Last year, I wanted to write a “year in reading” review for my new blog. I never got around to it and, since I had only started blogging a few months earlier, I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to review anyway. Now that I’ve got a whole year under my belt, I thought I’d take the time out this final week of 2011 to look back on the books that impressed me, made me think, or didn’t have any impression on me at all (there were quite a few like that).
Sizing up the last twelve months is a pasttime at the end of year. It’s a way for people to review all their triumphs and failures, things done and things left to be done. Reading has been that way for me as well. There were plenty of books I wanted to read but didn’t for any number of reasons. But I’ve not only had a chance to read some pretty great books, I’ve also had the pleasure to review them for this blog and for other sites as well. This post will address the books that I enjoyed and would highly recommend.
Fiction
I’ve read plenty of fiction books in the last year that were great to good to middling. The ones that stayed with me, sunk their teeth into my marrow and left their mark, have made this past reading year such a revelation. The book that lingers in my thoughts is Tayari Jones’s Silver Sparrow. Jones’ third novel creates an indelible collection of characters whose very heartbeats continue to thump subtly in my head. Told from the perspectives of two half-sisters whose father’s act of bigamy creates a tenuous but tense thread between them, Silver Sparrow addresses the compromises people make in the name of love with an uncompromising glare. What impressed me most about Ms. Jones’s story was how she refused to rely on any of the cliches or cheap stereotypes that such a story would provoke. These are not characters we are meant to despise or put in a simplistic box, but rather to embrace and understand even with their brittle flaws.
What You See in the Dark, by Manuel Muñoz is another great entry in the fiction category. This quiet, slower burner should read like genre fiction, a plunge into the shadowy back alleys of San Bernardino and Hollywood, a noirish take on reality and fantasy. Instead it is a quiet meditative look at dreams unfulfilled. What You See In the Dark, a tale of love, murder, and the cinema, continues to linger and have its sway over me. I had the real pleasure of interviewing author Muñoz for Creosote Journal, which was certainly a highlight of my blogging year.
While I gave Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel a mixed review, I admire her willingness to push the envelope in terms of novel structure and form. Less a novel than a series of interlocking tales, she uses various forms from short story to play to court transcriptions, comic strip panels, and others to bring to life a little known era in Asian American political history. But more than that, I Hotel is the story of California and of America. Whatever flaws the novel might have, they are more than made up for its tenacity.
The Barbarian Nurseries by Hector Tobar is a fascinating look at Los Angeles as seen through the eyes of the fierce and uncompromising Araceli N. Ramirez, a housekeeper who is thrown headlong into the marital drama of her employers. Anyone who is from Los Angeles will recognize this love poem to that sprawling, diverse, and always-evolving city.
Nonfiction
There are a few books of nonfiction that have had an impact on me this year. Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People is one such example. Aside from giving the rundown on how the definition of whiteness began in antiquities and continues to this day, what I remember and enjoy most about Painter’s work is that she is a born storyteller. Her ability to bring to life what could have been dry facts and research into fascinating stories about the history of Europe and America as seen through a racialized prism is superlative and thoroughly engaging.
Manning Marable’s long-awaited biography on the intriguing Malcolm X is another work of nonfiction that made waves this year. A Life of Reinvention: Malcolm X uncovered a lot of ground that The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley could not. What emerges is a man of complexity, a work in political and social progress, but someone far more human and flawed than previous hagiographies. Marable, who passed away this year just as his tome was being published, had an engaging but unobtrusive writing style that allowed his subject to burn defiantly through the work itself.
Journalist Isabel Wilkerson covers the scope of 20th Century African American history through her retelling of the Great Migration, a period of social revolt as African Americans migrated out of the south between World War I and the 1970s to seek better opportunities in the north and west. The Warmth of Other Suns focuses on three individuals---Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster---who left their homes and families in the deep south and sought economic opportunities and social freedom in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. As personal and intimate a historical account as you'll ever read, Gladney, Starling, and Pershing Foster, by the end of the book, will have become like good, old friends.
