Convicting the Innocent

Commentary: The Central Park Jogger

When it comes to false confession, there is one case that defines the genre. More than twenty-five years later, it still gets prominent headlines in the New York press; it still is the subject of television discussions and interviews. Many of the elements of the case were unusual if not unique. It involved five teenagers all confessing individually to the same crime on the same night. All five were in custody and being interrogated by police before it was even known that the crime for which they would later be convicted had been committed. Their separate confessions differed from one another in critical details. The victim in the case became a citywide celebrity long before anyone knew who she was.

Nameless, her identity no more than a shadow cast across the conscience of a troubled city, she nonetheless became a part of the language of her time. For fourteen years, she was known simply as the Central Park Jogger. Her presumed assailants—four black men and one Hispanic—also became monuments to a tarnished system of justice whose inequality was being etched more deeply in the awareness of a customarily indifferent public. They became known as the Central Park Five.

The jogger, a twenty-eight-year-old investment banker at the Wall Street firm of Salomon Brothers, was violently attacked on the evening of April 19, 1989, while out for a jog in New York’s Central Park. She had been raped and left for dead. Her skull had been caved in with a heavy object. Her temperature was 84 degrees and she had lost 75 percent of her blood. She was in a coma for twelve days. Her gradual recovery was regarded by some as nothing short of a miracle. She was the most notable victim among many during a night of marauding by about forty teenagers. The maddening romp introduced a new term into the vernacular of oppression. It was called “wilding.”

The attacks unleashed a firestorm of outrage throughout the city. The police felt the pressure for a quick resolution to the case and dozens of youths were herded into the stationhouse for questioning. Among them were five Harlem teenagers who would forever be joined in a tableau that traced a broken system of criminal justice. All between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, their names were: Anton McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise, and Yusef Salaam. All five initially denied having taken part in the attack or even being aware of it. But it was a long night and an even longer day ahead, and gradually each of the suspects began to give way. Finally, they all confessed to having been involved to one degree or another.

The prosecution made much of the fact that their confessions had been videotaped, but the cameras were not turned on until April 21, after the suspects had been in custody and questioned for as much as twenty-eight hours. The youths’ confessions were inconsistent with one another and at variance with the facts as they were known. There were conflicts about when, where, and how the rape took place, and differing descriptions of the clothing the jogger was wearing.

The confessions, flawed as they were, were nonetheless the backbone of the prosecution’s case. The only physical evidence was hairs on one of the boys that were said to be consistent with the hair of the jogger. In two separate trials, all were found guilty, with charges ranging from rape, to attempted murder, to the lesser charges of sexual abuse and assault. Their sentences varied from five-to-ten to five-to-fifteen years. Throughout their prison terms, the youths maintained they were innocent. They said they were tricked into making false admissions and often were responding to promises of leniency or threats of harsher treatment if they failed to comply. The authorities paid little attention. They even ignored the testimony of a DNA expert who, more than a year later, on July 13, 1990, testified in a Manhattan court that analysis of the semen found in the victim did not come from any of the five convicted of the crime. “That means,” he said, “there was another rapist who is still at large.” In fact, there was and he was the only one to have committed the crime.

In January 2002, a convicted murderer and serial rapist by the name of Matias Reyes, who was serving a term of thirty-three and a third years to life in the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York, confessed to raping the jogger. He explained that he had found God and felt compelled to confess that he, and he alone, was guilty of the crime. Reyes’s confession was compelling. He recreated the details of the crime with startling accuracy. Four months later, a DNA test matched his semen to that taken from the victim’s body. The office of Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau began reexamining the evidence in December. Two weeks later, on December 19, in a ruling that took just five minutes, State Supreme Court Judge Charles J. Tejada vacated all convictions against the five men, now between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty. They had all completed their prison terms of between seven and thirteen years.

Now fully recovered, the jogger went public on April 19, the fourteenth anniversary of the event that propelled her into the headlines. Her name was Trisha Meili, and she had just told her story in a memoir entitled I Am the Central Park Jogger: A Story of Hope and Possibility.

In September 2014, the city finally approved a settlement with the five men of $41 million, approximately $1 million for each year of their imprisonment. The suit, which had been filed in 2003, was opposed by the administration of then-mayor Michael Bloomberg but was reopened when Mayor Bill de Blasio took office. The wording of the settlement appears to absolve the city of any wrongdoing in the case. In the carefully crafted terms of the legal profession, it reads: “The City of New York has denied and continues to deny that it and the individually named defendants have committed any violations of law or engaged in any wrongful acts concerning or related to any allegations that were or could have been alleged.” Mayor de Blasio expressed a different point of view. The settlement, he said, arose from “a moral obligation to right this injustice,” which he added, was “long overdue.”

The idea of one confessing to a major crime which he did not commit appears to be counter-intuitive. The greater likelihood is that one would deny committing a crime of which he is actually guilty. But false confessions come in multiple forms and diverse variations. Most often, those who confess falsely are mentally handicapped or entirely naïve with respect to their legal rights and the intricacies of a criminal justice system that serves best those who are trained to use it to their own advantage.