The Central Park Five is a documentary movie about the former mayor Edward I. Koch called “the crime of the century” in New York City. It conducts unhindered interviews and provides invaluable video footage. It provides a great watching experience to learn about sociology, journalism and public administration, etc.
It is produced, written and directed by award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns in collaboration with his daughter Sarah and her husband David McMahon. Directors of photography are Buddy Squires and Anthony Savini.
It’s a simple story but with unresolved legal issues and it brings up a discussion about justice. On April 20th 1989, Trisha Meili, a Wall Street banker who graduated from Yale Law School, was raped when she was jogging in Central Park after 9pm.
She was sent to the hospital while the policemen questioned thirty Harlem teenagers with dark skin, and five of them were convicted. Their names are: Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam.
The movie brings us the truth that the sentence was wrong due to the imperfection of police investigation, media at that time, and the jury system. The five have already served sentences of almost 7 to 13 years when they were exonerated after the real murderer Matias Reyes was identified by DNA evidence test.
It’s a history of inter-cultural social issues. There are several bird’s-eye views showing the city of crimes and riots. The movie explores what New York City looked like in the 1980s, when Harlem had lots of illegal immigrants and most of them didn’t have education. The Central Park rape went on front page and drew lots of attention, as an inter-cultural violence.
It’s a story of media development in late 20th century. New York Times wrote the movie review, “As the filmmakers accurately depict, the teenagers were soon demonized and dehumanized, accused of being members of a “wolf pack” that went “wilding” like animals. To judge from the documentary you might think that it was mostly the agenda-driven tabloids that lobbed these descriptions.” There were professional skeptics writing in left-leaning publications immediately accepted that the Latino teenagers were guilty and believed the police, with whom these same skeptics had often been politically at odds.
It brings doubts to the jury system in the United States. From the beginning, the policemen randomly brought 30 Harlem teenagers to the police station. After that, they talked to five kids and showed impatience to them. The policemen cheated the teenagers by telling them they could go home once they confessed the “truth”, or signed a confession, which was made up by the policemen. The kids were terrified by the legal process and got very tired from the constant investigation. They wanted to get things down and went back home so they followed whatever the policemen told them to do.
It is human nature that those poorly educated teenagers didn’t understand the legal responsibility they were going to take after they confessed. They naively thought they could leave if they “helped” the policemen to finish their investigating work. The kids didn’t ask for a lawyer and they showed fear in the videotaped confession. All these processes indicated a threat to the freedom and fairness of the legal system.
“It was important to us that each human being that was in it have their humanity, something that was completely robbed … race has been a huge part of other films that we’ve done and its an important aspect of this story as well,” said Ken Burns in an interview. “It’s a difficult story, a painful story, and it’s still going on. It was a 13-year tragedy.”
It’s a sad story seeing these middle aged men sharing experience from their youth of being put on trial to the public. Nobody cared about what they went through in this town, not even their parents or community when they were teenagers. Their lives were taken away when they were young, and they continued their lives on the tracks that led them nowhere.
Korey Wise speaks poor English with a strong accent. He is very emotional and his videotaped confession was the best footage showing how a confused and afraid young person reacted to the legal process under pressure and insecurity. Kevin Richardson is the most sentimental one. He weeps and he looks confused towards life.
Raymond Santana seems very positive and very talkative. He jokes sometimes in the interview about the transcription that the policeman wrote for his confession and wonders “how a teenager could understand rape and write in that way?” Something interesting that he got in prison again as a rapist later on. He seems not angry but not hopeful at all. I know he must endure lots of hardships but he doesn’t explain how he went on another rape.
As Andrew O’Hehir (Salon) comments, “the documentary illustrates a way we respond to powerful narratives about race, sex and gender, even when they turn out not to make sense.” The case represented a massive failure of law enforcement, journalism and public imagination, and it led to the last major wrongful-conviction case of the 20th century.
