The danger of knowing one thing about the Central Park Five

How Ava DuVernay's When They See Us gets beyond guilty or innocent

Central Park Five suspects.
(Image credit: Illustrated | AP Photo/David Burns, File)

If you know one thing about the "Central Park Five" — and most people know precisely one thing — it's that Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Korey Wise, and Raymond Santana were either innocent or they were guilty. In 1989, then-Mayor Ed Koch predicted that "everybody here — maybe across the nation — will look at this case to see how the justice system works," and this prediction has largely come true: on the left, it has demonstrated that the criminal justice is racist and broken; on the right, it demonstrated that the criminal justice system is lenient and soft (and broken).

On the one hand, the "fact" of their guilt in the violent rape of Patricia Meili was firmly established in the year and a half leading up to their trial, in 1990, when they were being widely described and pathologized as a "wolf-pack," marauding across the park (and reported to have confessed to their crimes); when they were convicted, an unskeptical news consumer could be forgiven for assuming that the matter had been settled.

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Aaron Bady

Aaron Bady is a founding editor at Popula. He was an editor at The New Inquiry and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, Pacific Standard, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in Oakland, California.