"The other Black jury member had been excused by the judge after a fire in the hotel where the jurors were staying. I had been found guilty by a jury of my "peers," only one of whom was Black. I wasn't being tried in New York or Los Angeles we were in Indianapolis, Indiana, historically one of the strongholds of the Ku Klux Klan. "I knew from the start that I'd get no justice. In his book, the boxer said the verdict carried racial undertones. Noam Galai for AYS Sports Marketing/Getty Images Mike Tyson attends the Citi Taste Of Tennis on Augin New York City.
The trial also sparked visceral debates about racial attitudes in the criminal justice system and what constituted consent, discussions which in many ways still continue today. A hotel guest and two firemen were killed in the fire. The circumstances of the case only became more dramatic when, halfway through the trial, a blaze swept through the Indianapolis Athletic Club, where the jurors were sequestered. I've been crucified, humiliated worldwide." "I can't see anything good coming from this. "I don't come here begging for mercy, ma'am," Tyson said in an 11-minute speech before being sentenced. His defense team-which along with Voyles included high-profile attorneys Vincent Fuller and Kathleen Beggs from the Washington, D.C.-based firm Williams & Connolly-filed an appeal, which the Indiana Court of Appeals turned down in a 2–1 vote. Unlike Kennedy Smith and Simpson, however, Tyson was not acquitted.
Simpson murder trial in California, Tyson's case was one of the three celebrity trials that dominated newspaper columns and TV shows in the first half of the 1990s.Īs Audrey Gadzekpo, managing editor of The Indianapolis Recorder, noted in 1992, the "Tyson case has all the makings of a television miniseries-sex, crime, and a famous name." I'm sure she knows that."Īlong with the William Kennedy Smith rape trial in Florida a year earlier and four years before the O.J. I by no means meant to hurt her or do anything to her. "I'm sorry for Miss Washington as a person. "I have not raped anyone, tried to rape anyone by any means," he said. Speaking out before his sentencing, Tyson had struck a similar tone. "She knows it, God knows it, and the consequences of her actions are something that she's got to live with for the rest of her life." "I did not rape Desiree Washington," he wrote in his book Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography, released in 2013. The former heavyweight champion of the world, however, has always maintained his innocence. "The law of Indiana is pretty clear, and it never mentions whether a defendant or a victim are acquainted," she said. Tyson was eventually freed in March 1995. Gifford sentenced him to 10 years in jail, but suspended the last four years of the sentence. In February 1992, following a two-week trial that monopolized the attention of the media across the world, Tyson was found guilty of rape.Ī month later, Judge Patricia J. Washington told the police and subsequently testified in court that Tyson had invited her over to his room, where he forced himself on her. She had met Tyson, one of the celebrities invited to the event, when he had attended the show's rehearsal.Ī day later, on July 20, 1991, she checked into the emergency room at Methodist Hospital and reported that she had been raped. Washington, who at the time was a college student and the reigning Miss Black Rhode Island, was in town to attend the Miss Black America pageant.
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