FIGHTING BACK - FIVE KIDS, THIRTY HOURS, NO LAWYERS: THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE - PART 1

0:03 Callaroga Shark Media. Good morning. I'm Garrett Fisher. Tuesday May fifth, twenty twenty six. I need to start today with some news about the show. The production team at Daily Crime and Justice has earned a vacation, every single one of them, and they are taking one, which means for the next two weeks, it's just me. No murder trials, no daily verdict watch, no sentencing updates rolling in from court reporters. Instead, I'm going to spend two weeks doing what I think this show is actually about at its core, telling the stories of people who had nothing, went up against people or systems that had everything, and refused to disappear. We're calling it fighting Back. Ten episodes, ten cases, all underdogs.

0:53 Some of them won, some of them almost won. One of them changed American law forever with a handwritten letter and a pencil. All of them deserve to have their story told properly, and that's what we're going to do. We start today with a case that's going to take two episodes to do justice too, because it is not just the story of five kids. It is the story of a city that needed someone to blame, a system that needed a win. A press Corps that needed a headline, and a real estate developer who had eighty five thousand dollars and a newspaper column, and the instinct to pour gasoline on all of it. New York City, April nineteenth, nineteen eighty nine. Let me walk you through this segment one, The Night, the City and the five New York City, nineteen eighty nine. To understand what happened to these five young men, you need to understand the city they were living in, because the city is not just backdrop here.

1:50 It is a character in the story, and it is a character that is operating at the edge of its own fear. New York in nineteen eighty nine was in the grip of a crack cocaine epidemic that had driven violent crime to historic levels. More than one nine hundred murders that year, which works out to more than five every single day. Central Park, which is supposed to be the democratic lungs of the city, the place every New Yorker can access, regardless of neighborhood or income, was widely considered dangerous after dark muggings, assaults, a pervasive sense that the park belonged to whoever was willing to take it. The city was also racially charged in a way that is hard to fully convey at this distance. White flight had hollowed out entire neighborhoods. The crack epidemic had devastated Black and Latino communities in Harlem, the South, Bronx, and Brooklyn.

2:43 The relationship between the NYPD and those communities was adversarial in a way that was both documented and largely accepted as simply how things were. Young Black and Latino men were treated as suspects by default, stopped and questioned on the street as a matter of roote policing, and that practice was not a controversy. It was policy. That is the city that Antroon McCrae, Kevin Richardson, Yusuf Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Corey Wise were growing up in, all five of them from Harlem, all between fourteen and sixteen years old, none of them with a serious criminal record, none of them old enough to vote or buy a beer. Just five teenagers from the neighborhood who made the mistake of being in the wrong park, on the wrong night, in the wrong year, in the wrong city, and who were about to encounter a system that had already decided what they were before it asked them a single question. April nineteenth, nineteen eighty nine. On the night of April nineteenth, a large group of teenagers, roughly thirty of them, entered Central Park.

3:47 Some of them that night did things they shouldn't have. There were reports of harassment and minor assaults on joggers and cyclists in other parts of the park. Separate from what would happen to Tricia Mayley, the five boys were part of this larger group. They were in the park. That is not disputed, and it matters to understand clearly they were there. What they were not there for is what the entire case turns on. Trisha Meely was twenty eight years old, an investment banker at Salomon Brothers, a Yale graduate who jogged in Central Park regularly. She entered the park at approximately nine o'clock that night, and at some point around nine point fifteen she was attacked on a dirt path near the one hundred second Street transverse, beaten, raped, and left for dead. When she was found at one point thirty in the morning, her skull was fractured, her body temperature had dropped to eighty four degrees and she had lost approximately seventy five percent of her blood. Doctors did not expect her to survive. She survived, but she was in a coma for twelve days, and when she came out of it, she had no memory of the attack or of anything that happened in that park. The trauma had erased it completely. She could not identify anyone, She could not describe anyone. She simply had no recollection, which meant the police had a case of extraordinary brutality, a city screaming for an arrest, and no eyewitness, no physical description of the attacker, nothing except seamen recovered from

5:20 the scene and from the victim, and they needed someone to charge the interrogations. Police had already brought in a number of teenagers from the park that night in connection with the other disturbances, the harassment and minor assaults in other areas, and the five boys were among them, swept up in a general dragnet. Somewhere in the process of questioning, the focus shifted. These five became the suspects in the melee attack, and what followed was one of the most consequential miscarriages of interrogation in American legal history. None of them were given a lawyer, not one of the five, all of them legally children had an attorney present during questioning.

