The Central Park 5 case has been a textbook case for the one thing that has consistently and horribly disfigured America’s criminal justice system — the stain of wrongful convictions. These five men have the happy and tragic distinction of being the most celebrated wrongfully convicted prisoners released from prison, but in the decade since their exoneration and release, hundreds of other prisoners with much less fanfare and public attention have been released.
Blacks make up a disproportionate percent of prisoners exonerated and released. The reason for that is simple. They make up a disproportionate number of those arrested and charged with crimes they didn’t commit. Studies have shown that the two crimes that blacks are most likely to be falsely nailed for are murder and sexual assault. With sexual assault, almost always, the victim is a white woman. But this is only part of the story.
The Central Park 5’s nightmarish tale after their 1989 arrest for the rape of a white female jogger in Central Park is woefully familiar to others wrongfully accused. The accused face marathon police grillings, threats and intimidation, a coerced confession, slipshod legal representation, a fast-track trial, conviction, and then they are either dumped in a cell for life or receive the death penalty. In many cases, the press piles on with a deluge of lurid stories about the crime, and dredges up shop-worn racial crime, violence, drugs and dysfunctional home stereotypes about the alleged black perpetrators.
The Central Park 5 got the royal sensationalist treatment, with story after story and headline after headline screaming about young black guys on a terror rampage against whites, especially white women. This was more than enough to get a future presidential candidate to jump on the “fry them in the chair” bandwagon, complete with full-page ads demanding the death penalty. Even when a bogus frameup is exposed, it’s the rarest of rare cases where the media and prosecutors will admit that they got it dead wrong and publicly admit they were wrong.
But what about compensation for their years behind bars? The photo-ops of wrongfully convicted prisoners smiling with their relatives, announcing multi-million-dollar awards such as that received by the Central Park 5, are the rarest of exceptions. Most of the exonerated may not get a nickel for the decades of suffering they endured. It’s a situation many states have done absolutely nothing to correct.
Their only recourse is to file suit. And with that they face towering hurdles. One is the shield of sovereign immunity that states use to protect themselves from lawsuits. A state would have to waive that immunity to allow a suit. Then, the falsely accused has to demonstrate his actual innocence. This means providing smoking-gun proof that a district attorney rigged evidence with the intent to frame him. This almost never happens. Most wrongful convictions are obtained through alleged voluntary confessions, a verdict by an impartial judge or jury, eyewitness mistakes and inadvertent misstatements of fact.
DAs chalk up wrongful convictions to a trail of unintentional errors. In other words, the wrongful conviction and jailing is a moral wrong and injustice, but it is not a legally recognizable injury. They rarely admit they prosecuted an innocent man, and even when they approve a release after near ironclad evidence of wrongful conviction, they rarely offer any apology. This is partly to preserve the fiction of DA and criminal justice system infallibility, and partly not to open the floodgate to a hefty payout.
The exonerated must file a claim and wait a lengthy period for it to be processed. If there’s the slightest legal hitch in the circumstances of the conviction and release, the state may not pay.
The legal wrangling can drag on for months or even years. That’s exactly what happened in the case of the Central Park 5. The city played hardball with their claims for compensation. It took a new mayor willing to break the logjam and settle the case to finally resolve that part of it. Still, there were loud shouts from some quarters — including Donald Trump — that the five men should not have gotten a nickel and were probably guilty.
Money, of course, cannot substitute for the torment of being wrongfully jailed. It can’t restore careers, jobs lost nor the huge sums spent on legal fees to prove innocence. It can’t repair the wreck of families shattered. It can’t make up for the years that the children of those falsely accused grew up without their fathers. And it certainly can’t wipe away the scarlet letter of incarceration that’s imprinted even on the falsely accused. The Central Park 5 case is horrific proof of that.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst.
