CENTRAL

PARK
FIVE
Margaret Kammerer
 The Wrongfully Convicted:

Antron McCray Kevin Richardson Yusef Salaam Raymond Santana Korey Wise
 The Wrongfully Convicted:

Antron McCray, 15 Kevin Richardson, 14 Yusef Salaam, 15 Raymond Santana, 14 Korey Wise, 16
Agenda: • Facts of the Case
• Reasons for a Conviction
• Aftermath/Exonerations
WHAT HAPPENED?
• At 1:30 in the morning on April 20, 1989, the body of a female jogger (later discovered to be Trisha Meili) was
found off a running trail in the northern part of Central Park, New York City
– She had been struck repeatedly on the head (skull fractured)
– Dragged through the woods
– Wrists bound to head
– Lost a lot of fluid
– Body temperature was extremely low
– “virtually dead”

• She was taken to Metropolitan

Hospital and was not expected to
survive
• She would be in a coma for 12 days
 Rewind:
• On April 19, 1989, a large group of teens (more than 30 boys) entered Central Park, around 8:50pm
– All of the five entered around 110th street and Madison, either after hanging out elsewhere with friends, or running into
the large group at the street corner
– They didn’t all know each other
• The group was “wilding”
– “horseplay” –Wise
– Threw rocks at cars
– Harassed cyclists
– Beat up a homeless man
• The police show, and all the boys start running
• Richardson, Santana, and McCray all get picked up
by police and taken to the precinct
• They sit for a long time
• They’re about to be released when a detective with
Meili, realizing the scope of her injuries, calls the
precinct and tells them to wait

• Wise and Salaam get brought in at 10am on

Thursday, April 20th
Sentences: • McCray, Salaam, and Santana were all found guilty on
seven counts, including the rape and assault of Meili
and assaults of two men in the park that night
• Richardson found guilty on eight counts, including the
rape and attempted murder of Meili
• Wise was found guilty on three counts, including the
sexual abuse (but not rape) of Meili

• McCray, Salaam, Santana, and Richardson were all

given 5-10 years, which is the maximum sentence for a
juvenile
• Wise was tried as an adult and given 5-15 years
How Did This Happen?
 Situational Causes:
• New York Was Under-
Policed At the Time
 Situational Causes:
• Crime Was Rising
• In 1984, crack hit New York, leading to
increased crime and teenagers with “NYC in the late 1980s,
was a completely
cash and guns schizophrenic, divided
• There had recently been a new boom city” –Jim Dwyer, New
of economic activity, but the poor York Times
were still poor, leading to an
extremely divided city
 The People Involved:
• Developmental Problems
• Korey Wise was hard of hearing, and had
essentially stopped trying to fix it
• He also had some undiagnosed
developmental problems
• Kevin Richardson’s mother was also
developmentally disabled, and the police
took advantage of that
 The People Involved:
• Race
“If this had happened
in 1901, they would
• White female victim, black and Hispanic
have been lynched.
male suspects Perhaps castrated.
• There had been another major rape at And their bodies
the time, a woman who had been raped burned. And that
would have been the
then thrown off a roof in Brooklyn,
end of it.”
which received little to no media
coverage because all parties involved
were black.
 Investigation Process
• the case was moved to the Manhattan
North homicide department
• Meili was thought to not survive
• The Manhattan North homicide
department was a prestigious
department that had a really good
record
 Investigation Process “Central Park was holy.”
–Mayor Koch

• It hit the news HARD

• People were demanding justice for the jogger
• Media frenzy
“I think that if she were a young
woman who had been found in an
alley in Bedford-Stuyvesant, if she
had been found in Harlem, if she
had been found in any of the
darker enclaves in this city—or in
this state, Donald Trump wouldn’t
have spoken. He wouldn’t even
have whispered a word.” –Michael
Warren, later Richardson’s lawyer
 Investigation Process
• The publicity led to extreme pressure
for the police, and thus, an
accelerated timeline
• The arrests were announced on Friday, April 21st
 Investigation Process
• And once they were arrested, the
narrative of their guilt was
unquestioned
• Mayor Koch, in an interview: “…alleged perpetrators—
we always have to say alleged because that’s the
requirement.”
“Inmates vow to make prison
a living hell for accused
rapists”- Wall Street Journal
Interrogations: • Detectives got in their face
• The boys got no food, water, or sleep and it went on for
hours
• McCray’s dad.
• They all just wanted to go home
• Were willing to implicate others to go home
• They all thought they were going to be witnesses, they
didn’t realize they were confessing themselves
• “He just fed it to me, ‘what did he do? What did Antron
McCray do?’ I couldn’t tell you who they were, who they
looked like, if he woulda gave me 100 names, I woulda
put 100 people at the crime scene” –Ray Santana

