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Callaroga Shark Media. Good morning. I'm Garrett Fisher. Tuesday May fifth,
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twenty twenty six. I need to start today with some
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news about the show. The production team at Daily Crime
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and Justice has earned a vacation, every single one of them,
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and they are taking one, which means for the next
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two weeks, it's just me. No murder trials, no daily
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verdict watch, no sentencing updates rolling in from court reporters. Instead,
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I'm going to spend two weeks doing what I think
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this show is actually about at its core, telling the
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stories of people who had nothing, went up against people
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or systems that had everything, and refused to disappear. We're
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calling it fighting Back. Ten episodes, ten cases, all underdogs.
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Some of them won, some of them almost won. One
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of them changed American law forever with a handwritten letter
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and a pencil. All of them deserve to have their
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story told properly, and that's what we're going to do.
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We start today with a case that's going to take
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two episodes to do justice too, because it is not
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just the story of five kids. It is the story
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of a city that needed someone to blame, a system
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that needed a win. A press Corps that needed a headline,
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and a real estate developer who had eighty five thousand
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dollars and a newspaper column, and the instinct to pour
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gasoline on all of it. New York City, April nineteenth,
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nineteen eighty nine. Let me walk you through this segment one,
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The Night, the City and the five New York City,
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nineteen eighty nine. To understand what happened to these five
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young men, you need to understand the city they were
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living in, because the city is not just backdrop here.
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It is a character in the story, and it is
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a character that is operating at the edge of its
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own fear. New York in nineteen eighty nine was in
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the grip of a crack cocaine epidemic that had driven
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violent crime to historic levels. More than one nine hundred
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murders that year, which works out to more than five
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every single day. Central Park, which is supposed to be
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the democratic lungs of the city, the place every New
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Yorker can access, regardless of neighborhood or income, was widely
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considered dangerous after dark muggings, assaults, a pervasive sense that
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the park belonged to whoever was willing to take it.
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The city was also racially charged in a way that
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is hard to fully convey at this distance. White flight
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had hollowed out entire neighborhoods. The crack epidemic had devastated
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Black and Latino communities in Harlem, the South, Bronx, and Brooklyn.
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The relationship between the NYPD and those communities was adversarial
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in a way that was both documented and largely accepted
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as simply how things were. Young Black and Latino men
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were treated as suspects by default, stopped and questioned on
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the street as a matter of roote policing, and that
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practice was not a controversy. It was policy. That is
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the city that Antroon McCrae, Kevin Richardson, Yusuf Salaam, Raymond Santana,
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and Corey Wise were growing up in, all five of
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them from Harlem, all between fourteen and sixteen years old,
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none of them with a serious criminal record, none of
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them old enough to vote or buy a beer. Just
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five teenagers from the neighborhood who made the mistake of
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being in the wrong park, on the wrong night, in
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the wrong year, in the wrong city, and who were
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about to encounter a system that had already decided what
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they were before it asked them a single question. April nineteenth,
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nineteen eighty nine. On the night of April nineteenth, a
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large group of teenagers, roughly thirty of them, entered Central Park.
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Some of them that night did things they shouldn't have.
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There were reports of harassment and minor assaults on joggers
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and cyclists in other parts of the park. Separate from
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what would happen to Tricia Mayley, the five boys were
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part of this larger group. They were in the park.
