NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio vowed that upon his election he would settle the case for claims related to the incident in Central Park in 1989. Recall that on a summer's evening a lone female jogger was raped and beaten senseless by an attacker(s). She survived, but the press seized the incident as symbolic of NYC's decline into mayhem and crime, casting a pall over a city used to grimy streets and their grimy denizens.
Police arrested a group of teenagers who were found in the park at the time, ages 13-16 years old. Four were Black and one Hispanic. The news media cried for justice as the victim lingered in hospital. The police elicited a confession from the group's members and the DA filed charges and the criminal case went forward leading to convictions and long jail sentences, despite the ages of the alleged perps.
One problem: they were not involved in that attack at all, nor were they in the vicinity. The attacker was a serial rapist named Matais Reyes, who admitted to the Central Park attack 13 years later in 2002. The teenagers convicted of the crime were released from prison after DNA evidence indicated they had no part in the attack. Mayor Michael Bloomberg did not want to admit wrongdoing by prosecutors and would not settle the case during his administration, claiming prosecutors acted in good faith. However, as lawyers discovered, the behavior of police interrogators was not only illegal on its face, but morally reprehensible in its outcome: sending the wrong people to prison for much of their young boyhoods. Is $1million per year sufficient compensation? Nobody knows the answer.
No comments:
Post a Comment