It took no time at all for anger over Donald Trump’s callous comments about the Central Park Five to be swept aside by a fresh new wave of revulsion. Hours after reasserting the guilt of five men wrongfully imprisoned for rape as teenagers — whom Trump once declared should be executed — the GOP nominee faced a firestorm over his own boasts of sexual violence. By the time the presidential debate aired on Sunday night, the controversy over the Central Park Five had been pushed out of view. This was disappointing to many racial justice activists, who had hoped Clinton would use the case to “go on the offensive,” as BuzzFeed reported, to push back against Trump’s racist “law and order” rhetoric and lay out her own plans for criminal justice reform.
But despite the burst of outrage, the ugly truth is that Trump’s attitude is all too common in district attorneys’ offices around the country. Not only have prosecutors defended the convictions of innocent people in the face of exonerating evidence, they will often block efforts to test for such evidence as DNA in the first place. Once a conviction is overturned, DAs often refuse to drop charges, dragging out a legal fight while dangling the specter of re-imprisonment over men and women who just want to move on with their lives. If a person is officially exonerated and seeks compensation, it is not uncommon for DAs to fight these efforts as well.
There are important exceptions. On Sunday, amid the chatter about the presidential debate, the shocking news that Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson had died of cancer met with an outpouring of grief from exonerees and criminal justice activists over social media. Thompson, who was just 50 years old, oversaw 10 exonerations in his first year in office, an unthinkable record for an elected district attorney. He did not stop, doubling that number before he died.
Thompson transformed the lives of men like William Lopez, who spent 23 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Lopez, whom I wrote about in 2014, had been released by a federal judge who called his case “rotten from day one.” Yet Charles Hynes, Thompson’s predecessor, refused to drop the charges, instead taking steps to re-convict him. Lopez lived in fear of returning to prison, unable to fully to adjust to his new life outside. His torment subsided thanks to Thompson, who finally dropped the charges and the appeal, calling it “contrary to the interest of justice.” Months later, Lopez died of an asthma attack. In a post on Facebook Sunday night, a friend of Lopez — a fellow exoneree who helped win his freedom — mourned Thompson, calling him “a champion for the wrongfully convicted.”
New York has come a long way since the exoneration of the Central Park Five. It was Hynes, ironically, who first established Brooklyn’s Conviction Integrity Unit — a model that has caught on in jurisdictions across the country. Yet even in places where such offices exist, they do not dissolve prosecutors’ resistance to the notion that the state can ever get it wrong. When I recently cited the handful of death row exonerations in California during an interview with an assistant district attorney in Los Angeles, she questioned whether any of these people were truly innocent, raising the possibility that “none” of them were.
Those who come to terms with wrongful convictions often do so too late. Last year, a former Louisiana prosecutor named Marty Stroud penned an anguished apology to Glenn Ford, an innocent man he sent to death row. The letter caused a stir — the National Registry of Exonerations called it “uniquely powerful and moving.” Yet Ford was denied compensation from the state and died of cancer months later.
Prosecutors are not solely to blame, of course. Governors also deny justice to the wrongfully convicted. Days before Trump’s unrepentant remarks about the Central Park Five, his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, refused to grant an executive pardon to an Indiana man cleared by DNA evidence of participating in an armed robbery. After almost 10 years in prison, the man had waited three more years for a response to his clemency request. Through his lawyers, Pence said no.
Trump, of course, is a uniquely loathsome character who happens to be the GOP candidate for president, and whose words have dominated the news cycle for months. His insistence on the guilt of the Central Park Five is particularly galling in that it comes not from a DA defending his conviction, but from a private citizen who viciously weaponized his wealth against five innocent youths. “Maybe hate is what we need,” Trump told Larry King in 1989 when asked about his vigilante publicity blitz.
Yusef Salaam, one of the Central Park Five, has told the story of Trump’s vindictiveness for years. In 2005, when New York held hearings over the possible reinstatement of capital punishment, Salaam reminded lawmakers of Trump’s full-page BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY ad in the New York Times, noting that if the billionaire had gotten his way, Salaam would be dead. (I testified that day too, later getting to know Salaam through our mutual work with the Campaign to End the Death Penalty.)
