Super-Predators, ‘Wilding,’ And The Central Park Five
In 2002, a prisoner named Matias Reyes, already convicted of three rapes and a murder, confessed to a fellow inmate that he had raped Ms. Meili. Once the DNA found on Meili’s sock was retested, it turned out to be a match with Reyes. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, whose office had prosecuted the case, moved to vacate the convictions of all five (now) men. The men have now filed suit for wrongful imprisonment but Mayor Bloomberg is fighting their lawsuits.
Readers might wonder what would lead 4 out of 5 boys who were innocent of this brutal crime to offer written and videotaped confessions (only Yusef Salaam refused to sign a confession or be videotaped). I have written about the routine nature of false confessions here. Criminal suspects, particularly if they are children, often tell law enforcement what they think they want to hear. It happens regularly.
Patricia J Williams writing in The Nation Magazine in 2002 shares some of the details of the “confessions” from the Central Park Five:
As for the specifics of the case, the much-touted confessions were preceded by eighteen to thirty hours of nonstop questioning, sometimes under quite unorthodox circumstances. For example, Antron McCray, 15 at the time, was put in the back of a police car and driven around the park in the middle of the night. Police didn’t feel it necessary to translate every question into Spanish for Raymond Santana’s family for fear that it was “going to take us all day.” The confessions themselves were filled with inconsistencies and obvious factual errors no one took seriously until now. But to me, the most troubling aspect was that the original handwritten confessions were written in police-speak. One detective wrote down three of the four incriminating confessions before they were videotaped. My notes of his testimony regarding Raymond Santana’s confession reveal that he didn’t “know if I substituted Raymond’s words for my own, but I wrote down what I recall.” The male black? “Probably my words.” Female white? “He probably said white female. Or white girl.” Had sex? “I don’t recall if those were his words or mine.” Nor was the statement “in exactly the same order that he told me.”
For so many New Yorkers, the Central Park Five case is now a distant memory. For me, the case is seared into my consciousness. I can’t forget it. I am looking forward to seeing the documentary and reliving the case, this time through the eyes of a grown person and not a child.
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