FIGHTING BACK - THE CONFESSION THAT CAME TOO LATE: THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE — PART 2

0:03 Kalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. I'm Garrett Fisher, Wednesday May sixth, twenty twenty six, and this is day two of our Fighting Back series. Yesterday we left Corey Wise an adult prison, sixteen years old, convicted of a crime he didn't commit. Sentence as an adult, held at Riker's Island and then transferred through four different adult prisons over the next several years, asking to be kept in protective isolation for extended stretches because the violence inside was so severe that isolation was safer than being around other people. His entire young adulthood from sixteen to twenty nine, spent behind bars for a rape that the DNA evidence had already before a single trial began, established he didn't commit. Today we pick up there and what happens next is one of those moments that makes you believe, against everything that the system has shown you, that the truth sometimes finds its way out anyway, not because of the system, not because of any detective or prosecutor or judge, but because of a chance encounter in an upstate New York prison between Cory Wise and the man who actually did it, Mattias Reyes, was seventeen years old on the night of April nineteenth, nineteen eighty nine, the same night Tricia Maylee was attacked in Central Park.

1:28 He was already a predator. In the days surrounding the Central Park attack, Reyes committed a series of other rapes in and around the park using the same method, a single attacker working alone, targeting women jogging or walking alone in isolated areas. One of those attacks happened just days before the Central Park assault. The victim of that attack described her assailant in detail, including fresh stitches in his chin. Police had Reyes's name in their files, they did not connect him to Melee. In the months that followed the Central Park attack, Reyes continued. He raped and murdered a pregnant woman named Lord's Gonzales in her apartment. He was eventually caught, convicted, and sentenced to thirty three and a third years to life, not for the Central Park attack, which everyone believed had already been solved, but for the other crimes. He went to prison in nineteen ninety one and disappeared into the system just another inmate while five innocent men served out sentences for something he had done alone for a decade nothing and then in two thousand and one, a chance of geography, Corey Wise had been moved to Auburn correctional facility in upstate New York. Mattias Reyes was there too. They met. What happened between them in that prison is something Reyes has described in interviews and to investigators. He recognized Wise from the coverage of the Central Park five case, understood that Wise was serving time for something Reyes himself had done, and experienced what

2:59 he described as a crisis of conscience. He told a corrections officer he had information. He eventually came forward and told investigators that on the night of April nineteenth, nineteen eighty nine, he had attacked and raped Tricia Maylee, that he had acted alone, and that he had never encountered the five young men who had been convicted. He provided details that only the actual perpetrator would know, details about the specific location, the sequence of events, the route he took through the park, information that had never been made public and could not have been guessed. The Manhattan District Attorney's Office convened an independent panel to investigate. They took his account apart, looking for holes. The DNA from the crime scene was subjected to the more advanced testing that had become available since nineteen eighty nine. It matched Reyes.

3:48 Every biological sample from the crime scene pointed to one man acting alone. On December nineteenth, two thousand and two, a New York Supreme Court justice vacated the convictions of all five the Central Park five. Entroon McCrae, Kevin Richardson, use of Salam, Raymond Santana, and Corey Wise were exonerated. The charges were dismissed after a combined total of more than forty years behind bars for a crime they did not commit. They were legally innocent by then. McCrae had been out since nineteen ninety six, Santana since nineteen ninety five, Salam and Richardson since nineteen ninety seven. Corey Wise had walked out of prison in August two thousand and two, just months before the formal exoneration, the last of the five to be released, as he had been the first to enter adult prison and the one who had served the longest. They were already out. The exoneration was a piece of paper, but it mattered because without it, they were still convicted felons in the eyes of the law, which affects, housing, employment, voting rights, every part of a life.