Angela Cuffie meets reporters on Dec. 19, 2002, at the Manhattan Supreme Court, where a judge overturned the conviction of her brother, Kevin Richardson, and four others jailed in the Central Park jogger case. Councilman Bill Perkins holds up an ad taken out by Donald Trump after the crime.
Photo: Mike Albans/NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images
Clinton, who was a New York senator when the Central Park Five were exonerated, has tried to move past her own rhetoric about “superpredators,” a term popularized by the case, to adopt the mantle of racial justice. On Friday, her campaign condemned Trump’s statement about the Central Park Five as “yet another racist lie.”
Clinton has shown some concern over wrongful convictions, having co-sponsored the Innocence Protection Act, providing for DNA testing and compensations in federal cases. But her sincerity — both on race and innocence — is undermined by her continuing support for the death penalty, as a death row exoneree from Ohio discovered firsthand at a town hall earlier this year. While in theory one can support executions while opposing sending innocent people to die, the exoneration of 156 death row prisoners to date shows how irreconcilable these positions are in real life. In a break from its own nominee, this year the DNC made abolishing the death penalty part of the Democratic platform.
But Clinton need not worry that such contradictions will obstruct her path to the White House. As George W. Bush showed, even the most cavalier approach to executions will not derail a presidential candidacy. As for Trump, his stance toward the Central Park Five is an expression of the racism and fearmongering that has animated his candidacy from the start. But it is also a form of denial that remains all too prevalent in the criminal justice system, even as Americans are more aware than ever of wrongful convictions.
As Trump showed in his defense of sexual assault, some people will never admit they are wrong. This, ultimately, is the reason so many remain in prison for crimes they did not commit.
But as the letter of apology from Marty Stroud demonstrated, changing your mind can be a powerful thing, precisely because it is so hard. Condemning Trump is easy. If Clinton truly wants to show that she cares about men like the Central Park Five, reconsidering the death penalty would be one good place to start.
Top photo: Woody Henderson, right, from the National Action Network, leads a demonstration outside the Manhattan Criminal Court in New York on Sept. 30, 2002, protesting the conviction of the Central Park Five.
Excellent piece.
This issue really synopsizes the political position Americans are in.
Clinton is SO awful.
She is SO dismissive of other people, right down to their entitlement to survive.
She is SO deeply racist, right down to a fundamental INABILITY to see humanity when looking at black youths.
And yet, despite how justifiably despised she is, the criminal over-class was able to impose her, as the Democratic candidate, by nefarious means: NOT ONLY using the Democratic Party leadership to sabotage one of its own candidates – a Democratic candidate who was genuinely loved – and NOT ONLY using a malignant media to manipulate and misinform, but ALSO using the far more DIRECT ATTACK of silencing masses of THE PEOPLE by way of mass-disqualification and mass-disenfranchisement.
Now, she awaits coronation, because the Democratic and Republican ponds are both engineered to ensure that only SCUM can rise to the top, and what rose to the top of the Republican pond this cycle, was Rapey the KKKlown:
A CARTOON of a racist dictator, with an itchy nuke-finger; a billion-dollar-loser who has bankrupted his businesses over and over, and over, AND OVER AGAIN; a lying, cheating, charity-robbing, tax-avoider; a promoter of torture, and a self-described serial sex-assailant.
There could be NO LOWER BAR, yet Clinton is barely winning, because NEITHER of those monsters belongs in the White House.
Federal prosecutors that care more about getting promoted than serving the public deserve to be publically executed. That’s the only way to stop this disgusting Satanic exploitation of vulnerable populations.
“Federal prosecutors that care more about getting promoted than serving the public…”
Just to clarify, this article is not about federal prosecutors but about county prosecutors known, in most states, as ‘district attorneys.’ Federal prosecutors are known, generally, as US Attorneys.
I finally looked up “demagogue” on Wiktionary to see if it was illustrated with a Trump photo yet. And encountered this quote…
1954, Reinhard Luthin, American Demagogues, p. 3:
I mean damn, if we had bombs as accurate as that, the Iraqis would be petitioning for statehood by now.
Everyone should applaud when someone who is actually innocent is cleared of a wrongful conviction but that is not what happened in this case and the author should apologies to the victim of these crimes for lying about this case for political purposes.
