Philip Anderton Cooney’s a lucky son of a gun. The Georgetown student and son of a former White House official faces no charges after being accused of an anti-gay attack last September.
Cooney stood accused of beating down another student, who later identified him via facebook. Police initially charged Cooney with assault, but later upped the ante by adding “bias related,” as the victim claimed Cooney attacked him because he’s gay. A DC judge and Cooney’s lawyer don’t agree:
“After further investigation of this matter, we concluded that there was insufficient evidence to obtain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Channing Phillips, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s office.
…
“Philip was always completely innocent of the charges against him and the dismissal of the case has vindicated him entirely,” [lawyer Danny] Onorato said in a statement. “To know Philip Cooney is to know a young man of exemplary character who was wrongly accused in this case.”
This does nothing to explain, of course, why Georgetown University waited two weeks of protest and bad press before publicly addressing the matter.
Z.
HORRIBLE! Can’t believe still there are so many homofobic sick people.
http://www.ilovezeren.com
Chavez
Why is he ‘lucky’? Maybe he’s innocent.
In fact, since there is evidence he was elsewhere at the time, then unless he’s working on some kind of advanced physics, he is innocent.
Josh
I agree, why is it that just because someone is accused of a hate crime they are automatically guilty?
There is loads of evidence that says that Cooney was in no way involved with the attack, including an independent lie detector test administered by a former FBI agent and a strong alibi.
As for the victim identification – he used Facebook.com to “find” his assailant using the monogram off the backpack of someone that a friend reportedly heard discussing the incident in class. Later, the victim selected the same person out of a nine photo lineup. Not exactly the “friend of a friend” kind of identification system that you want to be using when implicating a person in a crime for which they could end up in prison.
While I support the GLBT community and abhor hate crimes of any kind, I also believe in the justice process. If the prosecution dropped the case entirely in such an abrupt fashion, it is obvious that there simply is a lack of credible evidence.
So you could call it luck, but next time you’re reporting a story like this, make sure you report all the facts, and not just those convenient to your position.
Clay
I grew up with Philip. He has close friends and family that are gay (including myself).
Not only is he not violent, but he’s not homophobic either.
Seriously if there were ever a case of scapegoating this would be it.
This whole debacle has made me lose any shred of faith I had in DC police. With gay bashings on the rise in the District you’d think the (relatively) new chief of police would like to actually tackle the problem head-on instead of making the victim try and seek justice through less than reliable modes of sleuthing (ie facebook).
*sigh*