The Central Park Five

A whole lot of things were missed to wrongly convict five men of brutally raping a woman. [Link]

If ever there was a cautionary tale about why our system presumes innocence, this was it. Yet as Herbert has reflected, in 1990 New Yorkers, including himself, “wanted them to be guilty. And when a desire is strong enough it can overwhelm such flimsy stuff as facts and truth. Reality is a funny thing. It is what we say it is.” Alas, that’s not the definition of reality: it’s the definition of a lie, imposed violently, carelessly, with the full power of the state. So what is the takeaway from the ruined lives of five young men?

First, in direct response to the case, Donald Trump mounted a successful campaign to reinstate the death penalty in New York. But the only thing that could have made this miscarriage of justice worse is if the defendants had been executed with the dispatch Trump howled for. We must rethink myths about the infallible catharsis of the death penalty.

Second, the convictions resulted from a corrupt process. In a clear breach of ethics, the prosecution directed the police investigation from the moment Meili was found, even questioning the defendants before they were charged and in the absence of counsel. The police, too, broke more rules on collecting evidence and questioning suspects than I can list here: but, most unusual, they also testified to much of it—it’s right there in the court record.

Worst of all, the defense attorneys were beyond dismal. Only one was a public defender with real criminal experience. Like many unfamiliar with the criminal justice marketplace, the defendants mistakenly believed that a private attorney is better than a (generally more practiced) public defender. At one point in the film, Yusef Salaam recalls his alarm when he saw Robert Burns, his lawyer, sleeping through crucial testimony. Indeed, Burns fell asleep nearly every day. He slept in full view of the judge and the press. He slept so hard, he once woke up and objected to himself. I fault the judge in this: no responsible officer of the court should have allowed Burns to continue. Competency of counsel is a basic constitutional right. At a moment when law, lawyers and even law schools are under political assault, we ignore their role in a democratic system at our collective peril.

Third, why is it still so hard to make this case the focus of serious public reflection? Given that it was one of the best-covered criminal trials in our history, the 2002 exoneration slipped by with relatively little notice. There is also a great deal of hand-wringing about why “no one” saw the flaws in the case when it was prosecuted. This ignores the fact that the courtroom was visited daily by throngs of people who did see those flaws—and proclaimed them loudly: family, friends, neighbors, residents of Harlem. But they were poor and black and relentlessly mocked in the media as deluded apologists. There were also small cadres of activists who marched in the streets for the defendants, most visibly Al Sharpton. But sadly, a number of them, including Sharpton, squandered that spotlight by blaming the jogger’s boyfriend, for which there was no evidence.