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That is not disputed, and it matters to understand clearly
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they were there. What they were not there for is
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what the entire case turns on. Trisha Meely was twenty
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eight years old, an investment banker at Salomon Brothers, a
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Yale graduate who jogged in Central Park regularly. She entered
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the park at approximately nine o'clock that night, and at
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some point around nine point fifteen she was attacked on
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a dirt path near the one hundred second Street transverse, beaten, raped,
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and left for dead. When she was found at one
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point thirty in the morning, her skull was fractured, her
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body temperature had dropped to eighty four degrees and she
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had lost approximately seventy five percent of her blood. Doctors
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did not expect her to survive. She survived, but she
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was in a coma for twelve days, and when she
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came out of it, she had no memory of the
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attack or of anything that happened in that park. The
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trauma had erased it completely. She could not identify anyone,
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She could not describe anyone. She simply had no recollection,
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which meant the police had a case of extraordinary brutality,
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a city screaming for an arrest, and no eyewitness, no
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physical description of the attacker, nothing except seamen recovered from
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the scene and from the victim, and they needed someone
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to charge the interrogations. Police had already brought in a
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number of teenagers from the park that night in connection
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with the other disturbances, the harassment and minor assaults in
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other areas, and the five boys were among them, swept
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up in a general dragnet. Somewhere in the process of questioning,
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the focus shifted. These five became the suspects in the
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melee attack, and what followed was one of the most
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consequential miscarriages of interrogation in American legal history. None of
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them were given a lawyer, not one of the five,
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all of them legally children had an attorney present during questioning.
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Most were denied food and water. Yusuf Salam later wrote
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that they were deprived of food, drink, and sleep for
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more than twenty four hours. Most did not have a
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parent in the room during the actual interrogation, though in
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some cases parents were brought in later once the cameras
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were turned on, which tells you something about what the
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detectives understood about how those unrecorded hours would look if
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anyone ever reviewed them. The interrogations ran between fourteen and
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thirty hours. Fourteen to thirty hours for children between fourteen
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and sixteen years old alone in a room with seasoned
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homicide detectives. The technique used on them is well documented
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and well understood now, though it was considered standard practice. Then.
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Detectives lied to the boys about what evidence they had,
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which is completely legal under American law, even when the
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subject is a minor. They told each boy that the
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others had already implicated him. They suggested that cooperating, admitting
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a smaller role, and pointing at someone else would be
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the way out rather than the way in. They used
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what interrogation experts call minimization, framing the act in ways
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that made confession feel like the rational choice, like the
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door to relief, like the thing a reasonable person would
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do to end this particular nightmare. And for a tired,
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frightened fourteen year old who has been in a room
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with adults for twenty hours with no food and no
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lawyer and no parent and no end in sight, it works.
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The research says it works. False confessions account for roughly
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twenty percent of all wrongful convictions in the United States.
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These five boys are exactly why. One by one, four
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of them broke. Raymond Santana, Entron McCrae, Kevin Richardson, and
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Corey Wise all gave statements on videotape describing their participation
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in the attack on Trisha Maylee. Yusef Salam was the
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one who held out, the only one who did not confess,
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who sat through everything they threw at him and refused
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to say something he knew wasn't true. But here's what
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anyone paying close attention to those confessions could see immediately,
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and what the prosecution knew before they ever walked into
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a courtroom. The four statements were a mess. They contradicted
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each other on fundamental details, where the attack happened, what
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time it occurred, who was present, what sequence of events
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took place. If five people actually witnessed and participated in
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the same violent crime, their accounts will have substantial overlap.
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These didn't. They describe fundamentally different events because they were
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each describing something that didn't happen, pieced together under duress
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from fragments of things the detectives had suggested to them.
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And then there was the DNA the semen recovered from
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Trisha Maylee and from the crime scene was tested against
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fourteen men, all five defendants, Mayley's former boyfriend, and others.
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The result was unambiguous. The semen matched none of them,
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not one. The only biological evidence from the crime scene
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excluded all five boys as the source the DNA said
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clearly and definitively that whoever did this, it was not them.
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The prosecution had this result before trial. They used the
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confessions anyway. After the break, the press calls them a
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wolf pack, a billionaire spends eighty five thousand dollars calling
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for their execution, and five innocent teenagers go on trial
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in a city that has already made up its mind.
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Before a single charge was formally filed, the New York
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tabloids had already done the work of conviction. In nineteen
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eighty nine, the tabloid press in New York was operating
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at full power, circulation wars, headline competitions, front pages that
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screamed at you from every news stand in the city.