6:00 Most were denied food and water. Yusuf Salam later wrote that they were deprived of food, drink, and sleep for more than twenty four hours. Most did not have a parent in the room during the actual interrogation, though in some cases parents were brought in later once the cameras were turned on, which tells you something about what the detectives understood about how those unrecorded hours would look if anyone ever reviewed them. The interrogations ran between fourteen and thirty hours. Fourteen to thirty hours for children between fourteen and sixteen years old alone in a room with seasoned homicide detectives. The technique used on them is well documented and well understood now, though it was considered standard practice. Then.

6:43 Detectives lied to the boys about what evidence they had, which is completely legal under American law, even when the subject is a minor. They told each boy that the others had already implicated him. They suggested that cooperating, admitting a smaller role, and pointing at someone else would be the way out rather than the way in. They used what interrogation experts call minimization, framing the act in ways that made confession feel like the rational choice, like the door to relief, like the thing a reasonable person would do to end this particular nightmare. And for a tired, frightened fourteen year old who has been in a room with adults for twenty hours with no food and no lawyer and no parent and no end in sight, it works.

7:27 The research says it works. False confessions account for roughly twenty percent of all wrongful convictions in the United States. These five boys are exactly why. One by one, four of them broke. Raymond Santana, Entron McCrae, Kevin Richardson, and Corey Wise all gave statements on videotape describing their participation in the attack on Trisha Maylee. Yusef Salam was the one who held out, the only one who did not confess, who sat through everything they threw at him and refused to say something he knew wasn't true. But here's what anyone paying close attention to those confessions could see immediately, and what the prosecution knew before they ever walked into a courtroom. The four statements were a mess. They contradicted each other on fundamental details, where the attack happened, what time it occurred, who was present, what sequence of events took place. If five people actually witnessed and participated in the same violent crime, their accounts will have substantial overlap.

8:31 These didn't. They describe fundamentally different events because they were each describing something that didn't happen, pieced together under duress from fragments of things the detectives had suggested to them. And then there was the DNA the semen recovered from Trisha Maylee and from the crime scene was tested against fourteen men, all five defendants, Mayley's former boyfriend, and others. The result was unambiguous. The semen matched none of them, not one. The only biological evidence from the crime scene excluded all five boys as the source the DNA said clearly and definitively that whoever did this, it was not them. The prosecution had this result before trial. They used the confessions anyway. After the break, the press calls them a wolf pack, a billionaire spends eighty five thousand dollars calling for their execution, and five innocent teenagers go on trial in a city that has already made up its mind.

9:39 Before a single charge was formally filed, the New York tabloids had already done the work of conviction. In nineteen eighty nine, the tabloid press in New York was operating at full power, circulation wars, headline competitions, front pages that screamed at you from every news stand in the city. The New York Post, the Daily News, the Times, all of them covered this story as though the outcome were already settled. And the word that entered the American vocabulary from this case, the one that perhaps did more damage than any single headline, was wilding. It came from a police briefing supposedly drawn from something one of the boys said during questioning, though the actual origin is disputed. It was used to describe a pack of teenagers rampaging through Central Park, randomly attacking innocent people for sport. The press ran with it, and it stuck, and what it did, what it was designed to do, whether consciously or not, was turned five specific teenagers from Harlem into a symbol of something much larger and more frightening, the sense that this city had lost control, that the parks and streets belonged to predators, that something had to be done. The boys were miners. Their names should have been protected under standard journalistic practice for juvenile suspects. Two local television stations broadcast their names anyway. Their home addresses were published, their families received death threats, and into this environment, twelve days after the attack stepped a real estate developer from Manhattan

