I tried to watch the Netflix series the other night, but it was too painful to see these kids rounded up, interrogated and forced into confessions of the rape of a young white woman jogging through Central Park at night. The boys had supposedly been "wilding," in which they joined a throng of other black teens from the Upper West Side and drifted through the top end of the park, roughing up a couple of bicyclists and some school teacher who ended up in the hospital with head wounds. They were no where near the proximity of the rape victim, but that didn't stop a prosecutor determined to find suspects to fit the crime. The police obliged by extorting confessions out of five boys, all but one under 16, who at worst were simply part of the gang of kids. Nothing suggested they took part in any of the assaults, much less the rape that left the young white woman clinging to her life in a hospital.
The story is well known as the boys were eventually cleared of the crime, but not until after they spent 8 to 13 years in jail. Literally, having their youth stolen from them. At the time of the crime, 1989, the news spread like wildfire with just about every white person across the country assuming these kids' guilt. Not Joan Didion, who wrote a lengthy essay for the New York Review of Books back in 1991 on her thoughts of the case, offering sympathy to both the rape victim and those found guilty of the crime. The evidence didn't add up.
Donald Trump infamously took out a full page ad in the New York Times demanding the "Central Park Five," as these boys became known, be given the death penalty. He was so proud of this ad that he had a copy framed and a picture of him taken with it. He was one to never miss an opportunity to promote himself.
This brutal crime and others led to New York being pictured as a lawless city, like that so often depicted in movies. It resulted in Rudy Giuliani being elected Mayor in 1993, after a narrow defeat to David Dinkins in 1989. Mayor Rudy was going to bring law and order to the city, clamping down on crime by giving police free reign, regardless of the consequences. Giuliani was true to his word, bringing down the crime rate and for a brief while was the nation's favorite mayor. However, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and forced to drop out of the 2000 New York Senate race against Hillary Clinton. He finished up his term of office in December, 2001, shortly after the horrendous bombing of the World Trade Center, garnering himself much sympathy.
The NYPD has long been regarded as one of the most brutal police forces in the country. Not much changed under Giuliani other than they could now act with even greater impunity under the guise under the protection of the Supreme Court, which had granted police across the country qualified immunity. This was based on an obscure legal doctrine that has let them get off the hook for many brutal beatings, including the deadly beating of Eric Garner in 2014 over a pack of contraband cigarettes.
Interestingly enough, this was the same year the Central Park Five won a landmark lawsuit against the City of New York for $41 million in damages after their charges had been vacated in 2002, on account of someone else admitting to the vicious rape of Trisha Meili. DNA evidence proved conclusively that the boys had nothing to do with the crime. This went pretty much under the radar as America was embroiled in its wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, following the 2001 terrorist attack. Here again, neither the police nor the prosecutor were held accountable for these wrongful arrests and convictions. The city was forced to carry the burden of the legal fees and fines associated with their actions.
The Netflix series covers much of this territory but leaves a lot of holes. Understandably, Ava DuVernay takes the POV of the boys and their parents. After all, this is the first time their stories have ever really been heard. Admittedly, she makes them look much more tender aged than they do in their mug shots, but then those are usually not the most flattering pictures.
Not surprisingly, conservative critics have taken exception to her depiction of events as she makes the police look like ruffians and the prosecutor a nasty bitch determined to pin the crime on the boys despite the lack of any physical evidence, much less a logical explanation for the vast discrepancies in time and distance between events. All she has are their conflicting testimonies, loosely tied together by Korey Wise's statement. He was the oldest of the boys at age 16 and subsequently tried as an adult.
Ms. DuVernay not only highlighted the lives of these boys before and after their wrongful conviction, but amply illustrated a justice system that is slanted against minorities. The opening sequence where these boys are rounded up by police as part of a dragnet where virtually any black kid under 18 is considered a suspect just makes your blood boil. Imagine cops going into an affluent white neighborhood and doing the same thing. That's right they wouldn't. Parents wouldn't stand for it and rightly so. Black parents didn't stand for it either but their objections were discounted, and in at least one case the father was threatened by having his criminal record exposed if he didn't talk his son into confessing to the crime and naming other names.
How the police and prosecutor arrived at five persons is anyone's guess, especially since these kids didn't know each other very well. Names got tossed around and eventually the cops settled on this magic number, figuring that's how many young teens it would take to hold the female victim down and rape her.
The biggest question to me has always been Trisha Meili, who came out of her coma within a week of the horrific rape and beating, but apparently had no memory of what had happened. She just assumed these five kids were her attackers and felt a great measure of relief when they were found guilty as charged. Even after it became clear in 2002 that they were not responsible for her rape, she still held them accountable for other crimes committed in that park that night. She was appalled by the settlement in 2014 that made them all millionaires, as she held to her view that they went to the park to beat up people that evening if not her.
One can well imagine the trauma she went through that night and the physical and emotional pain she endured afterward, but why she has chosen not to admit these boys were falsely accused and convicted of this horrific crime is beyond me? She like others seemed to think if they weren't guilty of one crime then they were guilty of another, treating these kids as part of a herd of wild beasts.
As for the prosecutor Linda Farstein, who headed the district attorney sex crimes division in 1989, she remains unrepentant, believing she did her job based on the amount of information available to her at the time, and that she was poorly portrayed by Felicity Huffman in the mini-series. A fine irony given Huffman herself has since gotten into a college admissions scandal of her own.
The police stand behind their methods, as they always do. The television series shows them being pressured into forcing confessions from these kids by Ms. Farstein, who was convinced that the perpetrators came from this "wolfpack." She was shocked that the police were about to dismiss the boys to family court for their wild night in Central Park. So, they opt for various forms of extortion tactics to get five confessions out of the kids that all but ruin their lives.
It seems only Elizabeth Lederer offered some contrition by stepping down from her job at the Columbia Law School in the aftermath of the mini-series, not before. She formally led the case against the five boys.
I doubt this movie will alter many minds, but events since then have called attention to the dubious methods of the police across the country, which are protected by the US Supreme Court. The Minneapolis city council has since unanimously voted to disband its police department in the wake of George Floyd killing, but will have to wait for the results of a statewide referendum as to whether they can carry out this action. Other cities are considering the same option as they believe their police departments to be inherently corrupt and systematically racist in their approach.
Of course, this will become a national referendum in the general election, as local police unions are working hard to convince Americans that police must retain qualified immunity. For their part, the Supreme Court has refused to listen to cases brought to them against it. So what if a few kids are falsely accused or if a cop strangles a man to death in front of cameras. This is the price you pay to maintain law and order in these "urban jungles."
Comments
Post a Comment