Attorney Byron Potts, her lawyer, insists that Williams “is recanting her entire story. She says it did not happen. She fabricated it . . She wanted to get back at her boyfriend. She was mad at him.”
Police found Williams with cuts and bruises. She claimed that she had been stabbed, beaten, forced to eat feces and subjected to a racial slur by her white captors. She is African American.
Her testimony sent away a mother and son, a separate mother and daughter, and two men. It also brought out Rev. Al Sharpton who rallied those angered over the case and may now be able to claim two racial rape hoaxes to his credit, here (Three, if you include the Duke Lacrosse rape case). While saying that innocent people should not be in jail, Sharpton suggested some skepticism over the victim’s recanting: “If there are other circumstances around the recanting, we should know what they are.” Other leaders who spoke out on the case have insisted that she must be lying now, here.
Some of the defendants were given up to 40 years in prison.
Potts insists that Williams is feeling “total remorse; that’s why she’s coming forward. She is remorseful for having these people spend time in jail.”
Notably, the defendants confessed in the case, though innocent defendants have been previously found to have confessed to crimes to avoid longer sentences.
The prosecutor who secured those convictions, Brian Abraham, insists that the denial of the victim really should not matter much because of those confessions: “The case wasn’t based on her statements. . . All six of them have been in jail without filing appeals. If they file something afterwards, the evidence was pretty overwhelming for the charges on which they were convicted.”
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