The former principal of a Montessori school in Manhattan, who claimed she had consensual sex with a student at her school only when he had reached the age of consent, has appealed against her conviction.
The jury had gone with the prosecution that had argued Lina Sinha, 41, had indeed had sex with the student when she was 30 and he was 13 in the summer of 1996. She was convicted in March and was sentenced to 14 years in prison. She had rejected last year a plea bargain offer by the prosecution that could have sent her to six years in prison.
Now, Sinha, whose parents own two Montessori schools in the city, is accusing prosecutors of concealing the promises to a witness, who was also a student at her school, in exchange for his cooperation.
She is represented in the appeal by Joel B Rudin whose firm claims it specialises in re-investigating 'lost' causes and finding ways to overturn convictions based on newly-discovered evidence, prosecutorial misconduct, and defence attorney ineffectiveness.
Lina Sinha accuses the prosecutors in the Manhattan district attorney's office of 'bolstering' their case against her by getting the alleged second victim to testify against her.
The names of the first victim who is now a police officer in New York and that of the second person who testified against her saying that she had seduced him into having sex have not been revealed as they were minors at the time of the sexual encounters.
Rudin's appeal contends that the witness had no credibility because prosecutors had offered to help him get leniency for a probation violation in a drug related case in Connecticut in exchange for his testimony. The offer was not revealed to the defence before trial, the appeal asserts.
The jurors were deadlocked on the second witness's charges. He had told the court that she had seduced him in 2001 when he was 13.
Rudin argues that his very presence at the trial left a negative impression on the jury in the much publicised case. Her arrest also fuelled many anti-immigrant sites to call for a ban on immigrants. Columbia University-educated Sinha was born in America.
The Manhattan district attorneys office has not commented on the appeal.
The second boy had been arrested in early 2005 with 102 bags of cocaine. He pleaded guilty to drug possession, and was put on five years' probation in exchange for being an informant.
According to Rudin's office police started questioning the boy when a former teacher at the school called the officials during the trial and told them Sinha might have been involved with the second boy.
A few months after the call, the boy was arrested for violating his probation. According to Sinha's lawyer the boy first denied any sexual relationship with Sinha. But Rudin contends that the boy changed his account after prosecutors offered to ask for a more lenient sentence for the probation violation.
There were many things the prosecutors did not reveal, according to the brief: It said the boy was told he would not be sent to 'a harsher prison; the jury did not know that the witness's mother had been given special phone privileges.
Prosecutors did not allow the boy, who turned 19 on the eve of the trial, to tell the truth, the brief contends. The defense lawyer Gerald Shargil had sought a mistrial when he had come across the hidden role of the prosecutors but the judge refused the request.
'They artfully elicited his testimony that no prosecutor had made any promise directly to him,' Rudin's brief says. 'They guided him to testify not only that he had received no consideration of any kind, but that the thought of it had never even entered his mind.'
