The Central Park Five (DVD REVIEW)
The Central
Park Five
DVD Review
by Kam Williams
Heartbreaking Documentary Revisits Shameful Rush to Judgment
Around 9 PM on April
19, 1989, a 28 year-old, female jogger was brutally beaten, sexually assaulted
and left for dead in a wooded area of Central Park
located off the beaten path. Because she was an investment banker with an Ivy
League pedigree, the NYPD felt the pressure to apprehend the perpetrators of
the heinous crime ASAP.
Within
hours, cops had extracted confessions from Anton McCray, Kevin Richardson,
Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam and Raymond Santana, Jr., teenagers who had been
denied their right to an attorney. Although none of the five had ever been
arrested before, they were all convicted of rape and attempted murder on the strength of
those incriminating admissions alone.
Part of the explanation for the
legal lynching was that the victim was a wealthy white woman
while the accused were poor black kids from Harlem.
The press was all too willing to exploit the hot button issues of color and
class, and the media sensationalized the case’s lurid details, coining the term
“wilding” to describe the alleged behavior of the defendants.
Real estate
magnate Donald Trump even took out full-page ads in every New York City daily newspaper, calling for
the death penalty and saying that the boys “should be executed for their
crimes.” In the face of the vigilante-like demand for vengeance, no one seemed
concerned that the suspects’ DNA failed to match the only semen found at the
scene.
Sadly, they
were only exonerated in 2002 after having completely served sentences ranging
from 6 to 13 years when Matias Reyes, a serial rapist whose DNA was a match,
confessed to the crime because of his guilty conscience. This gross miscarriage
of justice is recounted in The Central Park Five, a riveting
documentary co-directed by the father-daughter team of Ken and Sarah Burns,
along with her husband, David McMahon.
The film
features reams of archival footage, including videotapes of the framed
quintet’s coerced confessions. Mixed in are present-day reflections by them,
their lawyers, and relatives, as well as by politicians, prosecutors and other
pivotal players.
A
heartbreaking expose’ about a rush to judgment which ruined five, innocent
young lives.
Excellent
(4 stars)
Unrated
Running time: 119
minutes
Distributor: PBS/Sundance
Selects
DVD Extras: A New
York Wilding; an interview with the filmmakers; a behind-the-scenes featurette;
The Making of featurette; and an update on the five defendants.
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