Philadelphia Inquirer
Sunday, March 28, 2004

Misfiled cases from rape unit are resolved

A plea bargain resolves the last of charges brought after a sweeping review of Phila. police sex-crimes practices.

By Craig R. McCoy,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

Kelly was 13 when she told police that Keith Duda forced himself on her, covering her mouth with his hand while he had sex.

And when he was through, she said, he flipped a business card at her and said to call if she wanted it again.

Nine years later, Duda, now 25, acknowledged all of that in court. He did so as part of a plea agreement that guaranteed him probation for that crime, as well as for sexual assaults on two other women.

His court hearing, held earlier this month, marked the end to one of the sorrier chapters in the annals of Philadelphia justice.

Duda was the last of 62 men to face charges as a result of a reexamination of how sex crimes were investigated by Philadelphia police in the 1990s.

That reexamination, triggered by a series of Inquirer stories, concluded, as the paper had, that police investigators had downgraded or ignored hundreds of sex crimes.

Kelly was one of the women, teens and girls victimized twice - first by their attackers, then by the Philadelphia police who failed to help them.

In her case, the police officer originally assigned to the case labeled the attack a noncrime.

But after other police reopened her 1995 complaint, authorities ended up charging Duda five years later with raping four girls, including Kelly, while he was a teenager in the 1990s.

Those charges were resolved as part of a plea agreement reached March 5, after Kelly, the youngest of Duda's victims, and initially the most fervent about seeing him prosecuted, decided that she could not deal with the trauma of a trial.

Duda was spared any time in prison after the District Attorney's Office plea-bargained to reduce three sets of felony rape charges to indecent assaults and a simple assault charge - all misdemeanors - and to grant him eight years' probation.

He thus pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting three of the girls. Charges involving the fourth were dropped because that woman had stopped cooperating with prosecutors.

In addition to the assault on Kelly, police had accused Duda of raping a 14-year-old at George Washington High School, a 15-year-old at knifepoint, and 18-year-old Brenda Robinson.

Robinson, now 26, said police told her she had no case because she had delayed reporting the attack for 11 months.

Last week, she said she had accepted the plea. "That's better than nothing," said Robinson, who agreed to be identified in this article.

Before imposing the sentence, Common Pleas Court Judge Sandy L.V. Byrd told Duda: "I am not pleased with these negotiations."

Byrd added, though, that he was accepting the deal to let Duda's victims "put the ugliness you visited upon them behind them."

Assistant District Attorney Christopher Mallios told the judge that prosecutors had agonized over the plea. He said it had been hard, too, for newly assigned police "trying to clean up after other police officers who didn't do their jobs."

In an interview, Mallios added: "We had some insurmountable problems proving our case. None of the victims wanted to testify; they all asked us to plead the case out."

Prosecutors agreed to the plea after Kelly came emotionally undone during a pretrial hearing in February.

Duda, a Philadelphia disc jockey who has a 6-year-old daughter, declined comment. His attorney did not return phone calls.

Now 22, Kelly, who asked to be identified in this article only by her first name, said in an interview that Mallios had assured her after the pretrial hearing that he was "willing to fight to the end."

She replied: "Chris, I don't think I can handle it. Do you think I'm a coward?" She expressed the same misgivings in court earlier this month.

In court, according to the official transcript, Byrd told her: "This judge never thought for a second that you are a coward. I think it takes great strength to do what you have done."

The 1995 attack on Kelly was assigned to Officer Roscoe Cofield. Cofield, now retired, labeled the crime an "investigation of person" case - a noncrime classification since discarded by the Police Department.

After the attack, Kelly and her mother brought Cofield her bloody and ripped underwear and dress, but they said Cofield refused to accept them.

In interviews with The Inquirer last year, Cofield said that he could not recall his investigation in Kelly's case but that he would never have turned away evidence. He also said that he believed that "half the girls that came in, they were lying."

So much so, he said, his nickname for the sex-crime unit was "The Lying Bitches Unit."

Reached last week, Cofield said: "You had so much limited time for investigation, to really go out and pursue cases... . All of the codes, I didn't invent any of that. I'm sorry I was ever in that unit."

In 1999, The Inquirer disclosed that the sex-crimes squad had dumped thousands of complaints since it had been founded two decades previously. Officers did so to lighten their workload, to avoid difficult investigations, and to make the unit's performance look better than it was.

As part of a series of reforms, then-Police Commissioner John F. Timoney ordered a reinvestigation of all such cases dating back five years, the statute of limitations on rape.

The department concluded that the unit had written off 1,822 crimes in those years, including 681 rapes. Timoney ordered all 1,822 reinvestigated.

The reinvestigations led to the arrests of 62 men. Of those, 33, including Duda, have been convicted. And 28 were acquitted or had the charges against them dropped. One is a fugitive.

Although a few are now serving long sentences, many ended up with probation for reasons similar to those that played out in Duda's case.

At Duda's sentencing, Kelly delivered a personal message to her attacker.

"It has been nine years of torture and pain and agony," she said. "For some reason, whatever awful reason this is, I had to go through this. God wanted this to happen, and maybe it is so I can help other girls."

Duda, too, spoke.

"I just have one thing I would like to say," he said. "That as a result of my conduct in this matter, I am very sorry to all parties."