The role of Donald Trump in the tragedy of the Central Park Five case

When Trisha Meili was found beaten at an incredible pace in Central Park, she was presumed to be dying as a result of her injuries.

She was found in a ravine 90 meters from the jogging trail where she had been dragged, naked and bound, covered with mud and her own blood. "She was beaten as badly as anyone I've ever seen beat," said Joseph Walsh, the first policeman on the scene.

His wounds were horrible. Meili had lost 80% of her blood and, with a body temperature of only 29 ° C, she was suffering from hypothermia, reports news.com.au.

His skull was fractured in 21 places and his left eye was dislodged from the cavity. She was in severe hemorrhagic shock, falling into a coma.

By the time she arrived at the hospital, she was unable to breathe alone.

When the media was informed of the vicious attack, it was generally thought that she would never wake up. The most promising prognosis was that she would remain permanently in a coma – but miraculously, twelve days later, she woke up.

She was in a bad state: unable to speak, walk or remember anything in her life. After six months of intense therapy, Meili has had a remarkable recovery.

Eight months after the attack, she was returning to her position in the Solomon Brothers corporate finance department. It was a miracle.

She was the only eyewitness to her attack, but Meili never found her memories of that evening. The five teenagers who were convicted of wanting a brutal attack were different.

If she could remember anything, nothing, the trajectories of their lives would have been significantly different.

A night of terror

On the evening of April 19, 1989, Meili was out for a night jog, something she had been doing regularly for two and a half years without incident. Her work schedule meant that she often worked late at night and that she had to start early, which made daytime exercise impossible.

Still, she was concerned about jogging alone at night in the notoriously dangerous park, which was why she applied a strict set of rules.

"I would not start running, say, after 9:30 pm," she told Larry King. "I did not go to the northernmost part of the park, which is a bit more isolated than the area where I was attacked for the first time.

"At night, I did not go around the tank in the park, because it's a narrow path and I thought:" Um, that's a little bit more dangerous."

She would also run in well-lit areas. That night, she started jogging at 9 pm, within the deadlines set by her own rules.

"I also felt that, you know what, it's not going to happen," she said. "First, it can not happen and if it happens, I'll be able to distance the person."

At about the same time that Meili started jogging, first reports were reported that about three dozen young people were attacking joggers and cyclists.

At 9:30 pm, the number of complaints increased and the first patrol cars were sent to the park.

Half an hour later, at 10 pm, John Loughlin was beaten with a pipe in the back of his head, one of the many people attacked that night.

At 10:15 pm, police gathered a number of juvenile offenders, including 14-year-old Raymond Santana and Kevin Richardson. In a short time, police began questioning the children and quickly extracted the names of 33 suspected suspects to be in the park that night. Antron McCray and Yusef Salaam, 15, and Korey Wise, 16, were on the list. They were brought in for questioning the same night and these five people were interrogated continuously for two days. They were deprived of sleep and subjected to lies, violence and threats as to what would happen to them if they did not cooperate. Finally, exhausted and scared, they all confessed to attacking Trisha Meili. All would come back on these confessions in the weeks to come.

But it was too late. These five children were charged with the attack. Their names were leaked to insulting media before only one charge was laid, although four of them were under 16 years old.

They were quickly nicknamed "The Central Park Five". and have been the subject of death threats against their home. They have been publicly published in the four dailies of New York.

Thirteen years later, they would be exonerated from this crime, after a serial rapist and murderer confessed in great detail.

He acted alone. His DNA was the only sample collected at the scene of the crime.

It was an open and closed case.

The Central Park Five were innocent.

TRIAL BY MEDIA

Three days after the attack, the New York Times already signaled in a hyperbole way. "The attackers of Jogger are terrorized at least 9 hours out of 2", reads in the title.

"Young people who raped and savagely beat a young investment bank while she was jogging in Central Park on Wednesday night were part of a poorly organized group of 32 schoolchildren whose random and motivated assaults have terrorized at least eight others for nearly two hours, police investigators said yesterday.

Detective chief Robert Colangelo, who said the attacks did not appear to have anything to do with money, race, drugs or alcohol, said some of the 20 young people surveyed had told investigators that criminal madness was the product of a hobby called wilding. "

Such irresponsible reporting has completely removed the presumption of innocence, a trend in the way the media has framed the case. When she does research on her Netflix miniseries When they see usAva DuVernay, writer and director, discovered a study showing that 89% of articles written by New York newspapers at the time of the case did not use the word "presumed". Because of confessions, guilt was automatically assumed.

Although Colangelo stated that race is not a motivator in the attack, it was certainly in the media's speech: it did not go unnoticed that the defendants were four afro teenagers American and a Hispanic. "The first thing you do in the United States of America when a white woman is raped is to gather a group of young blacks," Reverend Calvin O. Butts said in a statement. New York Times report.

