Rabbi Yehuda Kolko has been acquitted on both counts of harassing a child he sexually abused years before.
The boy is now 13. He was in first grade when Kolko fondled his genitals.
Details of the case against Kolko.
More verdict details as they come in.
Update 7:29 am CDT – The Jewish Week adds:
…The jurors were not allowed to know anything about the underlying crime that led to the protection order in order to avoid prejudicing the case, and throughout the trial Rabbi Kolko’s lawyer, Jeffrey Schwartz, sought to portray the boy’s father as having a vendetta against the rabbi and seeking to manipulate the system to get him removed from the neighborhood.
Schwartz’s strategy seems to have worked. The one juror who agreed to speak to The Jewish Week said that she believed the case was “all nonsense” and that the allegations against Rabbi Kolko were “payback,” though she said the jury had not been allowed to speculate for what.
When the juror was told that Rabbi Kolko had been charged with sexually abusing the boy, she replied softly, “Oh, wow,” but quickly added, “there was no evidence for that.”…
The New York Post quotes Schwartz as denying after the verdict that Kolko had ever molested anyone:
Kolko, 66, was arrested in 2006 for allegedly touching the private parts of the boy and a first-grade classmate at a Flatbush yeshiva where he worked as a teacher.
"This destroyed his whole life without really any basis in fact," Schwartz said. "It basically got him thrown out of his profession."
Schwartz can say that because he's an unethical piece of garbage. He can also say it because Charles Hynes bullied both families into agreeing to a plea bargain that allowed Kolko to plead guilty to endangering the welfare of a child. He was not required to register as a sex offender and received three years probation and no prison time.
Hynes publicly claimed neither family wanted their child to testify. The families denied this and one wrote a letter to the DA the day after being bullied into the plea that tells Hynes the family wished Hynes would have allowed the case to go to trial, and says that their som was ready to testify.