Clarence Davis/The Daily News, via Getty Images
The Central Park Five Yusef Salaam, center, was a defendant in the case examined by this documentary.
The documentary “The Central Park Five” revisits two New York nightmares. The first and most famous was the rape and beating of a 28-year-old white woman who, very early on April 20, 1989, was found in Central Park bound, gagged, nearly naked and nearly dead, her head crushed and shirt soaked in her blood. For years she was known only as the Central Park jogger, and her assailants were widely thought to be the five black and Latino teenagers, 14 to 16, who were arrested in the attack. The directors Ken Burns, David McMahon and Sarah Burns argue that the convictions, and the years the defendants served for the crime they were later absolved of, were a second, racially motivated crime.
The Daily News, via Getty Images
Kharey Wise, right, with his lawyer Colin Moore during his trial for a rape in Central Park in 1989.
IFC Films/Sundance Selects
Antron McCray and his mother, Linda McCray, outside court on July 17, 1990.
It is a crime that remains fresh in memory partly because it was so notorious, even though what looked like its final chapter was written a decade ago. In 2002 a New York State Supreme Court judge, Charles J. Tejada, after being presented with a confession and DNA evidence from a murderer and serial rapist, Matias Reyes, overturned the convictions of the men who became known as the Central Park Five. Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam had already served sentences of almost 7 to 13 years for the assault when they were exonerated. Their records were wiped clean, and they were also presumably liberated from the public stain of what the mayor at the time, Edward I. Koch, has called “the crime of the century.”
Like other documentaries that revisit injustices “The Central Park Five” positions itself as something of a public pardon. Equal measures criminal investigation, cultural exhumation and a consideration of race in a presumptively postracial America, it seeks to set the record straight. Measured in tone and outraged in its argument, it is an emotionally stirring, at times crushingly depressing cinematic call to witness. It’s also frustrating because while it re-examines the assault on the jogger and painstakingly walks you through what happened to the teenagers — from their arrest through their absolution — it fails to add anything substantively new. If you followed the news, the story will be familiar; if you lived in New York in 1989, it may also feel incomplete.
When the story broke, it was horrifying. The jogger, Trisha Meili (at the time, most of the news media didn’t identity her), had entered the park on April 19 at around 9 p.m. About 15 minutes later she was attacked. When she was found, the assumption was that she would die; instead she was comatose for several weeks. (When she woke, she had no memory of the attack.) As Ms. Burns writes in “The Central Park Five,” her 2011 book, the five teenagers had also been in the park that night, with a gang of about 30 kids who went after eight people, some violently. Each of the five said that he hadn’t participated in the rampage, and yet, after they were arrested for attacking Ms. Meili, most confessed to assaulting her. The confessions sealed their downfall.
Using broad strokes the filmmakers try to piece together why the teenagers confessed so readily and why everyone seemed eager to convict them. To that end the film sketches the New York of the 1980s as a battlefield, plagued by crime and reeling from the decimating shocks of a bad economy, AIDS, crack and racial explosions. Combatants, innocents and smaller battlegrounds flash by (Howard Beach, Crown Heights, Bernhard H. Goetz) like the rapidly turned pages of a history book. The five teenagers were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were also the wrong color and the right suspects; the jogger was the perfect color and the right victim. The teenagers might have been up to “mischief,” as one of the movie’s interviewees blandly puts it, but they were effectively sacrificed on the altar of public opinion.
That’s true, yet the movie would be a lot stronger if it included everything that was in play back in 1989. Because the one thing that it fails to do persuasively is explain why so many people in New York, including African-Americans and professional skeptics writing in left-leaning publications like The Village Voice, almost immediately accepted that the teenagers were guilty and believed the police, with whom these same skeptics had often been often politically at odds. 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.
Yet, in a special section on the April assault that was published by The Voice a few weeks later, one of the best articles, by Wayne Barrett, included the word “pack” in a headline. But Mr. Barrett emphasized what the police had or had not done the night of April 19, not what the teenagers might have done. In that same issue The Voice printed an investigation by Barry Michael Cooper that quoted residents of a housing complex across from Schomburg Plaza who identified several of the accused teenagers as belonging to a group of sometimes violent neighborhood troublemakers. Some of the accusations involved the usual kid stuff, like making noise, but there were also brutal attacks. A lengthy New York magazine cover article several months later also detailed violence.
Maybe the filmmakers thought that this history might muddy the waters and cast suspicion on the teenagers all over again. The problem is that by ignoring it — as well as gliding rather too fast over the gang attacks on the other people in Central Park on April 19 — it seems as if there were something here that needs to be hidden. In 1989 if you read about the jogger case, you probably read about both these earlier park assaults and the ones around Schomburg Plaza. You knew that the unfolding story and New York were more complex than any tabloid headline. You knew life was shaped by race (as it always is), but also by class and by sex. And you also knew that the fears that gripped so many were not necessarily hysterical but grounded in lived, sometimes terrifying experience. That does not justify what happened, but it is part of why it happened.
The legal evidence that the five did not attack the jogger is, as laid out in the movie, overwhelming, solid and seemingly incontrovertible. It was also overwhelming, solid and seemingly incontrovertible in 2002, when the convictions were voided. According to news accounts it took Judge Tejada about five minutes to make his ruling. The police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, disputed that Mr. Reyes acted alone; unsurprisingly the police and prosecutors don’t appear in the movie. The next year the men once known as the Central Park wolf pack filed a lawsuit against New York, and the prosecutors and police who aided in the men’s conviction when they were teenagers. The lawsuit, as the filmmakers remind us in the movie’s final stretch, remains unresolved. The city in turn is trying to subpoena outtakes from the documentary to defend itself.
The Central Park Five
Opens on Friday in Manhattan.
Produced, written and directed by Ken Burns, David McMahon and Sarah Burns; directors of photography, Buddy Squires and Anthony Savini; edited by Michael Levine; music by Doug Wamble; released by Sundance Selects. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. This film is not rated.
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