4:58 The exoneration didn't give them back. Was taken, but it cleared the record, It said officially in writing that the State of New York had gotten it wrong. The people who still wouldn't believe it. You would think that a DNA confirmed confession from the actual perpetrator would be the end of it. It was not. The lead prosecutor on the original case, Elizabeth Letterer, maintained for years that the five may still have been involved, that Reyes could have been an unindicted coejaculator, as one detective memorably and grotesquely put it, the idea being that maybe, somehow five teenagers had also attacked Tricia may Lee that night in addition to Reyes, even though there was zero physical evidence of anyone else's presence, even though Raya said he acted alone, even though his account was consistent with a single attacker assault, and even though the seaman the only biological evidence came exclusively from him, The head detective on the case called Reyes's confession this lunatic case cox a wild story and said people were foolish to believe it. And in twenty fourteen, when the city finally settled the civil lawsuit for forty one million dollars. Donald Trump wrote an op ed in the New York Daily News calling the settlement a disgrace and relaying that a detective close to the case called it the heist of the century. A DNA confirmed confession from the actual rapist, and the settlement paid to five wrongly convicted men was called a heist. That's the environment these

6:29 five men walked back into when they were released. Not a city that said we failed you, We're sorry, how do we make this right? A city or at least large loud portions of it, that still thought they were guilty, still thought the settlement was an outrage, still thought that five black and Latino men from Harlem must have done something wrong in that park, even if it wasn't exactly what they'd been convicted of. They fought that environment for eleven years. The civil lawsuit was filed in two thousand and three. The city fought it, contested, it delayed it. The five men and their attorneys spent over a decade in litigation, not against some private corporation, but against the city.

7:11 They grew up in the city that had taken their youth, the city that was spending taxpayer money to avoid admitting what two juries, a corps of detectives and an entire prosecutorial apparatus had done to them. After the break, the forty one million dollar settlement, the legal reforms that came from this case and where five men who had every reason to be broken ended up instead. On June nineteenth, twenty fourteen, eleven years after the lawsuit was filed, New York City agreed to a forty one million dollar settlement with the five men, roughly a million dollars for each year each of them had in prison. The city did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement. That standard practice in civil cases, and it matters here because it meant that no one was ever officially held responsible. The settlement said we will pay you. It did not say we did something wrong. Here is who did it, and here is what happened to them. Yusef Salam said it plainly in a twenty nineteen interview. No amount of money could have given us our time back. He was fifteen when he was arrested. He was in his late thirties by the time the settlement arrived. A million dollars a year sounds significant until you understand what a year in prison between the ages of fifteen and twenty two actually costs,

8:43 not just in money, but in education, in relationships, in the compounding opportunity that people who weren't in prison were accumulating while they were locked up. The settlement was the best available legal remedy. It was not justice, and the people responsible for what happened to them, the detectives who ran those thirty hour interrogations, the prosecutors who put those contradictory confessions in front of two juries while knowing the DNA excluded their clients. The officials who fought the exoneration for years. None of them faced criminal charges. None of them lost their jobs as a direct consequence of what they did to these five kids. The system that failed the Central Park five protected the people who ran that system right to the end. That's not a mistake. That's a choice, and it's a choice the City of New York made repeatedly, over more than two decades, every time it had an opportunity to hold someone accountable and chose not to. What changed because of them. Here is what the Central Park five case did produce and it matters legal reform, real lasting reform that has changed how interrogations of miners are conducted in this country. Because of this case and others like it, in New York and roughly twenty four other states have passed laws requiring the electronic recording of full interrogations, not just the videotape confession at the end, the whole interrogation, from the first question, the hours before the cameras turned on, the psychological pressure, the

10:16 lies about evidence, the isolation, all of it now has to be on record in states with these laws. It's an incomplete reform. The laws vary by state, not every jurisdiction has adopted them, and recording an interrogation doesn't automatically prevent coercion. It just makes coercion harder to deny. But it is something. It is a concrete change in how children are treated inside interrogation rooms, and it came directly from what happened to these five men they're suffering. Produced protection for the next generation of teenagers who end up in a room with detectives and no lawyer. The case also changed how prosecutors and courts think about false confessions as evidence. The research on false confessions partiarticularly among juvenile suspects who confess at dramatically higher rates than adults, has grown substantially since nineteen eighty nine, and the Central Park five case is one of the most studied examples of the phenomenon. Twenty seven percent of people exonerated by DNA evidence had originally confessed to the crime. It happens, It happens with documented regularity, and the Central Park five case is part of why the legal system is now slowly beginning to treat a confession as something to scrutinize rather than something to accept at face value. This is the

