Central Park Five: Justice Is Long Overdue

The activist documentary is a genre that has gained prominence over recent years, perhaps most notably with the Paradise Lost trilogy. Now famed documentarian Ken Burns has come out with The Central Park Five, a movie about a horrifying 1989 rape case that resulted in the conviction and imprisonment of five minority teenagers who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Burns first establishes the setting - New York City in 1989 was a mess. The city was plagued by crime, with crack dealers all over the city, seething racial tensions, and murder and muggings were commonplace. Things were at a boiling point when a white female jogger was found in the northern part of Central Park, barely alive and the victim of a horrific physical and sexual attack. The Central Park Five were five minority teens ranging in age from 14 to 16, who had been in the park that night and had unwittingly found themselves among a group of teens who were causing trouble by throwing stones at cars and hassling people in the park. The five were arrested along with the other teens for rioting and "wilding" as they called it, but once the Central Park jogger was discovered, the police quickly decided that these teens must have also been responsible for attacking and raping her.

The documentary tells this story via first-person interviews with the five men and various reporters who covered the case. The Five were subjected to intense police interrogations and coerced into making false confessions. Their parents were misinformed, confused, and at no point thought about getting lawyers so their sons would stop incriminating themselves. The detectives fed the teens with information, and they just spouted back what they were told, making up conflicting details that didn't even tally with the crime scene. In the movie, one of the Five watches his videotaped confession and can't believe what he was saying. As they read their signed statements, each man is startled, one of them saying, "what kind of 14-year old would talk like this?" After they were arrested, every single one of them recanted, denying that they had been responsible for this heinous crime. But it was too late, and their false confessions were used against them. They were sentenced to five to ten years in prison, with Khorey Wise receiving a longer sentence because he was 16 and tried as an adult.

Throughout their prison sentence, the Five proclaimed their innocence, which meant that they were consistently denied parole. After seven years, four of them were finally released and attempted to resume their lives, which was no easy feat. But in 2002, Khorey Wise, who was still in prison, ran into Matias Reyes, a man who was serving life imprisonment for a series of murders and rapes across the Upper East Side in the late 80s. Reyes started telling fellow inmates that he felt bad that Wise had been imprisoned for a crime he hadn't committed. Detectives were called in and before long, they had a full confession from Reyes as the man solely responsible for the Central Park rape. The Five were completely exonerated and their convictions were vacated, eleven long years after their wrongful arrest and imprisonment.

The Central Park Five is an eyeopening look at the miscarriage of justice and the NYPD still refuses to accept any blame for mishandling this case. They even had DNA evidence that could have identified Reyes as the rapist, but they were so fixated on the idea that these five teenagers were responsible that they were blind to any other theories or evidence. Three members of the Central Park Five filed a civil lawsuit against the City of New York in 2003, which has yet to be resolved because the City adamantly denies any wrongdoing. The documentary discusses the disheartening fact that despite the media storm over the case in 1989, the innocence of the Five received remarkably little media interest and was quickly forgotten. The Central Park Five aims to address that incongruity and give these five men the chance to have their stories heard. Hopefully it will result in a swell of public support and ensure that these men finally receive some justice. Nothing can give them back the childhood they lost in the prison system, but at least New York can give them some remuneration and most importantly, a long overdue apology.