Free Mugged by Ann Coulter

twenty-three prosecution witnesses, two were neighborhood acquaintances of the Perrys. One testified that Jonah told him on the night of the incident that his brother was shot when they were mugging someone. The other said Jonah told her that night that he tried to beat up a guy who turned out to be a cop. 15
    These intrepid souls told the truth, knowing they’d have to go back to the neighborhood.
    Jonah did not take the stand in his defense and presented no witnesses to support his version of events. Rather, defense lawyer-cum-racial agitator Alton Maddox—soon to be concocting the Tawana Brawley hoax—accused the police of conducting a “frame-up” and claimed Van Houten was drunk on the night of the shooting. He presented no evidence for these charges.
    Maddox attacked the family friend who testified that Jonah told her they had mugged a detective, accusing her of being a prostitute. He ridiculed the other Perry neighbor for his lack of education and having had troubles with the law. (And if there’s one thing Alton Maddox cannot abide, it’s a lawbreaker!) Throughout Maddox’s summation, there were choruses of “Amen” from the gallery. 16
    In a courthouse jammed with Perry supporters, the jury acquitted Jonah of the mugging, leading to cheers from the courtroom. 17
    Still, the truth had come out and, whether or not Jonah was there (as the evidence indicated), there could be no question that Officer Van Houten had been mugged and had fired in self-defense. Instead of rounds of mea culpas from the media, the matter was quickly forgotten.
    But not by the
Village Voice
’s Nelson George, who unabashedly included his essay on the Edmund Perry frame-up in a 1993 collection of his columns. The evidence had evidently not changed his opinion that something “stinks” in the NYPD. 18
    Why didn’t we ever get any stories on the courageous neighborhood witnesses who testified against Jonah? Aren’t they the heroes? They went against “the community” to tell the truth.
Yeah, I heard him say he mugged a cop
. Why aren’t there any movies about such real bravery?
    Instead, there was a movie about the mugger:
Murder Without Motive: The Edmund Perry Story
. Without motive? The motive was:
The cop was being mugged!
The IMDB movie summary states: “Edmund Perry appears to have things all going his way when he graduates from Phillips Exeter Academy with a scholarship to Stanford U.
when an unfortunate meeting with a police officer ends his life
.” (Emphasis added.)
    Instead of turning every story about a black person shot or killed by a white person into an occasion to announce that “the simple fact is, America is a racist society,” liberals might, just once, have asked the question:
Why do you suppose there would be a generalized fear of young black males? What might that be based on?
    Throw us a bone. Perhaps it’s because a disproportionate number of criminals are young black males. 19
    What stinks in the Edmund Perry case is that the culture encouraged an entire ethnic group to develop a deeply adversarial relationship with mainstream society. Hollywood and the universities celebrated gansters and criminals. Black kids got beaten up for doing well at school. And when a Stanford-bound black teenager mugged an undercover cop, the
New York Times
trotted out the police brutality theory, later downgraded to “a tragedy.”
    MARLA HANSON—1986
    Journalists needn’t have worried about manufacturing a Hollywood-ready story. Hollywood was willing to alter the facts of actual cases all on its own in order to create a politically correct narrative.
    In June 1986, model Marla Hanson’s face was slashed by two black men. An Irish cop investigating the case determined that her assailants had been hired by Hanson’s slimy landlord, upset that she had spurned his sexual advances. A white woman—a “white Hispanic” in the Trayvon Martin-era lingo—prosecuted the case, and a racial demagogue, Alton Maddox, represented