Central Park 5 – The Truth Wills Out

            Twenty-five years ago a young white woman left for a run through New York City’s Central Park. That run and the resulting brutal rape and beating she endured set in motion a chain of events that altered the lives of five young black men and their families.

            The attack on the victim quickly riveted the nation’s attention beyond its senseless viciousness. The young woman was an attractive, athletic white college graduate who was employed by a Wall Street firm. Almost, immediately after she was discovered beaten in the park the press began reporting her attackers were a roving gang of black youths preying on victims in a pack-like frenzy. Soon, the public was introduced to the word “wilding,” a term talking heads in the press created to describe such group attacks.

            New York’s Mayor and police commissioner vowed they would find the perpetrators and “bring them to justice.” Massive resources – police officers and the latest tools in criminal investigations – were employed to find the roving band. And America watched each day as reports came out about the victim: head trauma, broken bones. The horrendous details went on and on until … until justice was done.

            With great fanfare, New York’s finest announced the arrest of five African-American teenagers. The case was airtight; there was physical evidence and there were confessions.

            And it was life-imitating art, imitating life, the droning on about the racial makeup of victim and attacker.

            The five defendants – brutal, violent sociopaths, animalistic in their bloodlust – were tried and justice meted out. And the city was once again safe for pretty young white women to jog in …

            Except it was all wrong.

            In what would later turn out to be bad police work, the investigation wrongly focused on these five young men who actually had no physical connection to the attack, nor any physical evidence to even warrant any suspicion. The police used improper interview techniques and cajoled and coerced some of these five boys to give phony confessions implicating themselves and each other.

            And the poor victim who struggled to recover from the serious injuries she sustained was led to believe “these are the attackers.” These five young men, labeled rapists and sent to a New York maximum-security prison proclaimed their innocence … and no one listened.

            Two weeks ago, New York City announced a $40 million settlement with these men. The truth had come out years earlier. The truth about their innocence, the police malfeasance, it all came out and they were released and exonerated. The attacker a lone sex-predator – was in custody. His DNA matched the crime scene; his confession was airtight. There was no “wilding,” there was no “Central Park 5.” There were only five wrongly convicted men who were destroyed in the press and sent to prison.

            Forty million dollars. It sounds like a lot. But, consider that for years – even after the men were exonerated and released; even after it was admitted in court that the confessions were improperly obtained and evidence lacking – the city refused to acknowledge its mistakes. For years these men, these innocent men who had suffered through the hell of New York’s maximum security prison apparatus and who lost years from their lives, were never even given an apology.

            How much is your freedom worth? How much is your reputation, your name worth after it’s been smeared in the press? $40 million feels like thirty pieces of silver. And worse, the money these men received is more than ten times what a wrongly convicted person would receive in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The government doesn’t like admitting its missteps or adequately compensating the wrongly convicted.

            “J'accuse.” In 1894 a French military officer named Dreyfus was accused of conspiring with the hated Germans. Dreyfus was an easy target. He was Jewish and everyone in French military and political circles knew how “those Jews” couldn’t be trusted. Convicted of treason, he was sent to France’s notorious penal colony off Guyana, Devil’s Island, to pay for his crimes.

            The writer Emile Zola refused to accept the rush to judgment and the neatness of the investigation. “J'accuse” – “I accuse the authorities of betraying and convicting an innocent man.” And the truth willed out, Zola prevailed, and Dreyfus was freed from hell.

            In our rush to judge we often rely on our prejudices and our fears to direct our opinions. We forget the police, the government, are made up of fallible individuals who can be manipulated or are lazy, greedy, stupid, or just plain wrong. Perhaps that is why the great theologian Martin Luther, in response to his church’s call to recant – to accept the “political reality” of his times uttered “On the (God’s word) I stand. On this and no other.”

            The “Central Park 5” are free. Yet, like Dreyfus in 1894 innocent men and women still suffer when government rushes toward guilt. Consider that the next time our 24-hour news channels tell you the police have “broken a case.” Someday, you could be Dreyfus.