Mayor Ed Koch fueled the flames by nicknamed "The Crime of the Century" – a long time of a hundred years that had seen the horrors of Son of Sam, the Zodiac Slayer, John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy – as well as the Countless other atrocities, including the Holocaust. This does not want to minimize the horrible nature of the crime, but only to underline how much the public feared for the blood.

The case was emblematic of an era in New York where homicide rates were at their peak and residents were too afraid to leave their homes after dark. In 1989, 1905 murders were perpetrated in the city. The first of them took place just 41 minutes after the launch of the ball in Times Square to celebrate the new year. It was the worst year ever recorded.

The following year, this imposing figure was surpassed, with 2245 shocking murders for the city. As a reminder, there were 290 murders in New York in 2017, the lowest number since 1944.

It was an unsafe era, and the random brutality of the Central Park Jogger attack, coupled with its anonymity in the media of the day, made New Yorkers comfortable.

In a 1991 essay on Central Park Jogger, Joan Didion explained how a public debate surrounding Meili's decision to jog alone in the park at night took place in the New York Times' opinion pages; some have described it as reckless, while another argued that "when people run is a function of their lifestyle". A Democratic candidate wrote a platform in which he declared: "This park belongs to us and this time no one will take it from us".

TRUMP APPEALS TO DEATH

Donald Trump, then a real estate mogul who was recently illustrated in the city because of his ghostly book The art of the deal, paid $ 85,000 to run one-page ads in New York's four dailies: The New York Times, The Daily News, The New York Post, and New York Newsday. The same inflammatory diatribe of 600 words, published on May 1, 1989 in the four newspapers, entitled "Bring back the death penalty." Bring Back Our Police & # 39; and although it did not specifically refer to the incident, it referred to "wild criminal gangs" and called for the killing of "criminals of all times" ". "I want to hate these attackers and these murderers," wrote Trump. "They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes."

Adhering to a largely misunderstood quote from Mayor Koch that "hate and resentment should be removed from our hearts," Trump called for a zero-punishment policy.

"How can our great society tolerate the continued brutality of its citizens by crazy outsiders?" ask for the letter. "Criminals must be informed that their civil liberties come to an end as soon as an attack on our security begins!"

This first example of Trump's hate speech would have considerable consequences. Michael W. Warren, who defended one of the defendants, claims that the full – page ads "have poisoned the minds of many people who lived in New York and who, quite rightly, had a natural affinity for the victim, "arguing the broad dissemination of the message had an impact on the impartiality of the jurors.

HOW DO FALSE CONFESSIONS OCCUR?

To understand how such a miscarriage of justice could occur, one only has to look at the statistics regarding false confessions in America. In 1989, the idea of ​​false confessions was relatively unstudied and, when Central Park Five admitted the brutal attack, it was presumed that he had done so. After all, what innocent person would confess to a crime she did not commit? Now we know better.

When genetic evidence is used to overturn a conviction, more than a quarter of the cases originally involved a false confession. Between 1989 and 2017, 12% of the wrongful convictions that were subsequently quashed involved a person who had confessed. Thirty-eight percent of them were given by children under 18 and 70% of them were shocked by a mental illness or intellectual disability.

The brutal interrogation techniques employed by the police, the lack of options presented to the accused and the feeling that such confessions are the only way out of the room add to these impressive numbers. Police are allowed to lie to obtain confessions.

The most recent and most publicized example of the above was presented in 2015 Make a murderer docu-series, where Brendan Dassey – at the time of his interrogation, a sixteen year old child with learning difficulties – was led by an officer.

He was questioned three times during a 24-hour period without the presence of an adult, a parent or a lawyer. The video footage of this systematic breakdown of Dassey allows a heartbreaking viewing, as he wends his way through a confession with coach, of a crime of which he had no knowledge. By his confession alone, he was convicted of first-degree willful homicide, rape and mutilation of a corpse, while the confession was described as "manifestly involuntary in the constitutional sense. "by an American judge. The conclusion of this judge has been overturned and Dassey is currently serving a sentence of life imprisonment.

Like Dassey, the Central Park Five were questioned for days. In the case of Salaam, aged 15 – who falsely told the police that he was 16 years old in order to avoid that his parents needed to be in the room during the night. interrogation – it was later discovered that much of the interrogation had been conducted illegally. Despite this, Salaam's answers were admitted to the evidence.

A few hours before Meili's bruised body was found, one of the children whom the police had collected gave a preventive refusal in the police car, claiming that he had "not committed the murder".

