Jane Doe No More (37 page)

Then Donna boiled the case down to why it was so important to her to receive absolute justice. It was clear that Donna Palomba’s fight was not going to end here in this courtroom, regardless of the verdict.

Nothing will make the night of September 11, 1993, go away. But you have the power to stand up for what is right and just. You can help John and Jane Doe retrieve their dignity, and you can allow them a new start in the long road that lies ahead. The incident was tragic. The investigation was pathetic. But the integrity and honesty of Jane Doe can be publicly restored and, in fact, it should be. Please, in the name of justice, do the right thing and find in favor of Jane Doe. Send a message that investigating a violent crime is serious and policies and procedures need to be followed. Send a message that abusing an innocent victim of rape is not only wrong, but inexcusable.

As the lawyers rolled out their closing arguments, the local newspaper reported that the “
ALLEGED RAPE VICTIM WANTS $2.5
M.” The headline made Donna seem like a woman looking for a payday. It mentioned nothing about Donna wanting, more than anything else, changes in policy and procedure within the WPD. She was being portrayed as someone looking to capitalize on a claim of being sexually assaulted—exactly what the WPD had been saying for the past seven-plus years.

Donna wondered, after following the newspaper accounts of her trial, if there was some sort of conspiracy to protect her attacker, as if everyone knew who this person was, but did not want to come forward and identify him. Or perhaps there was simple arrogance and ignorance when it came to treating victims of sexual assault, which was one more reason Donna felt she needed to see this through. It seemed preposterous, sure, that a conspiracy could be unfolding in front of her; but Donna had been victimized twice, and many troubling things continually ran through her mind.

In her closing argument, Maureen set her well-proven claims against the police department into one amazing, revealing, and startling metaphor, depicting Doug Moran as “a man [who] sat there picking the wings off a grasshopper.”

The image was remarkable: A bully pushing around a defenseless woman half as strong, who had been traumatized to the point of, Donna once wrote, “depression, overwhelming feelings of sadness, tension, nightmares and interrupted sleep, a growing rage and bitterness toward people in town and my accusers, a constant feeling of worry and dread.” Donna had written out the differences in her life pre- and post-rape on a sheet of paper. Before her ordeal, Donna had “enjoyed being alone, could relax easily and quickly, [she was] more carefree and friendly, less apprehensive, trusting, more social, able to spend quality time with her children, energized and excited to do new things.” Post-rape became the polar opposite—an endless well of dealing with “anguish and trust issues, feeling unsafe all the time, stomach cramps from nerves, nausea and digestive problems.”

Additional notes Donna wrote in her trial steno pad summed up the toll the post-rape trauma caused by the WPD had taken on her: “I’d give anything to go back the seven years—my children will never be five and seven years old again—they are now fifteen and twelve and I wonder about all I have missed.”

In looking back on it all, Donna ruminated, “Why [would] anyone put herself through this if she was not telling the truth? . . . What I wish is that I could go back seven years—I would give anything to go back . . .”

Donna and John held each other as Maureen spoke to the jurors, the passionate lawyer making the argument that a victim of rape—at the scene of that crime—should be treated with the utmost sincerity and compassion, regardless of what a cop
thinks
took place. To accuse a woman of lying about what was done to her, weeks after she was allegedly raped at gunpoint, while she was ostensibly and progressively handling the post-attack trauma well and making progress toward healing, was to stomp on her emotional security for the rest of her life. Donna would never be the same—no matter what happened in court. Doug Moran had intimidated and terrorized Donna, Maureen suggested. He had made up his mind and went after her for no apparent reason, finding only the pieces of the evidence puzzle that fit conveniently into
his
claims, no matter where that evidence came from. Because of this, as the psychologist who had evaluated Donna had testified, Donna would be scarred for life.

“Their lives have value,” Maureen stated emphatically, speaking about victims of rape in general. “Please let your verdict
reflect
that.”

Cheryl Hricko was unabashed in her closing comments to the jury. She went straight at Donna’s reaction after the crime: what Donna said, how she said it, and the way in which she presented herself. All of Donna’s behavior, Hricko opined, pointed to a woman who had made up a story to cover up an affair.

One of the points Hricko keyed in on early was the idea that because Maria Cappella, Donna’s sister, let Jeff Martinez into her apartment, he could not have been all that intimidating or threatening.

“Why would you let this gentleman in your home at that particular point in time? And if he is proven to already be sexually aggressive at the front door, then why is he invited in and asked if he’d like [something to drink]?”

