Defense: Drunk and unclear on what happened, woman who made up NYC gang rape believed her lie

Defense: Woman believed her NYC gang-rape lie

NEW YORK — A woman due to be sentenced Tuesday for fabricating a gang rape accusation that sent an innocent man to prison was too drunk to remember much of the night she met him and believed her allegation was true, according to legal papers filed by her defense team.

Biurny Peguero started “to believe that her lie was the true story as she was intoxicated with alcohol and could not recall all the details of that night,” a psychiatrist wrote in a report accompanying a defense pre-sentencing memorandum obtained by The Associated Press.

Peguero, 27, approached authorities last year to say she had made up the 2005 incident. She faces up to seven years in prison after pleading guilty in December to perjury. Her lawyer, Paul F. Callan, is asking a judge to sentence the mother of two young children only to probation, noting that her recantation was key to exonerating William McCaffrey.

“Had Ms. Peguero not stepped forward to right this wrong, Mr. McCaffrey might have spent most of the next 20 years in prison,” wrote Callan, who said she was riven with remorse over the false accusation.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office didn’t immediately return a phone call about the defense memo.

A judge overturned McCaffrey’s rape conviction in December, after he had spent nearly four years behind bars in jail and prison. He was released on bail a few months before he was officially cleared, with DNA testing also playing a part in establishing his innocence.

Peguero, then 22, originally said McCaffrey was the ringleader among three men who raped her at knifepoint after luring her into their car after she went to a Manhattan nightclub with female friends.

McCaffrey, now 32, said she had agreed to go with them to a party, and they dropped her off unharmed after she changed her mind.

Peguero testified before a grand jury and at McCaffrey’s trial. He was found guilty of charges including rape and kidnapping and got a 20-year prison term. No one else was convicted.

She confessed her lie to a priest and then to authorities last year. Prosecutors have said she told them she claimed she was raped to make her friends feel sorry for her.

She told the defense psychiatrist she still “does not have a clear understanding of why she lied and the reason behind sustaining the lie for this long,” according to the court filing.

It describes her as a survivor of a childhood rife with neglect and abuse who has entered a happy marriage and become an ardent Catholic in recent years, and it includes 18 letters from fellow parishioners at her New Jersey church and other supporters.

Peguero, who has an infant and a 7-year-old, lives in Union City, N.J.