As an African-American law student and critic of the criminal-justice system, I was not surprised to hear that five black and Latino men convicted of raping and beating a female jogger in Central Park, N.Y., in 1989 were railroaded.
Recently, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau announced that he would seek the reversal of the convictions of the five men, who have spent the past seven and a half to 13 1/2 years in prison for a rape that prosecutors now say they did not commit. At the time of their arrest, the "Central Park Five" ranged in age from 14 to 16 years. The case was flawed from the beginning, and it exposes the corruption and racism of the American criminal-justice system.
First, Morgenthau's report reveals that, contrary to a longstanding claim that the woman was gang-raped, DNA and other evidence suggest that the woman was brutally beaten and raped by one man, Matias Reyes, a serial rapist and murderer who confessed last January to being the man who sexually assaulted the jogger.
Second, the district attorney's report also undermined the physical evidence the prosecution used to falsely convict the men. Specifically, strands of hair found on some of the youths, which the prosecution claimed belonged to the victim, do not match her DNA. And third, the report said that the uncorroborated videotaped confessions of the five men -- full of discrepancies and errors -- had "serious weaknesses."
Attorneys for the men have charged that the police used trickery and coercion to extract the confessions. Coerced confessions are more common than you may think. According to the Innocence Project, an organization that handles wrongful conviction cases, at least 27 overturned guilty verdicts in the past decade involved false confessions. "These young men all spent years of their lives in prison because police made a predetermination about their guilt," said defense attorney Eric Seiff.
Thirteen years ago, many people believed the five teens committed the crime. The defendants were characterized as animals, and newspapers such as the New York Post ran headlines titled "Wilding Thugs" and "The Wolfpack's Prey," while Time magazine featured a story entitled "The Rotting of the Big Apple." Even Donald Trump took out full-page ads calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York to tame "these roving bands of wild criminals." Sadly, the Central Park Five were victims of white racial paranoia.
Throughout history, society has bought into the myth of the super-predator black male that threatens white society, particularly white women. In the Jim Crow South, gangs of white men often lynched black men amid rumors that a black man had assaulted a white woman. Despite claims that justice is blind, racism finds it way into the courtroom. "When a prosecutor or judge appeals to fears of African-American violence directed against whites, elaborate and detailed myths about African Americans are ushered into the conscious and unconscious minds of courtroom participants," said the late federal judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. in his book "Shades of Freedom."
Although many will still claim that the U.S. justice system is the best in the world, this recent overturning is more proof that something is inherently wrong with the system. In the American legal system, opposing sides compete to win the hearts and minds of the judge and jury. Prosecutors are rewarded based on the number of people they place behind bars. Too often, they care little about the integrity of the evidence used to convict criminal defendants, and more about seeking higher political office by showing they are "tough on crime."
Meanwhile, in countries such as France, prosecutors are civil servants. They are members of the judiciary with life tenure, free of political pressure and independent of the police. They are not promoted for their number of convictions, and they are often praised for clearing an innocent defendant's name.
Meanwhile, as attorneys for the Central Park Five consider seeking redress for their clients' suffering, Linda Fairstein, a key prosecutor in the Central Park case, expressed her displeasure. "The big outrage here is that clearly there's a financial opportunity for the five young men and their lawyers," she said. "To me, it would be the greatest injustice if taxpayer money would be used to reward them at the end of this investigation." The greatest injustice? Prosecutors took years of freedom away from these citizens. A little remorse, at the very least, is in order.
David A. Love is president of the Black Law Students Association at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. This column was produced for the Progressive Media Project, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by the Tribune News Service.