'It's as if we were born guilty': the Central Park Five

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• published: 14 Dec 2012
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Raymond Santana emerged from an eight-year stint in prison as a man in pieces. Part of him remained the scrawny 14-year-old he was when he went in, convicted of a particularly brutal rape that he didn't commit. The rest of him was something he barely recognized. His social skills and youth had been wasted in the lockstep of prison life: years of violence behind bars had frayed his nerves; some family and friends had long since abandoned him; he'd never attended a school dance, worked an afterschool job or filled out a college application. "You try to live a normal life," Santana, now 38, told MSNBC.com last week. "But some of the things you've gone through never go away. But I had to stop caring about the labels people put on me. " The labels stuck on him by so many—including Donald Trump, a ravenous New York City media, and millions of New Yorkers—included animal, monster, and rapist. Santana is one-fifth of The Central Park Five, a group of Harlem youths wrongly accused and convicted of the 1989 rape and beating of a white jogger in Central Park. The youngest of the group were 14, the oldest 16. The victim,Trisha Meili, was 28 and an investment banker at Salomon Brothers. Their story came to exemplify so much of what was wrong with crack-era justice in New York City during the 1980s, with apparently uncrossable lines between races and classes, with shoddy police work and with politicians and a media quick to use racial stereotypes to stoke fear in a polarized public. Thirteen years after the teens' convictions and long after each had served lengthy prison sentences, their convictions were vacated after a serial rapist and murderer confessed to the crime. The exoneration offered little solace for many of the teens, who say they lost so much more than they can ever regain. A new documentary, "The Central Park Five," by award-winning documentarian Ken Burns and his daughter Sarah Burns, reveals just how botched—and relentless—the investigation against the five teens was, and how overwhelmingly most segments of New York turned against the young men. But it also offers a chance for the boys, now men, to finally shed the past. "For so long we didn't have a voice," Santana said. "But this documentary is giving us our voice back." WOLFPACK The Central Park Jogger case became one of the most high-profile and racially charged cases in modern city history. Tabloid newspapers screamed "Nightmare in Central Park" and "Wolfpacks Prey"; many of the sensational headlines likened the minority youth to beasts. Donald Trump took out full-page ads in four New York newspapers, including The New York Times, appealing for the reinstatement of the death penalty. "I want to hate these muggers and murderers," Mr. Trump wrote in the 600-word ad. "They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes." Mayor Ed Koch called them animals who had committed "the crime of the century." If ever there was a public lynching in Manhattan, these five—Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam and Kharey Wise—were certainly strange fruit. "The system put a mark on us," said Salaam, a father of five daughters and a step-son. He now works in information tech. "You're not the same as everyone else. And nobody ever asked who we were. As black and brown people, it's as if we were born guilty." "Their exoneration came 10 years ago this month. And now an important new documentary is bringing new light to this ugly chapter in New York's history," the Rev. Al Sharpton said during a special segment on the case airing Thursday night on PoliticsNation at 6pm. All but McCray, who after leaving prison moved out of state and changed his name, joined Sharpton for Thursday's program. Sharpton was an early supporter of the group and helped to raise thousands of dollars in bail money for them. "It was such an important story on so many levels. For the first part, nobody knows what happened to these guys. I mean, we still talk to people every day who say, oh yes, that wilding case. They don't know that the convictions were vacated, they don't know that they really did not do it, that it wasn't just some kind of technicality," Sarah Burns said on the show.