Some Of You May Remember...

The Exonerated Five

The Central Park Jogger Case of 1989. Thirty years ago, a young White, career woman was brutally raped, beaten and left for dead in Central Park while jogging one evening in Central Park. It was a vicious crime, and also the same night that by sheer coincidence, a bunch of teens from Harlem decided to go to that nearby park. You get a bunch of male teens together of any race or ethnicity, looking for excitement and god knows what- yeah, bad shit can happen. Bad shit did happen- all around. Several joggers and passers-by were beaten, robbed harassed and threatened, the perpetrators of those crimes rightly arrested and jailed. Unbeknownst to any of the teens in attendance however, there was another crime committed in that park that evening. It was a far more heinous crime, one committed in an area they did not frequent that evening- Central Park is pretty huge for a city park, one that spans several Manhattan neighborhoods.

I was a teacher in Harlem at that time, and I remember crossing my fingers and hoping with my fellow educators that none of our students (who were the same age) were involved- fortunately, none were. And I remember (much to my regret) thinking- sure, it's a big place, sure the time lines may not exactly match, but with all that running around, all that confusion... hey, where there's smoke, there's fire! If they didn't do it... well then, who the hell did? New York detectives are anything but dumb- if they couldn't piece it together, no one could. And piece it together, they did- just not how I, or many others were led to believe.

New York, the whole country, wanted the bad guy(s) caught on this one... the-pressure-was-on! And when they couldn't make the pieces all fit- the NY DA and NYPD  pieced the story together whole cloth, and went with it. Of course, the whole concocted fabrication should have been thrown out of court when no DNA samples from the victim matched any of their chosen perps- in fact, that there was no evidence of any kind linking The Central Park Five to the jogging victim. Videos of their police coerced "confessions" however sealed their fate; they were going down for that vicious, heinous crime- one they not only did not commit, but didn't have any knowledge of until they received their officially approved police scripts, which had to undergo several creative rewrites. They literally became the faces of that crime- all five were quickly imprisoned.

In 2002, the real assailant confessed to the crime- he had previously committed several other rapes, incl one in the same area, using the same MO! Somehow, New York's Finest never considered looking into that most glaring and obvious of leads...

When They See Us is the painful recounting of that woeful tale: before, during, after and present day. And a scary refrain to that which happened some... ninety years ago.

Addendum:  Donald J. Trump saw it necessary to put out a full page ad at the time in New York's major newspapers demanding a return to the death penalty. When all five were later exonerated of the crime, he said that they still deserved to be in prison- of course, one can only speculate as to why innocent people should remain in jail, but I think there's already a rather appropriate name for those who think that anyone of color should be in jail, regardless.