5 Exonerated in Central Park Jogger Case Will Settle Suit for $40 Million
Source: NYT
The five men whose convictions in the brutal 1989 beating and rape of a female jogger in Central Park were later overturned have agreed to a settlement of about $40 million from New York City to resolve a bitterly fought civil rights lawsuit over their arrests and imprisonment for a sensational crime they did not commit.
The agreement, reached between the citys Law Department and the five plaintiffs, would bring to an end an extraordinary legal battle over a crime that came to symbolize a sense of lawlessness in New York, amid reports of wilding youths and a marauding wolf pack that set its sights on a 28-year-old investment banker who ran in the park many evenings after work.
The confidential deal, disclosed by a person who is not a party in the lawsuit but was told about the proposed settlement, must still be approved by the city comptroller and then by a federal judge.
The initial story of the crime, as told by the police and prosecutors, was that a band of young people, part of a larger gang that rampaged through Central Park, had mercilessly beaten and sexually assaulted the jogger. The story quickly exploded into the public psyche, fanned by politicians and sensational news reports that served to inflame racial tensions.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/20/nyregion/5-exonerated-in-central-park-jogger-case-will-settle-suit-for-40-million.html
Alex P Notkeaton
(309 posts)The city got off easy!
Fred Sanders
(23,946 posts)the rules of evidence admissibility exist?
alcibiades_mystery
(36,437 posts)And his verbal confession was not as damning as the others.
But yes, of course you're right, and the your point holds 100 fold.
BeyondGeography
(39,278 posts)New York City was no better than the Jim Crow South in this case. Like George Stinney being executed at age 14 in South Carolina in 1944 just for being black in the vicinity of a crime committed by someone else. I hope this provides some measure of comfort.
alcibiades_mystery
(36,437 posts)BeyondGeography
(39,278 posts)Get some bogus confessions and those screaming Post headlines and the nightly TV news would do the rest. Wilding! What a nightmare for those kids and their families.
alcibiades_mystery
(36,437 posts)We would get into no good shit, sometimes in big packs of kids, 40, 50, just roaming. That's the way the City was back then (I was in Queens) - you came with crew or you were a victim, period. So you mobbed up. But the CP Jogger rape was odd for me, even at the time. The robberies, sure. Stick up kids is out to tax. The jumpings? Shit, that was a dime a dozen. That was any given day taking the bus home from high school. But a gang rape? I was always like, REALLY? I'll never forget, a good friend of mine who has since passed called bullshit at the time. At the time! He was like, nope. We were all flabbergasted: they confessed, my dude! Shit is signed and sealed! He was like, "Nope. I ain't buying." He must have been one of the only people in the City to call bullshit back then. They were convicted on Day 1 of the Daily News trial.
BeyondGeography
(39,278 posts)The machinery all lined up; police, DA, media. It's powerful and a big part of you can't believe the whole power structure of the city would screw 15-year-old kids over for life with a big fat lie. I was working in midtown and living two blocks away from Metropolitan Hospital where the jogger was taken after the attack and the coverage was more intense than anything I've ever seen except 9/11.
My friends and I gave their guilt no thought, although we did see through the hysteria of "wilding." We were all living in cheaper, fringe areas at the time, we often went to that area of the park and none of us ever saw large groups of kids seriously mess with white people; they were mostly interested in each other. We should have put two and two together right there. I had a really sick feeling watching that PBS documentary. The city will pay the money and the people who destroyed these kids and their families will sail on. Not only that, they'll probably still think they did the right thing in their warped minds.
tenderfoot
(8,424 posts)The hysteria was ridiculous and I remember it well.
The "wilding" incident isn't the only thing the media botched. This was around the same time the Kuwaiti girl testified in front of congress claiming that babies were being pulled from incubators and tossed to the floor by Saddam Hussein's invading army.
Delphinus
(11,808 posts)I just read the article - an entirely different man - and only ONE - was the guilty person. Oh my goodness - how in the world could this have happened. I am stupefied.
BumRushDaShow
(127,295 posts)blame-the-black and attack-the-black. "Willie Horton" (MA), "Central Park Jogger" (NYC), "Charles Stuart" (Boston) "Yusef Hawkins" (NYC), "Rodney King" (L.A.), and on and on.... blowing up the big cities as the racist media targeted and skewered thousands and thousands of young black men and women while blaming the whole black community for the ills of Raygunomics.
It's been 25 years since the OP's case and 25 years ago, Spike Lee artistically depicted the era as it was coming to a head, in an Academy award nominated film (which I saw in the theater when it came out) -
rocktivity
(44,555 posts)Last edited Thu Oct 6, 2022, 01:47 AM - Edit history (6)
...found DNA and other evidence that the woman had been raped and beaten not by the five teenagers but by another man, Matias Reyes, a convicted rapist and murderer who had confessed to acting alone in the attack..."They found the DNA of only ONE person, and it didn't match any of the suspects? I realize that DNA technology wasn't as sophisticated back then, but surely it was possible to notice whether or not there was more than one specimen!
Even the very term "wilding" turned out to be crock -- due to a reporter overhearing something that happened to match a rap song.
Well, presuming that the lawyers get a third, the five will get about $5M each -- hope they spend it wisely.
rocktivity