After George Zimmerman's recent acquittal, watching a documentary like The Central Park Five several days felt particularly relevant. Not because the cases are exceptional. If anything, the death of Trayvon Martin and the imprisonment of the innocent central park five are endemic to my country's dysfunctional attitudes to its racial minorities. These represent some of the severest possible iterations of racism encoded within American institutions. During the concluding minutes, one of the talking heads says that, just because these men were eventually declared innocent, that doesn't mean that we should wrap a pretty bow around this story. There's absolutely nothing pretty about it; Entire families were traumatized, five teenagers lost out on their childhood, and the man who harmed the victim went free to beat and kill other women. And with the phenomenon of the school to prison pipeline, one can't watch this documentary secure in the knowledge that this is relic of the bad old days. We're still living in the bad old days, and effective documentaries like The Central Park Five bear witness to that fact.
Back in 1989, a comatose female jogger was found raped, beaten, and left for dead in Central Park, in New York City. At the time, several young, black teenagers were in jail for being in the company of other teenagers committing crimes in the park. As news of the jogger's condition spread, police were under pressure to find the culprit(s) responsible. The central park five speak about being interrogated for hours; young teens deprived of contact with their families, food, and sleep. Eventually, far too tired to function, they confessed to the crime. At some point the police had locked onto these children in their custody and never quite let up on their intent to pin the crime on them. Even though they had to coach them to say the right things. Even though all their false confessions to the crime differed from one another (all of them pinned the rape on someone else.) Even though one young man visibly flinches at the sigh of the beaten up jogger. Even though their DNA was never found at the scene of the crime.
In the end, the shocking thing isn't that they were found guilty. It's far more surprising that this case even went to trial at all.
This documentary is quite skilled at sketching in the intimate stories of these men, as well as the overal socio-political forces at work in New York City at the time. During the 80s, the city was in the middle of a rising wave of crime. People kept to their enclaves- divided based on race and class, of course- and people were angry. The victim in this case was white, but she was also an upper class banker; a fact which is repeated ad naseuam in the footage of news reports at the time. Meanwhile other rapes and murders did not get nearly the kind of attention at the time. A number of factors- spoken and unspoken- combined to create a perfect storm of controversy.
Therefore, this was not just a trial. It was a message, a showpiece, a warning. This was a war enacted on the psyches and lives of five vulnerable young men. One of the most heartbreaking moments is when one of the central park five says he was just coming into his own and figuring out who he was before he went to jail. Another says he was told to go to the police station for questioning, but he'd be back home. He then says "and I came back seven years later."
While their names were eventually cleared, their exoneration did not inspire the same media storm as their trials and convictions. And that's why documentaries like this are so important. Every time the innocent are convicted, there's an important story there. Aberrations of justice speak to flaws in the system, and inequalities in the institutions allegedly designed to protect us.
The reason these young men lost out on their childhood is because of the choices individuals made. From the police who locked onto them, to the prosecutors who used this case to jump-start their careers. And, of course, there was a jury. One of them speaks on camera, about being one of the few jury members to doubt the guilt of the defendents. He eventually caved to voting them guilty.
His reason? It had been days of deliberation and he was tired.
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