Jury In the Queens Jogger Case Was Certain Who Did It, But Questions Remain

Just hours after they began deliberating, jury members in the trial of the rape and murder of a woman jogger in Queens returned a guilty verdict. The family of the victim, Karina Vetrano, cheered as the court clerk read the ruling.

But, according to Gothamist reporter Max Rivlin-Nadler, the trial raised serious questions about how police conducted the 2016 investigation that resulted in the arrest of Chanel Lewis.

It was the second trial for Lewis, a black man, after the initial one ended in a jury deadlock last fall. Through both trials, attorneys for Lewis questioned whether police coerced Lewis, who has a learning disability, into confessing to the crime. At the end of the latest trial, defense lawyers received an anonymous letter suggesting that police had tested the DNA of hundreds of black men who were arrested in Brooklyn and Queens because a controversial phenotyping process suggested the culprit was black.

"There's no video evidence. There's no eyewitness evidence here," Rivlin-Nadler told WNYC's Jami Floyd.

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