In The Atlantic Wire's own coverage of the Pena trial, we went with the headline "New York Juries Don't Like Convincing Cops of Rape," and Adam Martin asked a very similar question: "What does a prosecutor have to do to win a rape case against a cop in this town? More than they have so far, that's for sure." A spokesperson later took issue with that line. "To say the prosecutor didn’t win this conviction was just wrong," DA spokeswoman Erin Duggan told Martin. "He assaulted anally, vaginally, and orally. The vaginal attack is what was hung up in the jury." As Adam noted, the three counts that Pena was found guilty on were "predatory sexual assault," a charge which carries a sentence of 25 years to life and was meant to give prosecutors a way to prosecute crimes that go beyond rape.

But the DA's statement is still confusing. Did the jury not believe there was a vaginal attack? And if so, why not? Further, what the world hears regardless of the definition of "predatory sexual assualt" is that, despite this being an apparently clear case involving a schoolteacher assaulted at gunpoint by a drunk cop while she was on her way to work in the morning, the jury did not find him guilty of rape. While these semantic distinctions are very important in the language of the courtroom and to cops and the DA, the layperson doesn't necessarily know the difference between a charge of rape or a charge of sexual assault, or what "predatory sexual assault" means. It's generally also assumed that the worse sort of sexual assault is rape.

In ongoing conversations with the the DA's communications team over the past few months, they've repeatedly expressed how hard they have worked to convict rapists, and sexual offenders, in New York City. Joan Vollero, the DA's Deputy Director of Communications, released stats to The Atlantic Wire recently showing sex crimes indictments: In 2009 there were 124 indictments filed; 168 were filed in 2011. As for sex crime conviction rates of people actually brought to trial, in 2009, that was 86 percent; in 2011, it was 89 percent.

Who does get convicted of rapes and sexual assaults in the city? Kentrel Whitaker, sentenced to 22 years in prison and 15 years post-release supervision for sexually assaulting a 73-year-old woman as she walked on the East River promenade, and Mustaphe Ouanes, who was convicted of rape in the first degree, among other charges, for raping a woman in his room at the Plaza Hotel in Midtown. (Ouanes will be sentenced in April.) Also, Jeremy Fulton, a former youth minister from the Mariners' Temple Baptist Church in Lower Manhattan, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison followed by 20 years of post-release supervision after pleading guilty to the rape and sexual abuse of five girls who attended his church. Serial rapist Vincent Heyward received 200 years to life "with a consecutive determinate sentence of 228 years in prison following his conviction at trial for a series of violent sexual attacks on five women in Hamilton Heights and Chinatown." Hugues Akassy, the "Riverside Rapist" who claimed to be a French journalist in order to lure women to picnics and dates (and would then physically stalk them and and also abuse them via email), was given 20 years in prison for stalking, harassing, and, in one case, raping a Russian tourist on the Upper West Side. In another 2011 case, Jaime Lopez-Mendoza was convicted by a jury of rape and given 15 years for raping a women in her room at the Dream Hotel (he was an employee there).