After almost two days of questioning, the police extorted confessions from four of the five; only Salaam refused to sign a confession, although he verbally confessed that he was present in the park that night, after a detective lied and told him that his fingerprints were removed from the victim's clothes. None of the five admitted to having raped Meili, claiming only to be accomplices.

Although four of them signed confessions and made video confessions, they all retracted in the following weeks, claiming to have been coerced by the police. The only videotapes of interrogations are confessions; the days of mind games that led to these camera statements were not recorded. Sleep deprivation played a big role in their eventual confessions, as well as fear and violence.

"I heard them hitting Korey Wise in the next room," Salaam remembered. "They would come to look at me and say, 'You realize you're next'. The fear really made me feel like I could not get out of it."

The five statements tell five completely contradictory stories, with differences in all aspects of the crime.

Taken in isolated extracts, the confessions are horrible and those who were in the audience room had no reason to believe that they were not true. "We accused her, we knocked her down, everyone started beating her and other things, she was on the ground, everyone was trampling and everything."

"Raymond had his arms and Steve his legs, he spread them out, and Antron got up, took off her panties."

"He was hitting her, he was saying:" Shut up, bitch! "Just hit her, it's my first rape."

It does not matter which child said which of the statements above. They are vivid and horrible, but according to a detailed 58-page document presented to overturn the indictment, none of these claims match what happened that night.

They are manufactured.

Attorney General Robert M. Morgenthau, who recommended the quashing of the convictions, asserted that there were large differences between "the author of the attack, the one who knocked out the victim, who undressed her, who hit her, who restrained her, who raped her, what weapons were used during the assault and who when, in the sequence of events, the attack took place.

"In many other respects, the statements of the defendants were not supported, supported or explained by objective and independent evidence, and some of their statements were simply contrary to the established facts".

The five people pleaded not guilty, but their confessions took on importance in the courtroom, even though there were no eyewitnesses in the crowded park, and no DNA evidence linking them to the crime.

Two separate trials declared the five guilty of various aspects of the crime.

Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray and Raymond Santana were acquitted of attempted murder but sentenced for rape, assault, robbery and riot.

Kevin Richardson was convicted of attempted murder, rape, assault and robbery, while Korey Wise – the only one to be tried in adulthood – was found guilty of assault sexual assault and assault and riot.

INJUSTICE FOR ALL

In 2002, Matias Reyes, a violent serial rapist convicted of murder, admitted to having committed the attack in Central Park that night. He went into the details of the crime and claimed to have acted alone. His DNA is the only sample taken from the scene and the way in which Meili's body was tied with a T-shirt corresponds to other crimes for which he was sentenced. The limitation period had long been past, which meant that Reyes could not be charged with the crime. In any case, he is already serving a life sentence for another murder.

At this point, Central Park Five had spent six to 13 years in prison for this crime.

Morgenthau made the above recommendation to quash the convictions handed down in 2002, and they were released.

The following year, Richardson, Santana and McCray brought a lawsuit for conviction in New York, claiming $ 250 million in damages for criminal prosecution, racial discrimination and emotional distress. The city refused to settle for more than 10 years, blocking an agreement because they believed that despite the reversal of convictions, they would win the lawsuit.

After being elected in 2014, the mayor of Blasio has accepted a settlement of $ 41 million.

That's less than 20% of what they were looking for and so they are currently suing the state for an additional $ 52 million.

Although they have settled, New York City has admitted no fault in the prosecution and conviction of Central Park Five.

Donald Trump, who placed the inflammatory ads that many believe helped to direct public opinion against the Five, also claimed he did not commit wrongdoing.

After the settlement was announced, he wrote an opinion piece for The New York Daily News, titled "The Central Park Five Settlement is a Shame".

In the play, he quotes an anonymous detective "close to the case" and says he told Trump that it was "the burglary of the century", echoing unwittingly to the hyperbolic claim of "crime of the century "Mayor Koch 25 years earlier.

"To install does not mean innocence, but indicates multilevel incompetence," Trump writes before beseeching people to "talk to the detectives and try to listen to the facts. do not exactly have the past of angels. "

"What about the other people who were brutalized that night, besides the jogger?" he asks. "The recipients must laugh at the stupidity of the city."

Since then, he has repeatedly reiterated the verdict of guilt of men, even if their convictions had been overturned. This week again, he again referred to the case.

"Anyone associated with the 1994 crime bill will have no chance of being elected," he tweeted. "In particular, African Americans will not be able to vote for you.I was responsible for criminal justice reform, which enjoyed considerable support, and I was helped to settle the bad bill of 1994! "

The director of the film, Ava DuVernay, reacted quickly: "The story that people know is the lie you told them, your violent rhetoric fueled the tensions that led to the bill you claim to be moving away from. you can not hide what you did at Central Park Five, they were innocent, and they will have the last word. "