“They’re trying to make this story climb some sort

of ladder of facts” –Jim Dwyer, New York Times
Interrogations: • Salaam gets told that his fingerprints were
found on the victim’s pants
• Confessions
– Written first
– Then all except Salaam are videotaped
– They get asked leading questions
• 3:40am when they finish Wise’s confession
• Once they were let out of police custody, they
categorically denied having done it
– Again and again they deny it

“These boys were in custody and in varying

degrees of interrogation for a range of 14-30
hours” –Saul Kassin, social psychologist
 Investigation Process
• Tunnel Vision
• DNA does not match
• Inaccuracies in the confessions
• The trail (where she was dragged off the path) is only 18 inches wide
• Ignored any evidence that pointed to anyone else
Matias Reyes

• There had been a serial rapist terrorizing the Upper

East Side that summer
– He was caught on August 5, 1989

• Two days before the Jogger attack, there had been

another attack on a woman in North Central Park
• A detective figured out it was Reyes and it was ignored
 Investigation Process
• Tunnel Vision
• DNA does not match
• Inaccuracies in the confessions
• The trail (where she was dragged off the path) is only 18 inches wide
• Ignored any evidence that pointed to anyone else
• Ignored the timeline
Police’s Theoretical Timeline
Police’s Theoretical Timeline
The Proven Timeline
Trial Process: August and October, 1990
• Ineffective Counsel
• Some of the lawyers fell
asleep during the trial
• Salaam’s lawyer was a
friend of his mother and
was a divorce lawyer
 Trial Process
• Jury
• Jury deliberated for 10 days
• A juror in the documentary, Gold, was seen by the others for being
the reason for such a long deliberation
• “I had to fight with my fellow jurors to consider the
discrepancies between the 3 statements. But it didn’t matter to
them. If they confessed, they confessed, and that’s that.”
 Trial Process
• Prosecution appealing to emotion,
rather than facts
• They put Meili on the stand
• Courtroom sketch of Santana, Salaam, and McCray
 Prison Time,
Exonerations,
& The Aftermath
Prison Time: • Richardson, McCray, Salaam, and Santana all served
around 7 years in prison
• They worked on getting readjusted to life outside
– Had to register as sex offenders
– Had trouble getting jobs
– Faced all the usual problems of life after incarceration
• Wise languished in prison
– (would ultimately serve 13 years)
Exonerations • In late 2001, after running into Wise in prison, and
feeling guilty, Matias Reyes comes forward and admits
to the crime
• The DA’s office starts an re-examination of the case
– DNA matches Reyes
– Reyes can immediately describe details of the case that
the boys weren’t even able to
– This crime was consistent with his others
• December 19, 2002 their convictions were vacated

“Not only would the evidence have likely led to a different verdict,
they wouldn’t have indicted the boys at all.”

Jim Dywer, New York Times, repeating what DA Morgenthau had

said to him at the time of the reexamination.
 Aftermath: • In 2014, the city settled a civil case for $41 million total
for the five men (about $1 million for each year in
prison)
• But the justice system was found to have no
wrongdoing
• Many, including Meili, Linda Fairstein (one of the
prosecutors), and now-President Donald Trump, still
believe in their guilt.

• Renowned director Ava DuVernay has directed a

miniseries about the case that will be released on
Netflix on May 31st
“The police department found that the police department had done nothing wrong,
even though it had let the right man get away and apparently had put the wrong
people in prison” –Jim Dwyer, New York Times
 “I felt ashamed, actually, for New York, and I also felt extremely
angry, because their innocence never got the attention their guilt
did. The furor around prosecuting them still drowns out the good
news of their innocence. These were five kids who were
tormented, we falsely accused, we pilloried in the press, we
attacked, we invented phrases for the imagined crimes that we’re
accusing them of. And then we put them in jail. We falsely
convicted them. And when the evidence turned out that they were
innocent, and they were released, we gave a modest nod to
fairness, and we walked away from our crime.”
Craig Steven Wilder, historian