Like Irvin Painter, Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD is also a born storyteller as revealed in his 2011 Pulitzer prizewinning account of the biography of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies. Considering that the 571 page book uncovers a lot of historical as well as medical and scientific ground, this skill proves quite adept at helping laypersons such as myself to understand the often complicated and very complex web that makes up cancerous genes and the medicine developed to combat them. The Emperor of All Maladies was eye opening. Months after I read it, I still recollect it whenever I chance upon an article about cancer or cancer research.
The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of A Wilding didn’t get the kind of fanfare that the previous nonfiction works had when they were published, and that is a disservice not only to the author Sarah Burns but most importantly to the subject itself, which, over twenty years later, deserves a historical review. Covering the story of the four young black and hispanic men who were unjustifiably charged and sentenced for the rape of a central park jogger in the late 1980s, Burns, like a good investigative journalist, covers all the grounds which led to the conviction and reveals how citizens of a city mired in racial politics and animosities willingly believed the men were guilty despite a shred of evidence linking them to the victim. The book’s ending, a bittersweet one with the eventual release and exoneration of the now grown men, continues to haunt. Will this happen again? Burns asks. Considering that the NYPD is now currently under investigation for its racial profiling practices, the answer should give everyone pause.
Francisco Goldman’s tender memoir Say Her Name is like a sad song---it stays with you long after the last refrain. Haunting, elegiac, and beautiful, Goldman’s momento mori to his late wife, Aura Estrada, is like the memorial to her that he kept in his New York apartment: full of tiny, intimate details of the life they shared. While there were moments I questioned the appropriateness of Goldman's revelations, I was thoroughly touched and saddened by his loss, as though I knew these people and their grief was my own. Very few works of art touch me this way, and Say Her Name is but one.
Showing posts with label sarah burns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sarah burns. Show all posts
Monday, December 26, 2011
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of A City Wilding by Sarah Burns: A Review
The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of A City Wilding by Sarah Burns. New York: Aflfred A. Knopf. 2011. 240 pp. $25.95
In 1989, Trisha Meili, an employee at Salomon Brothers in Manhattan, went out for a late night jog through Central Park. In another area of the park, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Jr., along with a loose-knit group of African American and Hispanic youths, were harassing bicyclists and joggers near a reservoir, activities that the media would later misappropriately refer to as “wilding.” Meili and the youths never crossed paths that night and yet their fates became inextricably tied together by an appalling act that would change their lives completely. In the weeks and months following that night, Meili would be dubbed by the local tabloids as “The Central Park Jogger,” the victim of a horrific rape and beating that fanned the flames in an already racially divided city. The young men were collectively referred to as “The Central Park Five,” who were charged and convicted for Meili’s attack. In 2002, DNA testing conclusively ruled out these young men as Meili’s attackers, but in 1989-1990, with DNA testing still in its infancy, their convictions rested solely on confessions that were coerced by overzealous Sex Crimes and homicide detectives and a prosecution’s office which had decided their guilt long before an investigation into the attacks even began. Sarah Burns’ The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of A City Wilding, cuts to the heart of what led to the convictions and how a city, already overburdened with crime, violence, and racism, and led by an exploitative and opportunistic news media, engaged in a modern day lynching.
