“It was for everybody, not just me, the crime of the century,” declares former New York mayor Ed Koch in The Central Park Five. The crime Koch refers to was the brutal rape of Trisha Meili, a young, white investment banker jogging through Central Park in April 1989, but the movie, which opens Friday at Music Box, alleges another sort of crime, one that’s extended well past the century. Five teenagers—four black, one Hispanic—were convicted of the rape and served five to seven years in prison, but in 2002 a convicted serial rapist named Matias Reyes came forward and confessed and DNA evidence confirmed his story, exonerating all five men. A $50 million civil rights suit brought by the men against the City of New York has been dragging on for nearly a decade, and in fact the city recently subpoenaed notes and outtakes from The Central Park Five to defend itself.
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Ken Burns never had this sort of problem with General Grant. The admired director of The Civil War, Baseball, and Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio steps outside his sepia-toned comfort zone with the new documentary, collaborating with his daughter, Sarah Burns, and her husband, producer David McMahon, to adapt her 2011 book on the Central Park jogger case. One can sense Ken’s hand in the movie’s cultural sweep, as talking-head commentary and fleet montages of TV news footage bring back the crack-fueled crime epidemic of the late 80s, the white hysteria stoked by the jogger case, and the tabloid press’s portrayal of the accused teens as subhuman predators. In a sense, though, the filmmakers’ explanations for why the injustice occurred may not be as illuminating as their investigation of how it occurred—how the police managed to convince themselves that the five kids were guilty and then grind confessions out of them.
By telling each kid that another had implicated him, the detectives turned the five into a circular firing squad. Santana remembers Hartigan, who was playing good cop to Arroyo and Gonzalez, persuading him to implicate Richardson, and Richardson got the same treatment. “He just fed it to me,” Santana says of the detective interrogating him. “He gave me the names, I put ’em in. . . . If he woulda gave me a hundred names, I woulda put a hundred people at the crime scene.” Except for Yusef Salaam, the kids all made written statements, and the fimmakers provide extensive clips of their videotaped confessions, which all but sealed their fate in court. On video, Korey Wise is shown a photo of a bloodied Meili by district attorney Elizabeth Lederer and declares that Richardson beat her in the face with a rock. Questioned all these years later, Wise confesses he invented the story in order to go home: “I was 16, and I felt like I was about 12.”
Directed by Sarah Burns, David McMahon, and Ken Burns
