Directed by: Ken Burns & Sarah Burns & David McMahon.
Written by: Ken Burns & Sarah Burns & David McMahon.
In
1989, five black and Latino teenagers were arrested, tried and convicted of
attacking and raping a white woman who was jogging through Central Park. The
case garnered national attention, and certainly was horrifying to everyone in
New York City – a city that was already deeply divided along racial lines
(remember, this was the same year Spike Lee directed his masterpiece – Do the
Right Thing). The media had a field day with the attack – describing the teens
as a “wolf pack” and popularizing the term “wilding” – to describe such attacks
by these large groups of non-white teenagers. This is a case that everyone
heard about – even me, who was only 8 at the time.
How
many people remember however that The Central Park Five were eventually exonerated?
After spending anywhere between 6 and 13 years in prison, new evidence came to
light. A man named Matias Reyes, who was arrested not long after the Central
Park Five, and was convicted of being the East Side Rapist, responsible for
many similar attacks. He eventually confessed to the crime – saying he
committed it alone – and whose DNA was linked to the crime.
So,
if they didn’t do the crime, and if they had no DNA evidence to convict them,
than how did these five men get convicted in the first place? Simple – they confessed.
But as we are seeing more and more often in the American Justice system,
confessions are not always accurate. In this case, you have five teenagers –
between 14 and 16 – who were questioned for hours on end, without a lawyer
present, who eventually just gave in and confessed – although none took
responsibility themselves, they all pointed the finger at the others, perhaps
thinking that this way they could go home. Despite the fact that the
confessions do not match each other, and have some glaring factual flaws in
them, and despite the fact that now reasonable timeline could be established to
make the prosecutions timeline fit, and despite the fact that even before
trial, the DA knew the DNA evidence did not match any of the defendants, they
pushed forward with the case – and got convictions.
The
documentary The Central Park Five has been directed by Ken Burns, best known
for his PBS documentaries, along with his daughter Sarah and son-in-law David
McMahon. The movie is clearly not impartial – few documentaries truly are – and
the filmmakers are clearly on the side of the five men – Kharey Wise, Kevin
Richardson, Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam and Anton McCray – all of which are
interviewed (although one does not want his face shown). Perhaps this closed
with these men can account for the film’s single biggest flaw – the fact that
the filmmakers never really question the five on what they were really doing at
the time of the attack. It’s pretty much undeniable that they are innocent of
what they were charged and convicted for – but by their own admission, they
were in Central Park that night as part of a large group of teenagers – perhaps
up to 30 – and participated in other crimes that night. So while The Central
Park Five were innocent of what they were charged with, they aren’t really completely
innocent, are they? A more complex documentary would address this issue.
Yet,
perhaps the movie doesn’t need to address it. After all, they weren’t charged
with anything other than the attack and rape of the jogger – a crime which they
are clearly innocent of. They served years behind bars for something they didn’t
do – something that should not happen to anyone, despite what else they may be
guilty of. What the movie does do is lay out a step by step process of how the
cops and the DA got confessions and then convictions out of the suspects, and
how the media ate up everything up they were fed, without ever questioning what
really happened. The city was horrified by what happened, and in a race to sell
papers, the different New York City papers piled on, seeing who could be the
most outraged by the crime.
The
Central Park Five joins the ranks of documentaries like the Paradise Lost
trilogy and West of Memphis – all about the West Memphis Three, convicted of
the murder of three young boys because of a confession by one of them. It makes
you question the justice system – a system that seems more interested in
getting results than getting correct results. This was a high profile case the
police needed to close – and close it they did, even if they should have known
they didn’t have the right people.
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