The slender but thorough book chronicles the events which led up to Meili’s attacks and the arrest and conviction of the five young men. Burns centers these events within the larger scope of New York during the 1980s---the crime and violence, largely located within the city’s econonomically deprived areas, whose prevalence was exploited by the local news media that helped further cement an image of a city spinning out of control. Though Burns makes the point that crime and violence was limited among the poor, she also reveals how a sensationalistic press helped establish in the minds of many white New Yorkers that crime was far more egregious than it actually was and linked the most horrific examples with the face of black males. Racial violence and police brutality had also added an extra layer of explosive tension in the city. The racially motivated murders of Michael Griffith and Willie Turk, both of whom were attacked by a mob of white youths after wandering into the Italian enclaves of Gravesend and Howard Beach; the police-related deaths of Eleanor Bumpurs, a sixty-six year old Bronx resident who was shot twice by riot police after lunging at them with a kitchen knife; and Michael Stewart, a graffiti artist who mysteriously slipped into a coma and died while in custody; and the media cause célèbre Bernhard Goetz, who shot five black youths after they approached him for money were all indicative of a society that was disintegrating into a morass of rage and racial violence. This willingness to believe black men were guilty of crimes highlights Burns’ contention that “the media only amplified that the city’s most at-risk population was the source of all crime, that black and Latinos, especially male teenagers, were criminals---murderers, thieves, rapists, and arsonists.” By the time of Meili’s attack, racial biases and a blindside on the part of detectives and prosecutors in their failure to admit the flaws in their case made it all but certain that the Central Park Five would be charged with the attack, even with little to no evidence linking them to Meili.
Their arrests on that fateful night were merely coincidental since many were picked up for attacking and robbing male joggers and tandem bicyclists whose main route ran along the park reservoir. After Meili was found, badly beaten and near death, in another area of the park, investigators immediately zeroed in on the young men who had been arrested that night and were being held at the Central Park precinct. What happened next was incredulous. The lack of blood on the young men’s clothing, the inconsistent timeline of the attacks, and, most importantly, the confessions detectives coerced from them, which were so wildly inconsistent with each other and with even the most basic facts available---such as the clothing Meili was wearing that night and the actual vicinity of her attack---should have alerted the most seasoned investigators. Instead, the lack of evidence itself became evidence. Investigators, as Burns points out, had already decided on their guilt before evidence could even be collected. Detectives in the homicide (Meili’s condition was so bad that the doctors treating her didn’t think she’d survive the night) and Sex Crimes units were brought onto the case. Seasoned investigators take it as a given that once they think a potential suspect has been caught lying during an interview that the suspect is the “guilty party,” then move toward a tactic that employs “minimalization” and “maximalization” techniques, which is a technical way of describing the good cop/bad cop routine. Most criminal investigations often rest solely on confessions, therefore the reputations of “good police” is dependent on their ability to get confessions. However Burns reveals this is more myth than actuality. In fact, as she writes, that while detectives think “they are experts at separting truth from lies, [but] studies have shown that this is a false confidence.” Once an investigator thinks you’re guilty, all the denials, even the lack of evidence, most likely won’t sway him.
Individuals who have not had much experience with law enforcement or understand their rights as citizens will often be the most vulnerable to coercion. This is doubly so if the defendants are teens, which was the case for the Central Park Five. Out of the five who were eventually charged with the rape, Korey Wise was sixteen, old enough according to state law to be interrogated without an adult guardian (Wise was also mentally underdeveloped and had a hearing problem). However, adult guardians were hardly protective barriers for these young men, since many were as equally disadvantaged. The mother of Raymond Santana, Jr., whose family came from Puerto Rico, had a language barrier to overcome, a fact which his investigators exploited, while others had to come and go during the long duration of the interview due to work and other obligations or suffered from illness. The young men, who would later complain of being bullied and harassed by their investigators, eventually confessed to either being at the scene of the rape or accused the other teens of the actual crime, in exchange for being let go. Though investigators denied during the trial that they physically bullied the defendents or gave the young men the impression that they’d be let go if they confessed (which would have thrown the confessions and thus the case out of court if such an offer was explicitly stated), neither they nor the prosecutors could substantiate why it took hours to eke confessions from them since, as they claimed, the young men volunteered that information almost immediately. Burns explains both the interrogation techniques used by detectives and the tricks, just this side of legal, that they used to convince suspects to waive their Miranda rights with enough probing detail that it is hard to see how these teens could have stood a chance under the onslaught of skilled manipulation.
