3 Get Maximum in Jogger Attack : New York: Five- to 10-year terms are handed down in the Central Park ‘wilding’ case.

NEW YORK — Three teen-agers who continued to profess their innocence received maximum prison sentences of five to 10 years today for the “wilding” rape and assault of a woman jogging in Central Park.

“Give me the max,” one of the defiant youths, Yusef Salaam, told Judge Thomas Galligan before sentence was passed. “Sooner or later the truth will come out.”

Galligan, in turn, denounced the three for showing no remorse, “only defiance.” On the night the jogger was attacked, he said, “Central Park was turned into a torture chamber by mindless marauders seeking a thrill.”

“The intensity of the violence that occurred that night is something no rational mind can explain,” the judge said.

Although the youths were tried as adults because of the seriousness of the charges, Galligan had to sentence them as juveniles because they were under 16 when the jogger was attacked on April 19, 1989. An adult would have faced up to 25 years in prison.

Salaam and Antron McCray, both 16, and Raymond Santana, 15, were convicted Aug. 18 of attacking the woman and assaulting two men the same night. They were acquitted of attempted murder and a lesser count of sodomy.

The judge denied motions to have the three sentenced in Family Court, asking, “Is sexual brutality of a woman something that’s acceptable or tolerable because it happens at the hands of a 14- or 15-year-old? The answer is obvious.”

At the hearing, William Kunstler, an attorney for Salaam, called the proceeding “a legal lynching.”

“I don’t expect anything to happen here other than the judge to sign the maximum,” he told Galligan. “I’m so sure of it I’ve already filled out appeal papers.”

The teens were accused of raping and trying to kill the jogger, then 28, during her nightly run in Central Park. She lost considerable blood and spent two weeks in a coma, a doctor said.

Each defendant spoke briefly before sentence was passed.

Salaam read a rambling, rap-style poem he had composed in jail. During the reading, he stopped once to glare at prosecutors.

“I have not yet begun to fight,” he concluded. “This is only the beginning.”

McCray told the judge, “I’m not going to let this stop me. I’m going to make it.”

Santana, who struck the meekest tone of the three, said simply, “Everyone knows I’m innocent of the crime. I never did it.”