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By Janell Ross
Last month, after two screenings of the Central Park film series 5 by director Ava DuVernay in New York – an extremely white audience and the other black – a general reaction was heard.
The series was good, but difficult, said audience members when ranking them out of screenings. It was hard to watch.
But the horrific dramatized case in the DuVernay series was not a 1000-year-old flood of the country's past. Elements of what led to Central Park Five experts stated that five wrongful convictions were recurrent and permanent features of American justice.
The series, published on Netflix on Friday, illustrates the human price of one of the most infamous odysseys in US criminal justice. In 1989, five boys, all Blacks and Latinos, and sixteen years old or younger, were falsely accused of brutal rape in Central Park, New York. The victim had no memory of the crime and almost died. After prolonged interrogations about the refusal to sleep, food and relatives, as well as the promise that the boys might go home after confessing, four of the five made false confessions, implicated each other in the crime, on tape.
In the years that followed, the boys were tried and sentenced in a city where police, reporters and prosecutors questioned their humanity, describing them in terms reserved for animals. The boys served seven to fourteen years before the rapist – who was then in prison for subsequent rapes and murders – confessed to the crime. DNA tests have confirmed his story. Prosecutors decided to try the boys while they knew during the trial that the DNA evidence did not match any of them, according to the records made public.
In 2002, a court overturned the convictions of men who had grown up. After a multi-year battle involving intermittent comments by Donald Trump and a 10-year blockade by former mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York City paid these men a collective settlement of $ 41 million. . Thirty years after the crime, police and prosecutors directly involved in the case continue to insist that they have done nothing wrong and claim that men are guilty.
It is a summary of the events with profound human consequences captured in the series. It is also a list of elements common to cases in which a person has been wrongly convicted.
Black Americans account for 13% of the country's total population, but 49% of nearly 2,500 people have been exonerated since 1989, according to the National Registry of Exon- tionations database. About 12% of the exonerated people are Latin American, 38% are white and 2% Asian.
Steven Drizin, co-director of the Center for Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern Pritzker Law School, wrote in an email to NBC News.
Police and prosecutors are under intense pressure to imprison someone for the crime. Both groups are often evaluated using statistics on arrests and convictions, which progress the fastest, regardless of accuracy, and want to violate the rights of suspects, break the rules or negotiate pleas. Judges and juries are also not immune to social pressure. Then there is the climate created by journalists with their own biases and motivations.
Many wrongful convictions were made as a result of wrongdoing by the prosecutor or the police, said Drizin.
This may include manipulated, concealed or fabricated evidence, as well as false testimony. In 2018, official misconduct played a role in at least 107 of the 151 exemptions documented by the National Register of Exemptions, according to an analysis of the register published this year. However, some states provide time limits for challenging convictions, prohibiting the prosecution of persons who have been improperly imprisoned and limit benefits. Most states have no formal control over prosecutors and federal law prohibits criminal prosecution for misconduct.
Wrongful convictions often follow false confessions, motivated by prolonged interrogations, the isolation of family or lawyers, the refusal of sleep, food, water, toilet breaks, threats or physical violence. Sometimes they follow more subtle manipulations, such as false promises that the person will be allowed to return home or statements that other people have been involved, said Drizin. Juveniles are the most likely to make false confessions.
"It's time, really, to count," said Edwin Grimsley, a PhD student in sociology at the Graduate Center at City University in New York, who spent a decade as a case manager for Innocence Project.
In the years following Central Park, some changes were made to prevent wrongful convictions. In 2017, 27 years after prosecutors had waited until the trial to reveal that DNA evidence found at the crime scene was not confused with any of the boys, New York became the first state where judges can punish prosecutors for this type of acts. Retention of evidence, even up to the trial, may prevent defense lawyers from using them effectively. And 25 states now require some police interrogations to be recorded. In 2018, New York began requiring police to record interrogations from beginning to end.
New technologies are also changing the landscape of criminal justice.
"Many people may be comfortable believing that everyone is found guilty, anyone arrested must have done something and there is no real reason for police and prosecutors to participate in sending the wrong person to jail, "Grimsley said. "But now that we have not only DNA, but also family DNA and expansive, it is science to make the truth much more difficult to deny."
The United States has a considerable backlog of untested genetic evidence in many cases, including sexual assault and murder. Advances in DNA analysis – including family DNA, which allows investigators to use the DNA profiles of their relatives to identify a suspect – could soon trigger a new one. wave of convictions canceled, said Grimsley. He predicts that this could lead to more intense media coverage, leading to changes in the way criminal justice work is done.
Already, the elements of a parody of criminal justice are better known today than they were when the Central Park Five were arrested 30 years ago. But victims of such crimes often remain invisible.
When DuVernay spoke at the screening of the Apollo Theater last month, she spoke of the work of rendering those previously described as a backpack, by clearly showing what had been stolen from them, what had been ground and their family. This guided her to the name of the series: "When they see us".
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