The book gets even more incredulous when the prosecution’s office, run under Linda Fairstein in the Sex Crimes unit, takes over. Elizabeth Lederer, the ADA who prosecuted, certainly gets the award for the most dogged prosecutor, especially since there were a number of times when red flag warnings were raised regarding the validity of the case. For instance, the confessions of the young men were so wildly inconsistent that Lederer had to plan her witness statements not only so some of the young men could avoid incriminating themselves on the witness stand but so that the inconsistencies wouldn’t be so blatantly obvious. And when the FBI lab conclusively ruled out the semen found on Meili’s sock did not belong to any of the charged, she still forged onward, claiming the lack of evidence was due to the fact that all five men simply did not ejaculate. Burns nails the prosecutor’s behavior: “Despite a prosecutor’s obligation to seek justice, it seems that at that moment, winning the case trumped investigating the evidence. The incriminating statements by these five teenagers were so convincing to the detectives and prosecutors that no one felt the need to question their conclusions, which had been so easy to jump to in the hours and days after the rape.” Their unwillingness to notice the cracks in their theory led them to overlook a far more obvious suspect, Matias Reyes, a serial rapist whose crime spree “took place near where Trisha Meili had been attacked, and who used strikingly similar methods.” Reyes, as it turns out, was Meili’s attacker, but this would not be known until twelve years later, when Reyes finally confessed to his involvement in that crime. By then, Reyes was already serving life for two other rapes and the murder of a young pregnant mother (there were many other attacks for which he was not convicted). Burns final conclusion on the behavior of the prosecutors and investigators is obvious: had they done their job thoroughly, Reyes might well have been caught and young lives spared from his reign of terror.
Racism, class, and fears of crime and violence certainly plagued the case from the start, but the media deserves as much of a drubbing for poisining the well. In this area Burns does not disappoint. She points out the precise language used by many of the newsprint engines to gin up the outrage. From the start, the local press and broadcast media painted the Central Park Five in terms that left no question as to their guilt, removing such journalistically, time-honored terms like “alleged” to describe the defendants’ roles in the crime. Burns correctly reveals how much of this language harkens back to a time when black men were routinely lynched for allegedly raping or having sexual relations with white women, reducing them to animalistic terms that denied their humanity. Words like “wilding” (a misused teen slang “for acting crazy” but in less than violent terms), “wild thing,” and “wolfpack” were routinely used in reference to the rape and beating. The teens themselves were described as “’bestial,’ ‘savage,’ ‘brutal,’ ‘bloodthirsty,’ ‘evil,’ and ‘mutant.’” Even the venerable New York Times, which had largely eschewed such language in its reporting, led with an editorial headline that read: “The Jogger and the Wolf Pack,” notably without the quotations marks around the most damning word. The media created an environment in which getting the facts was next to impossible. Once the trial commenced, both the press and the public were ginned for frontier justice, including arguing for a return of the death penalty in New York, nevermind the fact that the Supreme Court in the 1979 Coker v. Georgia decision, ruled that, in cases of rape, the death penalty was unconstitutional. Yet, as Burns also rightly points out, “[T]he tradition of death as a punishment for rape has historically been reserved for a particular affront: the rape of a white woman by a black man.”
Defenders of the Central Park Five do not come off any better in Burns’ account. While many within the black community supported the five defendants, their behavior within and outside the courtroom hurt the cause more than it helped. Supporters routinely harassed and heckled ADA Lederer as she left the courtroom and, in one case, the mother of one of the defendants had an outburst in court which led to her permanent banishment throughout the duration of the rest of the trial. The Amsterdam News, a member of the local black press, was less interested in the investigating the case, which would have yielded important evidence that could have exonerated the young men, and was more determined to make political points about racism and the lack of services provided to poor young men of color. Their main argument was that the violent attacks supposedly committed by these young men was the direct result of the city’s neglect toward the poor. While there is truth in such an argument, it had little bearing on the Central Park Jogger rape, since none of the teens charged had actually committed the crime and, more or less, came from rather stable homes. Unfortunately, the teens’ legal counsel were either incapable or had their own political agendas or personal ambitions to adequately defend their clients. Far too many mistakes were made and little effort was done until the last moment to poke serious holes in the prosecution’s case. Sadly, Santana, Jr., Wise, McCray, Richardson, and Salaam were convicted and wound up serving their full terms before they were fully exonerated in 2002.