11:12 named Donald Trump. On May first, nineteen eighty nine, before any trial, before any conviction, before any jury had heard a single word of testimony, Trump spent eighty five thousand dollars to place full page advertisements in four New York City newspapers, The Times, The Daily News, The Post, and Newsday. The headline read, bring back the death penalty, Bring back our police. The ad did not name the Central Park five explicitly, but it did not need to. Every person in New York who picked up a newspaper that day understood exactly who it was about. It called for the reinstatement of the death penalty in the specific context of the jogger attack, in the specific context of these five teenagers, who had not been tried, had not been convicted, and as we now know with absolute certainty, had not committed the crime. The ad said, I want to hate these murderers, and I always will murderers. Tricia mainly was alive, but Trump called them murderers before a jury ever convened. Usef Salam's family received death threats in the days after the ad ran. Corey Wise later said that every day they walked into that courthouse, people screamed at them and threatened them because of what Trump had done. Defense attorneys believe the ads materially affected the jury pool. That spending eighty five thousand dollars to place a famous New York billionaire's face and voice behind a call for the death penalty

12:43 of five black and Latino kids poisoned the atmosphere in which those kids would stand trial, and when the exoneration came, when DNA confirmed that someone else entirely had committed the crime, Trump did not apologize. He has never apologized. At a presidential debate in twenty twenty four, thirty five years after those ads ran, he said the five men had pled guilty and had badly heard a person killed a person. Ultimately, they never pled guilty. Tricia Mayley did not die. Every word of it was false, and he has still never apologized.

13:24 The five boys went to trial in nineteen ninety split into two separate groups by the prosecution, in a move that allowed them to control the order in which evidence was introduced and crucially prevented either jury from hearing the full picture of what the other trial had revealed. Each group was tried before a different jury without lawyers being able to cross reference what was happening in the other courtroom. The cornerstone of the prosecution's case in both trials was the videotape confessions played repeatedly for the jury four young men on camera describing their participation in the attack. The defense argued the confessions were coerced, that no physical evidence connected any of the five to the rape of Tricia Maylee, and that the only semen found at the scene belonged to an unidentified man who was not their client. The jury convicted them anyway. Jurors who agreed to speak afterwards said they were not actually convinced by the confessions themselves.

14:18 They knew the statements were contradictory and problematic. What swayed them was physical evidence. Semen, grass, dirt, and two hairs found in Kevin Richardson's clothing, described as consistent with the victim's hair. They leaned on that. What they didn't know, because the technology didn't yet exist to test it properly, was that those hairs were later subjected to advanced mitochondrial DNA analysis and found not to match Trisha Meili at all. The physical evidence the juries found most compelling was not what it appeared to be. The conviction stood regardless. When the verdicts came in. Ron McCrae, Raymond Santana, and Usep Salam were convicted of race, rape, assault, robbery, and riot.

15:02 Kevin Richardson was convicted of attempted murder, rape, assault, and robbery, the most serious set of charges among the five. And Corey Wise, who at sixteen was old enough under New York law to be tried as an adult, was convicted of sexual abuse, assault, and riot and sentenced to five to fifteen years in adult prison. He was sent to Rikers Island he was sixteen years old. After the verdict, he shouted at the prosecutor, You're gonna pay for this. You made this up. He was right about the second part. He spent the next thirteen years of his life paying for it anyway, transferred through four different adult prisons, asking for protective isolation for extended stretches, because the violence inside was so bad that being alone was safer than being among other people. His entire young adulthood from sixteen to twenty nine, in prison for a crime the DNA had already proved he did not commit. Nobody was paying attention to him. Nobody. That's part one of the Central Park five story. Five kids from Harlem fourteen to sixteen years old, hauled into interrogation rooms with no lawyers and no sleep, question for up to thirty hours, fed lies about what the evidence showed and what the others had said, until four of them said things that weren't true because they

16:34 were children and they were broken and they wanted it to stop. Two trials, five convictions, and DNA that had excluded all of them sitting in a file somewhere waiting tomorrow. Part two, Corey Wise is in adult prison and he is about to meet the man who actually did it. Antroon McCrae, Kevin Richardson, Yusuf Salam Ray, and Santana Corey Wise. Someone has to say their names do better. Disclaimer. Daily Crime and Justice is produced by Calaroga Shark Media. This episode draws on court records, published news accounts, documentary sources including the Ken Burns film, The Central Park Five, the Netflix series. When they see US Innocence Project, case files, and AI assisted research, we do our best to get it right. We are a podcast, not a courtroom. This is entertainment and commentary, not legal fact.