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The New York Post, the Daily News, the Times, all
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of them covered this story as though the outcome were
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already settled. And the word that entered the American vocabulary
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from this case, the one that perhaps did more damage
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than any single headline, was wilding. It came from a
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police briefing supposedly drawn from something one of the boys
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said during questioning, though the actual origin is disputed. It
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was used to describe a pack of teenagers rampaging through
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Central Park, randomly attacking innocent people for sport. The press
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ran with it, and it stuck, and what it did,
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what it was designed to do, whether consciously or not,
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was turned five specific teenagers from Harlem into a symbol
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of something much larger and more frightening, the sense that
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this city had lost control, that the parks and streets
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belonged to predators, that something had to be done. The
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boys were miners. Their names should have been protected under
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standard journalistic practice for juvenile suspects. Two local television stations
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broadcast their names anyway. Their home addresses were published, their
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families received death threats, and into this environment, twelve days
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after the attack stepped a real estate developer from Manhattan
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named Donald Trump. On May first, nineteen eighty nine, before
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any trial, before any conviction, before any jury had heard
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a single word of testimony, Trump spent eighty five thousand
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dollars to place full page advertisements in four New York
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City newspapers, The Times, The Daily News, The Post, and Newsday.
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The headline read, bring back the death penalty, Bring back
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our police. The ad did not name the Central Park
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five explicitly, but it did not need to. Every person
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in New York who picked up a newspaper that day
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understood exactly who it was about. It called for the
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reinstatement of the death penalty in the specific context of
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the jogger attack, in the specific context of these five teenagers,
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who had not been tried, had not been convicted, and
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as we now know with absolute certainty, had not committed
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the crime. The ad said, I want to hate these murderers,
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and I always will murderers. Tricia mainly was alive, but
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Trump called them murderers before a jury ever convened. Usef
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Salam's family received death threats in the days after the
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ad ran. Corey Wise later said that every day they
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walked into that courthouse, people screamed at them and threatened
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them because of what Trump had done. Defense attorneys believe
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the ads materially affected the jury pool. That spending eighty
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five thousand dollars to place a famous New York billionaire's
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face and voice behind a call for the death penalty
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of five black and Latino kids poisoned the atmosphere in
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which those kids would stand trial, and when the exoneration came,
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when DNA confirmed that someone else entirely had committed the crime,
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Trump did not apologize. He has never apologized. At a
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presidential debate in twenty twenty four, thirty five years after
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those ads ran, he said the five men had pled
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guilty and had badly heard a person killed a person. Ultimately,
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they never pled guilty. Tricia Mayley did not die. Every
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word of it was false, and he has still never apologized.
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The five boys went to trial in nineteen ninety split
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into two separate groups by the prosecution, in a move
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that allowed them to control the order in which evidence
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was introduced and crucially prevented either jury from hearing the
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full picture of what the other trial had revealed. Each
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group was tried before a different jury without lawyers being
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able to cross reference what was happening in the other courtroom.
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The cornerstone of the prosecution's case in both trials was
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the videotape confessions played repeatedly for the jury four young
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men on camera describing their participation in the attack. The
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defense argued the confessions were coerced, that no physical evidence
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connected any of the five to the rape of Tricia Maylee,
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and that the only semen found at the scene belonged
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to an unidentified man who was not their client. The
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jury convicted them anyway. Jurors who agreed to speak afterwards
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said they were not actually convinced by the confessions themselves.
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They knew the statements were contradictory and problematic. What swayed
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them was physical evidence. Semen, grass, dirt, and two hairs
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found in Kevin Richardson's clothing, described as consistent with the
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victim's hair. They leaned on that. What they didn't know,
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because the technology didn't yet exist to test it properly,
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was that those hairs were later subjected to advanced mitochondrial
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DNA analysis and found not to match Trisha Meili at all.
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The physical evidence the juries found most compelling was not
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what it appeared to be. The conviction stood regardless. When
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the verdicts came in. Ron McCrae, Raymond Santana, and Usep
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Salam were convicted of race, rape, assault, robbery, and riot.
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Kevin Richardson was convicted of attempted murder, rape, assault, and robbery,
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the most serious set of charges among the five. And
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Corey Wise, who at sixteen was old enough under New