NEW YORK — An expert witness was called to the stand at a Brooklyn domestic sexual assault trial to tell the jury about the impact of intimate abuse in the Islamic faith.
The testimony included claims that Muslim men entering arranged marriages seek virgin brides from their native countries so they “will be more submissive,” court records show. The witness, Chitra Raghavan, a professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, also said that Islamic men “across religion” tend to ignore rules giving women the right to reject a husband’s sexual advances.
Men in arranged South Asian unions “sometimes want, particularly if they know they want to be controlling,” to find a wife in their native countries, Raghavan testified, citing an alleged cultural belief “that if a woman comes from their so-called mother country, she will be easier to control, ultimately, because she will be more submissive.”
After hearing that expert testimony, a Brooklyn jury found Meftaah Uddin, 33, a Pakistani American man raised in Brooklyn, guilty of repeated sexual assaults against his wife in his family’s Brooklyn apartment. He was sentenced to seven years in prison in late 2022.
His attorneys say he was denied a fair trial because Raghavan’s “sweeping generalizations about Muslim culture” painted him as abusive by nature and prejudiced the jury. The attorneys, Lauren Di Chiara and Robert Fantone, have appealed to the New York State Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court.
If the court takes up the matter — it accepts only a fraction of the cases presented to it — it could set new rules for expert testimony about immigrant and religious cultures, a little examined, but sometimes critical, aspect of the criminal justice system.
Experts often testify in sexual assault and domestic violence cases. They explain why victims might delay reporting abuse, why signs of trauma are not always evident and why victims stay with abusers. The testimony is widely allowed in courts to aid the jury.
Defense lawyers routinely seek to exclude or limit the testimony. They have accused prosecutors of using experts to rationalize inconsistencies in victim accounts and have argued the theories experts present are too broad.
Raghavan was allowed by a New York trial court judge in Brooklyn to discuss the impact of sexual abuse in the Islamic faith, but only within certain limits.
“I don’t think it’s appropriate for her to make broad statements about all Muslim people,” Judge Niki Warin said at the outset of the proceeding.
Defense attorneys say, however, that Raghavan’s testimony went beyond the appropriate boundaries and could have prejudiced the jury.
Di Chiara, a former prosecutor who handled sex-trafficking cases, said Raghavan’s testimony disparaged Muslim men and was not “supported anywhere in the record by science research or studies.” Other cultural stereotypes introduced at a trial would have been seen as clearly out of bounds, the attorney said.
“If an expert were asked about the state of an Irish man when they come home from work, and their answer was ‘six Guinnesses deep,’ that would have been inappropriate for obvious reasons,” Di Chiara said.
Raghavan is exceptional in her field but was misguided by the prosecutor, Di Chiara said. Raghavan “was asked things I don’t think she should have been answering,” added Di Chiara, who used Raghavan as a witness in one of her cases when she was an assistant district attorney.
Fantone added that the idea that women are manipulated “across religion,” as Raghavan testified, is particularly harmful.
“I don’t think you can get any broader than that,” Fantone said. “… She’s essentially saying Islam itself is part of an abuse dynamic.”
Raghavan declined to discuss the matter when reached by email. She said she does not discuss work she has done for her forensic or clinical clients. She has an extensive résumé in studying coercive control, partner violence, sex trafficking and sexual assault and had testified 20 times in state and federal courts before Uddin’s trial on issues related to coercive control. She has studied Muslim communities and issues involving women. Raghavan, however, said at the trial that she had not studied Pakistani culture specifically and acknowledged there are regional differences within Islam.
At the trial, about two-thirds of Raghavan’s direct examination addressed general concepts such as battered women’s syndrome and coercive-control tactics such as surveillance, intimidation and isolation. A smaller portion of the questions and testimony was devoted to sexual and domestic abuse issues in South Asian and Muslim communities.
Brooklyn prosecutors deny the defense assertions and say the case against Uddin was extremely serious.
“We will continue to stand with the survivor, who endured a pattern of disturbing domestic and sexual violence, and will defend this conviction through any remaining appeal,” a spokesman for Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a statement.
Uddin and his wife, whose name The Washington Post is not using because she is considered a victim of sexual violence, were married in Pakistan after a match made by their two families. About two years after the wedding, in late November 2020, the wife, who was in her 20s and had completed school in Pakistan, moved to the United States and joined Uddin’s parents and sisters in the family apartment. He was arrested about six months after she moved in.
At the trial, she testified that she was not allowed to leave the house and could not access her phone or the internet. She described having some interaction with Uddin during the two years they lived apart but said she had spent little time with him before she moved in.
The wife told jurors that her husband was hot-tempered and violent. Her testimony included accounts of forced sexual encounters.
At the time of his arrest, Uddin, who has a degree in psychology, was working as an Uber driver and trying to set up a wholesale business.
In a phone interview from the Fishkill Correctional Facility, Uddin said he was pressured to get married by his family. He denied his spouse’s version of events and said she was unhappy in New York and displeased with his absences while he worked long hours.
He added that the expert’s testimony played on biases that the jury might have already had, “because the jury looks at a Muslim man and thinks 9/11,” he said, noting criticisms of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor.
“Basically, the expert witness is saying that all Muslim men are savages, and that is not a justifiable opinion to have for anybody,” Uddin added.
Mark Zauderer, a New York trial and appellate lawyer, said there is a risk of significant prejudice if a witness suggested that Uddin’s “alleged violent behavior was the product of his religion or culture.”
“You’re planting in the mind of the jury that this is what Muslim men do — they abuse women, they rape women, and it’s part of their culture,” Zauderer added.
New York Law School professor Rebecca Roiphe, a former prosecutor, also said expert testimony had the potential to put Uddin’s character on trial, rather than his alleged conduct.
“Specific culture and ethnicity inferences made not just about the victim’s conduct but about the defendant’s — that is heading into much more problematic territory,” Roiphe said. It raises the risk that “some juror is going to conclude or even subconsciously think that this defendant is more likely to have done this because other people in that ethnicity act in a particular way,” she added.
Uddin has faced additional hurdles in appealing his case because his former attorney did not raise objections to Raghavan’s testimony during the trial, which is generally necessary to preserve an issue for appellate review.
In a court filing with the Court of Appeals, Gonzalez’s office said there is no basis for a review on any issue raised by Uddin.
In October, an intermediate appellate court declined to consider Uddin’s argument that his trial lawyer failed to adequately represent his interests by objecting during Raghavan’s testimony and by not raising other key challenges, saying it was not the right venue. The appeals panel did not issue findings on Raghavan’s individual comments but upheld the verdict and said the expert was properly allowed to testify.
Raghavan “demonstrated through her foundational testimony that she possessed the skill, training, knowledge, and experience necessary to proffer an opinion,” the court said.
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