This might have been a good point had it been the least bit relevant to Donna’s rape allegations. On top of that, what did Jeff Martinez have to do with Doug Moran’s hostile, slanderous interrogation of Donna?

Hricko hammered Donna’s behavior during the minutes, hours, and days after the assault, right down to when Donna called her attacker a “gentleman” on the 911 call. “Endearing terms such as ‘gentleman’ . . . are just
not
associated with a brutal attacker such as this man . . .”

How could this be significant to an investigation, Maureen asked herself while listening to her adversarial counterpart, if these people had no idea how Donna customarily spoke? What if Donna used the word “gentleman” as common, everyday practice? The city was taking literally a term used in the heat of the moment—when
any
human would be searching for words in a terrified, scrambled mind. That one point infuriated Maureen and Donna.

Meanwhile the notion that this was the first weekend John Palomba had gone away by himself in twelve years of marriage was now considered an indication of Donna’s guilt, according to Hricko, who suggested that because John was away, it was the perfect opportunity for Donna to have an affair.

“If you look at the children’s room from the point of view of Donna’s bedroom,” Detective Neil O’Leary explained later, talking as an experienced investigator, making an important point that not one investigator looking at Donna’s case had ever considered, “you could see down the hallway and just about into the kids’ rooms. So the children had an almost straight eye line into Donna’s bedroom from their rooms. If the theory is that she had an affair and one of the kids caught her, you’d have to ask yourself as an investigator—which no one did—why in the heck would she leave her door open, for one, and unlocked, for another? It would be unthinkable to have your lover in your room, your children there down the hall, and your bedroom door open and unlocked!”

And because Donna had gone back to work within a week’s time, Hricko said, the WPD believed that behavior was inconsistent with someone suffering from a brutal rape.

Hricko went on so long that at one point the judge said, “Miss Hricko, you are going to have to wrap it up.”

Given all the evidence the WPD had uncovered, Hricko concluded, it was absolutely reasonable for Doug Moran to question Donna’s account. He would have been negligent if he had not.

Days passed. The jury seemed to be deadlocked. In actuality, however, several interesting scenarios were being played out in the jury room as the jurors discussed Donna’s case. Immediately, everyone believed that Donna had been raped and that she had not lied about her attack. There was no question about Donna’s story, or her character. The problems for the jury began with the actual jury verdict form itself. The form made it difficult and confusing for jurors to choose individual counts associated with the case.

“If it was a matter of guilt or innocence, like on TV,” one juror later said, “it would have been all over. Deciding on damages made us all not want to be there . . . it felt like we were in prison.”

On Wednesday, January 31, 2001, nearly five days after the jury was given the case, John and Donna Palomba stood and hugged each other tightly as the jury found the city, Doug Moran, Robert Moran, and Phil Post responsible, ruling against the WPD. The jury awarded Donna $190,000 in damages, a far cry from the $2.5 million dollars Maureen Norris had asked for during the proceedings.

“We had no doubt,” that same juror added, “that Doug Moran was a liar. There was a difference of opinion on the experts . . .”

As a whole, according to one juror who later spoke about the deliberation process, the jury “was offended by the $2.5 million-dollar amount. It was way too high.”

Some of the jurors did not want to give Donna any money at all.

Still, Donna won. Ultimately, within its verdict, the jury of two men and four women agreed that Douglas Moran and his brother, Robert, the former captain (who had by now retired from the WPD), were “negligent for injuring Donna and traumatizing her [and] not properly investigating her 1993 rape claim.”

Outside the courtroom Donna told reporters: “We tried very hard to settle this without going to trial. The case was really not about money—it was about change!”

Donna also said she wasn’t done with the WPD. She was going to do everything in her power to see that the department made changes in the way it dusted for fingerprints and photographed rape scenes in the future. In addition, she felt there should be a qualified, specially trained police officer in sexual assaults at every scene and available to handle all rape complaints.

“It’s a disgrace what happened,” John Palomba said bitterly as he walked with Donna out of the building and reporters crowded around them.

“Today is a victory for all victims who have been abused by police,” Donna said.

Maureen made one of the last press comments, and put Donna’s case into perspective as she said, “Look, if you’re raped, you’re raped! No one asks for that.”

The question for Donna now was: Where to go from here?

CHAPTER
TWENTY
-
FOUR

Still Jane after All These Years

Donna had demanded an apology and change in policy       
FROM   
the WPD. In the short term she ended up with neither. The WPD flat out refused to acknowledge that Donna had won her case. The city paid the damages, and Donna received her share after expenses and fees for the lawyers and experts. But she was still reeling from the realization that it was business as usual for the WPD. Nothing had changed.