– NEW YORK
In 2007 a 24-year-old police officer took the stand in New York Supreme Court to describe a 10-year relationship with his teacher that began when she gave him oral sex when he was a teen. The teacher, Lina Sinha, was convicted of having sex with her 13-year-old student. After an unsuccessful appeal to New York’s Court of Appeals, Sinha, 46, will surrender on July 23 to begin serving her sentence of up to seven years.
The case created a sensation when it broke, the lurid details making tabloid headlines. Sinha, who has degrees from Columbia University and whose family owns and operates several schools in the New York City area, was variously described in the media as “Lusty Lina,” “bed-ucator’’ and “Twisted Temptress.”
Ironically, her relationship with her underage student came to light after Sinha filed a police complaint against him in 2004. The student was then an NYPD officer. Sinha accused him of beating her up on more than one occasion. She later told authorities at the time that he had concocted the story about having sex with her as a teen in retaliation after she filed the assault complaint against him.
But, prosecutors said that Sinha was the aggressor who had sex with the teen while he was a student. They added that she filed her assault complaint only when he tried to end their relationship in late 2004.
According to news reports, a 2004 investigation revealed that from the beginning of June 1996 and continuing for several years, Sinha had sex with the student starting when he was 13 and in eighth grade. In addition, the investigation discovered that for over a year, beginning in January 2001, she allegedly had sex with another male student, starting when that boy was 12 and in seventh grade. The investigation also revealed that on at least10 occasions in 2005, Sinha allegedly filed false reports under a different name with the police, accusing her former student (now with the NYPD) of assault. The alleged offenses did not in fact occur, according to prosecutors.
Sinha was indicted on four counts of third-degree rape, three counts of second-degree rape, 14 counts of third-degree rape, five counts of second-degree sodomy, 36 counts of third-degree sodomy, two -counts of bribing a witness, tampering with physical evidence, endangering the welfare of a child, four counts of criminal impersonation in the second degree, tampering with a witness in the fourth degree, and 10 counts of falsely reporting an incident in the third degree.
Her trial began on February 2007 and in April 2007, she was convicted of sodomy, witness bribery counts, several counts of criminal impersonation and falsely reporting an incident.
Jurors were deadlocked charges that Sinha, 40, also had sex with a second student about five years after she seduced the first boy.
Sinha appealed the sentence .
Secret Trysts
Prosecutors said Sinha’s relationship with the student began as far back as 1995, when the boy was 13, and continued long after he left the school and was set to join the NYPD. On the stand, the officer testified that the affair began with a kiss. His team had lost an athletic competition and as captain, he was devastated. Sinha consoled him with a kiss, he said. “I was very sad, and Lina kissed me on the mouth,” he said.
According to a detailed article in The New York Times, prosecutors said that from there it progressed to acts of oral sex she performed on him when he was 14, and intercourse — as a birthday present — when he turned 15. When the boy went to college at 17, prosecutors said, he began to distance himself from Sinha, and she consoled herself with a “dalliance” with a second student. The second affair began with a hug on a ski trip, prosecutors said, and within a month, Sinha had sex with him. He was 12 and she 34, the prosecutors said.
In his testimony, the officer also claimed that Sinha had seduced him at a vulnerable time, when he was angry at his mother for divorcing his father. He described how he would take the telephone into his bathroom at home to talk in secret with Sinha. They began going on Friday night “dates,” he said.
Sinha, he said, would pick him up in the school van, and they would park on a deserted road. “And there I would kiss Lina and touch her and she would touch me,” he said.
When the prosecutor asked if he remembered Sinha telling him to keep their relationship a secret, he replied yes. “I recall the substance of the conversation being not to tell anybody. She can get into trouble,” the New York Times quoted him as saying.
Defense Claims
According to her website, Sinha graduated in 1987 with an undergraduate degree from Columbia College. She earned two master’s degrees from Columbia University and an advanced certificate from New York University. She went on to become a teacher, and spent her free time staying active and volunteering.
The website describes her as an avid runner, skier and tennis player who has participated in the New York City half marathon. She has volunteered with the Special Olympics and the Methodist Hospital in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and donated to the Wildlife Conservation Society, according to the website. She has also worked to choreograph Bollywood dances at the annual India Day parade held in New York City.
Sinha’s defense team, led by top attorney Gerald Shargel, claimed Sinha was a “caring, competent, highly devoted teacher and principal” who tutored the student and began a sexual relationship with him only when he was over 17 and in college.
The young man had lived with Sinha in her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, keeping his clothing there — and, after he dropped out of college and enrolled in the Police Academy, an extra uniform, the defense said. He also had a key to her apartment, the defense said.
Shargel did not dispute that Sinha had filed assault complaints against her former student but said she was motivated by jealousy, because he had started seeing another woman and had become physically abusive toward Sinha. When questioned by his superiors about the 911 calls, he accused Sinha, falsely, of having had sex with him when he was under age, the lawyer said. He was then unable to retract the accusation, the New York Post quoted Shargel as saying. “She was hurt in a very deep and profound way,” Shargel told the jury. “She was suffering the immeasurable anguish of a love affair gone bad.” He also said that the second student, when initially interviewed by investigators, denied a sexual relationship but changed his story after his mother hired a lawyer to sue Sinha and the Montessori schools for damages.
Shargel also sought to question the credibility of the police officer. “How is it he waited nine years before he told a single soul?” Shargel asked in his closing argument, according to the New York Times. “There is no DNA. There is no independent evidence. There is no prompt complaint. There is no scientific proof.”
The argument, however, failed to convince jurors. One juror, Sam Desai, told the Times in an interview that although there were some “heated moments” during deliberations, the jurors did not doubt the credibility of the officer. His testimony was the “primary piece of evidence” leading to conviction, Desai said.
He said the jurors, during deliberations, did discuss whether they would think differently about the case if the defendant was a man and the accusers were women. “Those types of hypotheticals were used all the time, and what came out was the best result,” Desai told the Times.
Perhaps the most stinging condemnation of Sinha came from Justice Carol Berkman of State Supreme Court in Manhattan during her 2007 sentencing. “Miss Sinha is intelligent. She’s well educated. She’s well raised. She’s hardworking. She’s beautiful. And she’s a predator who lived a lie,” the judge was quoted as saying in the Times.