The Central Park Five is a gripping cautionary tale of justice gone wrong. And while the story ends on an upbeat note for the people involved, from the former defendants to the victim, Burns does not allow for any hope that this nightmarish account is all in the past. The lessons it tells disturbingly go unlearned. As she writes, “Though New York and the country have changed---in many ways for the better---since 1989, who is to say that a rush to judgment like this one could not happen again?” The rush to believe the atrocities supposedly committed by poor blacks in the Louisiana Superdome during Hurricane Katrina by politicians and the media alike suggests that these pernicious attitudes have not gone away. The Central Park Five is an important work that quietly sets the record straight. One can only hope that this time its lessons will finally be heeded, but one cannot help but think that in far less public cases such rushes to judgment are occurring every day.
In 1989, Trisha Meili, an employee at Salomon Brothers in Manhattan, went out for a late night jog through Central Park. In another area of the park, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Jr., along with a loose-knit group of African American and Hispanic youths, were harassing bicyclists and joggers near a reservoir, activities that the media would later misappropriately refer to as “wilding.” Meili and the youths never crossed paths that night and yet their fates became inextricably tied together by an appalling act that would change their lives completely. In the weeks and months following that night, Meili would be dubbed by the local tabloids as “The Central Park Jogger,” the victim of a horrific rape and beating that fanned the flames in an already racially divided city. The young men were collectively referred to as “The Central Park Five,” who were charged and convicted for Meili’s attack. In 2002, DNA testing conclusively ruled out these young men as Meili’s attackers, but in 1989-1990, with DNA testing still in its infancy, their convictions rested solely on confessions that were coerced by overzealous Sex Crimes and homicide detectives and a prosecution’s office which had decided their guilt long before an investigation into the attacks even began. Sarah Burns’ The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of A City Wilding, cuts to the heart of what led to the convictions and how a city, already overburdened with crime, violence, and racism, and led by an exploitative and opportunistic news media, engaged in a modern day lynching.
The slender but thorough book chronicles the events which led up to Meili’s attacks and the arrest and conviction of the five young men. Burns centers these events within the larger scope of New York during the 1980s---the crime and violence, largely located within the city’s econonomically deprived areas, whose prevalence was exploited by the local news media that helped further cement an image of a city spinning out of control. Though Burns makes the point that crime and violence was limited among the poor, she also reveals how a sensationalistic press helped establish in the minds of many white New Yorkers that crime was far more egregious than it actually was and linked the most horrific examples with the face of black males. Racial violence and police brutality had also added an extra layer of explosive tension in the city. The racially motivated murders of Michael Griffith and Willie Turk, both of whom were attacked by a mob of white youths after wandering into the Italian enclaves of Gravesend and Howard Beach; the police-related deaths of Eleanor Bumpurs, a sixty-six year old Bronx resident who was shot twice by riot police after lunging at them with a kitchen knife; and Michael Stewart, a graffiti artist who mysteriously slipped into a coma and died while in custody; and the media cause célèbre Bernhard Goetz, who shot five black youths after they approached him for money were all indicative of a society that was disintegrating into a morass of rage and racial violence. This willingness to believe black men were guilty of crimes highlights Burns’ contention that “the media only amplified that the city’s most at-risk population was the source of all crime, that black and Latinos, especially male teenagers, were criminals---murderers, thieves, rapists, and arsonists.” By the time of Meili’s attack, racial biases and a blindside on the part of detectives and prosecutors in their failure to admit the flaws in their case made it all but certain that the Central Park Five would be charged with the attack, even with little to no evidence linking them to Meili.
