Sarah Burns’ book The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding, is one of the best books on a wrongful-conviction case in recent years. The documentary she is now producing with her father, Ken Burns, promises to be equally compelling.
The book and film focus on the wrongful conviction of five black and Latino teenagers in 1990 for the particularly vicious assault and rape of a white woman while jogging through New York’s famed Central Park on the evening of April 20, 1989.
The case set off a media frenzy in the crime-plagued city that soon spread across the United States after police announced that the five youths had confessed that they had committed the rape as one of a series of random assaults they and other teens committed in the park that night, a process they supposedly called “wilding.”
Burns adeptly dissects this case the skill of a surgeon. She shows how police jumped to conclusions and then manipulated and intimidated the five boys into highly inconsistent confessions that were greatly at odds with the facts. In the process, Burns shows how the police ignored the similarities between the rape of Continue reading →
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Recap of big wrongful convictions conference yesterday in NYC
