Former NYPD Officers Kenneth Moreno and Franklin Mata were immediately fired after they were acquitted of rape and burglary charges.  While that might sound strange, these two deserved it.

They were actually fired for their convictions on official misconduct charges for returning to the woman’s apartment after “helping her” into her building, where she was then [allegedly] raped by Ken Moreno.

Franklin Mata was barely out of rookie status when he served as Moreno’s lookout for the [alleged] rape.

At best, Franklin Mata is guilty of poor judgment as well as being morally bankrupt. Seriously, what kind of man is it that is willing to “be the lookout” while his partner rapes a drunken woman that they’ve both been dispatched to help?

It’s disgusting.

I have no sympathy for Franklin Mata.  He deserves to get bounced off the NYPD.  He deserves to be in jail and he should be very grateful he’s not.

How he managed to escape being convicted is beyond me, but my outrage at that lack of justice pales in comparison to my disgust at Kenneth Moreno being acquitted after he admitted to having sex with the woman.

Prosecutors did possess formidable circumstantial evidence — most notably a secretly recorded tape in which Moreno admitted to the woman that he’d used a condom and that it was “just me,” not his partner, too.

Prosecutors also had incriminating sidewalk surveillance video from that early morning in December 2008 when they were dispatched to help her out of a taxi outside her apartment.

The video showed the cops using the drunken woman’s key to let themselves back inside her apartment three more times.

One has to wonder at the jury who is willing to overlook such strong circumstantial evidence.  I mean really… why would a man try to console the woman he had sex with by telling her “it was just me, not my partner too” unless he didn’t have consent for that sex?

If he’d used a condom, like he said on tape, then there’s not going to be anything for a rape forensics test to find, is there?

But obviously the jury knows better, and they were there for the whole trial.  I clearly was not, but the fact the jury took over six days to figure it out tells me there was a lot of jurors thinking these cops were guilty as charged.

What the jury did convict them on was charges of misdemeanor counts of official misconduct for what I’d call dereliction of duty, as they returned to the alleged rape victim’s apartment three more times! Does it really take a rocket scientist to guess what Kenneth Moreno was going back for?

“The guilty verdict warrants immediate termination from the department,” Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said of the misconduct ruling. “We will pursue that today. What they did was in violation of the officers’ oath of office.”

Naturally Moreno claims he did nothing wrong and Moreno’s father says the woman made the whole thing up.

That just doesn’t pass the smell test, does it?  Not for me.

The woman has filed a $57 million federal lawsuit against Kenneth Moreno, and I hope she wins.  Maybe not the full $57 million… but $5 or $10 million might be a good amount for this jerk to pay for his night of non-consensual sex.

That still leaves one more thing that pisses me off in cases like this.

That’s the policy of paying cops facing criminal charges to sit at home on what amounts to a paid vacation.

Scumbags like Moreno and Mata were on paid vacations since they were suspended over two years ago.  In the NYPD, officers facing charges are placed in “administrative leave”, which means they basically do nothing and collect full paychecks.  Moreno raked in $150,000 in the two years since he was charged with rape.  Mata raked in $110,000.

That’s very similar to the procedure used here in Canada, where RCMP constables facing charges are placed on paid vacations while their case winds its way through the court system.

It’s a policy that needs to be changed on both sides of the border.  There is no justification for paying cops charged with criminal offenses.

It’s got to stop.

At least they’ve been stripped of their pensions, although that obviously hurts Moreno far more than Mata.  Moreno, a 20-year veteran could have retired with full pension had he not been such a screwup that fateful night two years ago.

I hope for Kenneth Moreno’s sake that it was worth losing his career and his pension over.