Their arrests on that fateful night were merely coincidental since many were picked up for attacking and robbing male joggers and tandem bicyclists whose main route ran along the park reservoir. After Meili was found, badly beaten and near death, in another area of the park, investigators immediately zeroed in on the young men who had been arrested that night and were being held at the Central Park precinct. What happened next was incredulous. The lack of blood on the young men’s clothing, the inconsistent timeline of the attacks, and, most importantly, the confessions detectives coerced from them, which were so wildly inconsistent with each other and with even the most basic facts available---such as the clothing Meili was wearing that night and the actual vicinity of her attack---should have alerted the most seasoned investigators. Instead, the lack of evidence itself became evidence. Investigators, as Burns points out, had already decided on their guilt before evidence could even be collected. Detectives in the homicide (Meili’s condition was so bad that the doctors treating her didn’t think she’d survive the night) and Sex Crimes units were brought onto the case. Seasoned investigators take it as a given that once they think a potential suspect has been caught lying during an interview that the suspect is the “guilty party,” then move toward a tactic that employs “minimalization” and “maximalization” techniques, which is a technical way of describing the good cop/bad cop routine. Most criminal investigations often rest solely on confessions, therefore the reputations of “good police” is dependent on their ability to get confessions. However Burns reveals this is more myth than actuality. In fact, as she writes, that while detectives think “they are experts at separting truth from lies, [but] studies have shown that this is a false confidence.” Once an investigator thinks you’re guilty, all the denials, even the lack of evidence, most likely won’t sway him.
Individuals who have not had much experience with law enforcement or understand their rights as citizens will often be the most vulnerable to coercion. This is doubly so if the defendants are teens, which was the case for the Central Park Five. Out of the five who were eventually charged with the rape, Korey Wise was sixteen, old enough according to state law to be interrogated without an adult guardian (Wise was also mentally underdeveloped and had a hearing problem). However, adult guardians were hardly protective barriers for these young men, since many were as equally disadvantaged. The mother of Raymond Santana, Jr., whose family came from Puerto Rico, had a language barrier to overcome, a fact which his investigators exploited, while others had to come and go during the long duration of the interview due to work and other obligations or suffered from illness. The young men, who would later complain of being bullied and harassed by their investigators, eventually confessed to either being at the scene of the rape or accused the other teens of the actual crime, in exchange for being let go. Though investigators denied during the trial that they physically bullied the defendents or gave the young men the impression that they’d be let go if they confessed (which would have thrown the confessions and thus the case out of court if such an offer was explicitly stated), neither they nor the prosecutors could substantiate why it took hours to eke confessions from them since, as they claimed, the young men volunteered that information almost immediately. Burns explains both the interrogation techniques used by detectives and the tricks, just this side of legal, that they used to convince suspects to waive their Miranda rights with enough probing detail that it is hard to see how these teens could have stood a chance under the onslaught of skilled manipulation.
The book gets even more incredulous when the prosecution’s office, run under Linda Fairstein in the Sex Crimes unit, takes over. Elizabeth Lederer, the ADA who prosecuted, certainly gets the award for the most dogged prosecutor, especially since there were a number of times when red flag warnings were raised regarding the validity of the case. For instance, the confessions of the young men were so wildly inconsistent that Lederer had to plan her witness statements not only so some of the young men could avoid incriminating themselves on the witness stand but so that the inconsistencies wouldn’t be so blatantly obvious. And when the FBI lab conclusively ruled out the semen found on Meili’s sock did not belong to any of the charged, she still forged onward, claiming the lack of evidence was due to the fact that all five men simply did not ejaculate. Burns nails the prosecutor’s behavior: “Despite a prosecutor’s obligation to seek justice, it seems that at that moment, winning the case trumped investigating the evidence. The incriminating statements by these five teenagers were so convincing to the detectives and prosecutors that no one felt the need to question their conclusions, which had been so easy to jump to in the hours and days after the rape.” Their unwillingness to notice the cracks in their theory led them to overlook a far more obvious suspect, Matias Reyes, a serial rapist whose crime spree “took place near where Trisha Meili had been attacked, and who used strikingly similar methods.” Reyes, as it turns out, was Meili’s attacker, but this would not be known until twelve years later, when Reyes finally confessed to his involvement in that crime. By then, Reyes was already serving life for two other rapes and the murder of a young pregnant mother (there were many other attacks for which he was not convicted). Burns final conclusion on the behavior of the prosecutors and investigators is obvious: had they done their job thoroughly, Reyes might well have been caught and young lives spared from his reign of terror.