11:47 part of the story I want to end on because it's remarkable and it deserves to be said out loud. Corey Wise, the one who served the longest thirteen years in adult prison starting at sixteen, took his settlement money and used a significant portion of it to fund the Cory Wise Innocence Project at the University of Colorado Boulder, a legal clinic dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people. A man who had everything taken from him by a broken system turned his settlement into a machine for fixing that system for other people. If you are looking for the definition of someone who earned the right to be bitter and chose not to be. That is Corey Wise. Raymond Santana became an activist and entrepreneur, using his platform to advocate for criminal justice reform and founding a clothing line whose proceeds support wrongful conviction work. Kevin Richardson lives in New Jersey with his wife and daughters and speaks regularly about juvenile justice. Ron McCrae, who was the most private of the five during the years of coverage, eventually chose to speak publicly, including in the Netflix series When They See Us Now, about what the experience did to his family and particularly to his father, who pressured him to confie and who McCrae said never fully recovered from the guilt of that moment. And Yusuf Salam, who at fifteen was the only one of the five who refused to confess, who held out through the interrogation while the others broke around him, is now a member of the New York

13:18 City Council representing the Central Harlem district where he grew up. He ran in twenty twenty three, won his primary and a landslide, and took office in twenty twenty four, he campaigns on easing poverty and fighting gentrification, and he talks about his wrongful conviction not as a wound, but as a credential. I am really the ambassador for everyone's pain, he said, In many ways, I went through that for our people, so I can now lead them. In twenty twenty two, the city unveiled the gate of the exonerated at the northern entrance to Central Park, the same park where their lives were upended, in honor of the five men, a plaque, a gate, an acknowledgment in bronze and stone that the city got it catastrophically wrong, and that these men are owed something it can never fully repay. Donald Trump has still never apologized. I want to say something plainly before we close this story, because I think it gets lost sometimes in the legal language and the settlement figures and the documentary coverage. What happened to these five boys was not a system malfunction. It was the system functioning exactly as it was designed to function in nineteen eighty nine New York, which is to say, it was designed to produce fast arrests that satisfied a terrified public and It was designed to treat black and Latino teenagers from Harlem as suspects first and human being second, and

14:49 it produced exactly those outcomes with ruthless efficiency. The interrogation tactics were legal. The decision to prosecute despite contradictory confessions and exclud voting DNA was a prosecutorial choice, not a procedural error. The media coverage was the predictable result of a press corps that understood what its audience wanted. And the eighty five thousand dollars full page ad was a real estate developer doing what real estate developers do, reading a room and amplifying whatever fear was already in it. None of those people went to prison, none of them were charged. None of them paid forty one million dollars out of their own pockets. The city's taxpayers paid the settlement, people who had nothing to do with what happened in those interrogation rooms. And the detectives, the prosecutors, the officials who fought the exoneration for eleven years, they moved on.

15:43 Some of them continued to publicly insist even after the DNA confirmation, that those five men were still somehow guilty of something. These five men spent a combined total of more than forty years in prison for a crime they did not commit. They were children when it started. They came out as adult into a world that had moved on without them, carrying convictions that affected every aspect of their lives until the exoneration paperwork came through and they built lives anyway, remarkable lives, lives that put to shame the people who tried to end them before they started. Antreon McCrae, Kevin Richardson, Yusuf Salam Raymond Santana, Corey Wise, the exonerated five, remember them. That's day two of fighting back and the end of the Central Park five story, or at least the end of the part we're covering here. Tomorrow, we go back even further, to the nineteen twenties, to a group of young women who were told by their employer that the paint they were using on watchdials was perfectly safe to put in their mouths. The company knew differently.

16:47 The women found out the hard way. They took on US Radium Corporation Anyway, and what they did in a New Jersey courtroom in nineteen twenty eight, change worker safety law in this country Forever. The Radium Girls that It's Tomorrow, Do Better. Disclaimer. Daily Crime Injustice 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.