Eyewitness NewsNEW YORK (WABC) -- After seven days of deliberations, a jury has found two NYPD officers not guilty in the rape of a drunk woman in 2008. Officer Kenneth Moreno was accused of raping the then 27-year-old victim in her East Village apartment, while his partner, Officer Franklin Mata, acted as a lookout.
Both were acquitted of all serious charges, including rape and burglary, but were found guilty on three counts each of official misconduct.
The officers faced 25 years in prison if they had been convicted. Now, they face possible sentences from no jail time to a year in jail on each count. Since only one year on each count can be consecutive, they face no more than two years behind bars when they are sentenced on June 28.Their attorneys, however, say they plan to appeal the convictions. District Attorney Cy Vance says the verdict shows that the officers violated the law.
"They violated the victim's rights," he said. "And the public's trust."
Moreno and Mata were called to help the intoxicated woman get home after she passed out in a taxi. They returned to her apartment three more times within four hours. The woman has testified that she passed out and awoke to being raped in her bedroom. Moreno had claimed that the woman made sexual advances, and that they cuddled in her bed but did not have sex.
During the trial, prosecutors told a stunning story of police misconduct and a perverse abuse of power. The officers acknowledged a number of missteps - including Moreno making a bogus 911 call - but said they weren't crimes and the rape allegation was a product of the woman's muddled memory.
Mata, 29, and Moreno, 43, have been suspended until a police department review after their trial.
The woman, a fashion product developer who's now 29, had gotten very drunk while out with friends celebrating her impending promotion and move to California. A cab driver called police for help getting her out of his taxi around 1 a.m. on Dec. 7, 2008.
The officers didn't tell dispatchers where they were as they repeatedly returned to her apartment - to check on her at her request, they said. Indeed, Moreno, a police officer for 17 years, admitted he invented an excuse for one of the visits by calling 911 with a phony report of a homeless man sleeping in a nearby building's lobby.
Her blood-alcohol level was three or more times the legal limit for driving, and she acknowledged during days of testimony that her memory of the night was spotty. But she said she acutely remembered the rape, and other vivid snippets - police radio chatter, flashlights, the same man's voice urging her to drink water in her bathroom and later asking her if she wanted him to stay in her bedroom - made her certain that her attacker was an officer.
"I couldn't believe that two officers who had been called to help me had, instead, raped me," said the woman, who has sued the city seeking $57 million over the incident.
After consulting prosecutors, she secretly recorded a conversation with Moreno a few days later. He alternately denied they had sex and seemed to admit it, particularly by saying twice that he'd used a condom when she asked him.
Moreno told jurors he was just "telling her what she wanted to hear" because she had suggested she'd go into the stationhouse where he worked and make a scene.
No DNA evidence was collected in the case, and experts debated whether an internal mark found during an examination of the woman could be interpreted as a sign of rape.
Moreno said he was only trying to console and counsel the woman about drinking during his series of visits, as he shared his own struggle with alcoholism some years before, killed a cockroach in her bathroom, made plans to have breakfast with her and sang to her a verse of Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer."
On the last visit, Moreno said, he suddenly found himself fending off drunken advances from the woman.
"I told her, 'There's another time for this. Not tonight.' I kind of had her by the shoulders, and I said, 'We're not doing this,"' he told jurors.
But, he said, he wound up in her bed after she fell and got stuck between her bed and a wall and needed to be freed. He said he stayed there with his arms around her for a time, out of sympathy, but kept his uniform on and didn't have sex with her.
Mata, a police officer for about five years, acknowledged during his testimony that he couldn't be sure what had happened between the two while he was snoozing on the woman's sofa. But he said he didn't believe Moreno had raped the woman because "Ken wouldn't do something like that."
He was charged with rape under state legal principles that hold an alleged accessory as responsible for a crime as the main defendant.
(The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
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