scene.
“That’s ridiculous,” said Bishop, a special education teacher. “Perfect cases are only on ‘Law & Order.’ In the real world, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.”
Bishop, who called 911 twice to report the incident, raged against the jurors who were hung up on such a seemingly minor detail.
“It disturbs me that the landscape of the whole picture was lost,” Bishop said. “Some of it you just have to use common sense. When common sense can be so easily swayed, in a big picture, it disturbs me.”
Bishop, who does not know the victim, insisted that what she saw that day was rape.
“From the time I made the first phone call to the time I made the second phone call, yes,” said Bishop.
She said she would willingly testify again — but only if the victim wanted to go through the ordeal of another trial.
Bishop declined to elaborate on her original testimony, saying she wanted to preserve the integrity of her account if she is called to the stand again.
But transcripts of her 911 calls were played to jurors and her certainty about what she saw is apparent in the transcript.
“Hi, there appears to be sex going on that is not consensual in the backyard of the house. . . . It’s rather disgusting,” Bishop told one 911 dispatcher.
Pena, who joined the NYPD in 2008, admitted assaulting the 25-year-old Bronx school teacher but insisted he did not rape her — and under New York law a rape conviction requires proof of penetration.
Three jurors said they were skeptical of the victim’s story when she mistook a green car for blue.
They also did not buy the testimony of witness Gregory Matherly, who was on a skateboard a dozen feet from the incident and testified that Pena raped the woman.
Pena, 27, was convicted of six other sexual assault charges and predatory sexual assault. He avoided the rape conviction even though semen was found on the victim’s underwear and a doctor said it appeared she had been raped.
Pena faces life in prison when he is sentenced May 7. He has been fired by the NYPD.