The Court Report
By Richard Blassberg

Jeffrey Deskovic Seeks Accountability And Damages From Police Chief Tumolo And Co-Conspirators

Last Tuesday, September 18th attorneys for Jeffrey Deskovic made a much anticipated filing with the United States District Court For The Southern District OF New York, against Peekskill Police Chief Eugene Tumolo, and several co-conspirators and governmental subdivisions, seeking damages for their knowingly false, and malicious prosecution and incarceration which claimed more than sixteen years of Deskovic’s liberty, in violation of his due process, and civil rights, under 42 U.S.C. Section 1983, rendering him incalculably injured, and forever changed. The action stems from unlawful activities that began in November 1989 in response to the rape and killing by strangulation of fifteen year-old Peekskill High School student Angela Correa.

The 77-page summons and complaint identifies Steven Cunningham, then 29, as the crack-addicted assailant who attacked Correa, “leaving behind a trail of evidence, demonstrating his involvement in the crime, including, critically, his semen.”

That semen that Eugene Tumolo now insists he ordered tested, established as early as April of 1990 that Jeffrey Deskovic’s DNA did not match the assailant’s, and yet a malicious prosecution went forward predicated upon an indictment hastily sought and obtained by Westchester Assistant District Attorney George Bolen three days
before he would receive official word of the mismatch.

Tumolo, then a Lieutenant Detective with the Peekskill Police Department, of which he is now Chief, and who headed the investigation, not surprisingly, now publicly claims, through his attorney Tony Castro, that upon learning of the failure of the DNA to match that of his falsely confessed, sixteen-year-old suspect, went to ADA Bolen but was rejected, and informed that the prosecution would be going forward anyway.

Analysis:

That claim, seventeen years later, in no way mitigates his involvement and culpability in the obtaining of a forced, false confession from a vulnerable sixteen-year old boy, and the malicious, and unconscionable prosecution for many months, and ultimate incarceration of that youth for sixteen years thereafter. After all, is Chief Tumolo trying to now say that he had no recourse, once ADA George Bolen informed him that he would be going forward with Deskovic’s prosecution, despite compelling scientific evidence that the youth was, in fact, innocent?

Is Tumolo trying to suggest that he could not have gone to District Attorney Carl Vergari, George Bolen’s boss? And, even assuming Vergari might have been as evil, and hell-bent as Bolen, he could not have appealed to the State Attorney General’s Office, the United States Attorney’s Office, or even the press and media to prevent the
tragic, knowing and malicious prosecution of an innocent boy placed in harms way by Tumolo’s own overzealous, unlawful, personally self-serving investigative tactics?

What, other than his lack of moral fiber, and depraved indifference to the outcome of a malicious prosecution set in motion by his own evil deeds kept Mr. Tumolo from attempting to right the wrong he had set in motion, and what, other than his own selfinterest, kept him silent for sixteen years as Jeffrey Deskovic, a person he knew was innocent, languished in state prison, while Steven Cunningham, someone not unknown to Tumolo, remained free to kill again, even as he would kill some three years later?