Racism, class, and fears of crime and violence certainly plagued the case from the start, but the media deserves as much of a drubbing for poisining the well. In this area Burns does not disappoint. She points out the precise language used by many of the newsprint engines to gin up the outrage. From the start, the local press and broadcast media painted the Central Park Five in terms that left no question as to their guilt, removing such journalistically, time-honored terms like “alleged” to describe the defendants’ roles in the crime. Burns correctly reveals how much of this language harkens back to a time when black men were routinely lynched for allegedly raping or having sexual relations with white women, reducing them to animalistic terms that denied their humanity. Words like “wilding” (a misused teen slang “for acting crazy” but in less than violent terms), “wild thing,” and “wolfpack” were routinely used in reference to the rape and beating. The teens themselves were described as “’bestial,’ ‘savage,’ ‘brutal,’ ‘bloodthirsty,’ ‘evil,’ and ‘mutant.’” Even the venerable New York Times, which had largely eschewed such language in its reporting, led with an editorial headline that read: “The Jogger and the Wolf Pack,” notably without the quotations marks around the most damning word. The media created an environment in which getting the facts was next to impossible. Once the trial commenced, both the press and the public were ginned for frontier justice, including arguing for a return of the death penalty in New York, nevermind the fact that the Supreme Court in the 1979 Coker v. Georgia decision, ruled that, in cases of rape, the death penalty was unconstitutional. Yet, as Burns also rightly points out, “[T]he tradition of death as a punishment for rape has historically been reserved for a particular affront: the rape of a white woman by a black man.”
Defenders of the Central Park Five do not come off any better in Burns’ account. While many within the black community supported the five defendants, their behavior within and outside the courtroom hurt the cause more than it helped. Supporters routinely harassed and heckled ADA Lederer as she left the courtroom and, in one case, the mother of one of the defendants had an outburst in court which led to her permanent banishment throughout the duration of the rest of the trial. The Amsterdam News, a member of the local black press, was less interested in the investigating the case, which would have yielded important evidence that could have exonerated the young men, and was more determined to make political points about racism and the lack of services provided to poor young men of color. Their main argument was that the violent attacks supposedly committed by these young men was the direct result of the city’s neglect toward the poor. While there is truth in such an argument, it had little bearing on the Central Park Jogger rape, since none of the teens charged had actually committed the crime and, more or less, came from rather stable homes. Unfortunately, the teens’ legal counsel were either incapable or had their own political agendas or personal ambitions to adequately defend their clients. Far too many mistakes were made and little effort was done until the last moment to poke serious holes in the prosecution’s case. Sadly, Santana, Jr., Wise, McCray, Richardson, and Salaam were convicted and wound up serving their full terms before they were fully exonerated in 2002.
The Central Park Five is a gripping cautionary tale of justice gone wrong. And while the story ends on an upbeat note for the people involved, from the former defendants to the victim, Burns does not allow for any hope that this nightmarish account is all in the past. The lessons it tells disturbingly go unlearned. As she writes, “Though New York and the country have changed---in many ways for the better---since 1989, who is to say that a rush to judgment like this one could not happen again?” The rush to believe the atrocities supposedly committed by poor blacks in the Louisiana Superdome during Hurricane Katrina by politicians and the media alike suggests that these pernicious attitudes have not gone away. The Central Park Five is an important work that quietly sets the record straight. One can only hope that this time its lessons will finally be heeded, but one cannot help but think that in far less public cases such rushes to judgment are occurring every day.
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