These young guys were convicted of multiple crimes for their actions that night and most of them admitted their involvement in the rape and other bloody mayhem. Some of them were convicted of the penetration part of the rape which wasn’t actually proven but it is likely that some of them did perform that act. The later confession of the guy who’s semen was found in the victim got all of their convictions reversed but it was a technical point not a bestowing of innocence onto these criminals.
Trump and everyone else should be outraged that these guys got a million dollar political settlement for their crimes even if they didn’t perform the final rape act and the victim should be able to sue them and take that money.
It’s odd to see how much you trust the justice system that convicted them, but you disparage the (same) justice system that exonerated them.
He’s right, only one man actually ejaculated inside or on the victim without protection, a man already in prison who i believe got his sentenced reduced for claiming he didn’t have help from the Five. But there was plenty of evidence that it was a GANG rape and beating. It’s entirely probable that they DID participate in the assault and torture but not the unprotected penetration.
“Miss Teen USA” is already its own punchline. But the explanations Trump uses at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/10/12/former-miss-arizona-trump-just-came-strolling-right-in-on-naked-contestants/ would look really funny on other people. “Mr. Principal, what are you doing in the girl’s locker room?” “Oh, just checking everything is A-OK, five by five, that adds up to a ten you know…” “Monsignor, what are you doing in the little boys’ changing room?” “Oh, just maintaining the place, squirting around a little holy water…”
To quote The Donald about his buddy Jeffrey Epstein, “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side…” Uh-huh.
To be sure, I’m not suggesting Trump is a pedophile; I just think that molesting little kids is something that every American billionaire has to do now and then in order to show the world that he has no boundaries and can keep the law dogs on their leash.
It’s pretty clear at this point that Trump will not be our president. I’d be surprised if he even gets 35%.
This, of course, will hand Hillary a landslide victory. Think about that for a moment–Hillary Wins By A Landslide! And she, so completely out of tune with the American people, will see that as an endorsement and will plow forward, full steam ahead with business as usual and much, much worse.
So our goal now must be to make sure that Hillary does NOT win by a landslide. They can’t throw in your face any more that if you don’t vote for Hillary, Trump might win. There is almost no chance of that.
You can now fearlessly vote third party/independent.
During this illogical rant, the author fails to mention that democrat Ed Koch was mayor during the attack and democrat David Dinkins was mayor during the trial. Also we fail to see in this article that the DA, Robert M. Morgenthau, and the prosecutors were all democrats.
This shows the cognitive dissonance of liberals. We have a totally democratic city, run by a democratic political machine — that wrongly convicts four black man — yet somehow this huge machine of injustice is overlooked by the liberals who helped create it — and instead a buffoonish billionaire is blamed for convicting these men.
Notice how the liberal author immediately assumes Clinton is the paragon of truth claiming she,” has tried to move past her own rhetoric about “superpredators.”
I ask the author how does she know this? Or do liberal journalists just assume what liberal politicians say are undisputed facts. Perhaps Hillary is only pandering to the black community, yet this possibility is never even imagined in this article.
Advice to liberals who really care about injustice: If you want to stop black youth from being wrongly convicted, I think the mayor’s office and the DA are places to start — not rants about reality star hosts during an election.
I don’t see where the author accused Mr. Trump of anything. She just mentioned his unbelievably racist actions and behavior.
Also, she actually criticized Mrs. Clinton.
I don’t understand where you get the the political bias from. It must be somewhere between the lines, or maybe I am not able to comprehend correctly. The article I read was critical of flaws in the justice system and the terrible impasse the death penalty leads to.
“As Trump showed in his defense of sexual assault, some people will never admit they are wrong. ”
This, and many other throwaway lines along with it, represent nothing but leftist demagoguery. Apparently all of you would rather have an ENABLER of a SERIAL RAPIST in the Presidency, instead of someone who just said some inappropriate things on a bus once, 11 years ago.
I heard worse language at my college fraternity.
Someone left the pen door open on Breitbart.
I was all set to tear Trump a new one for the day, but reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case it seems anything but clear. They were exonerated for the rape, yes — but they apparently were part of some “wilding” phenomenon. I never am one to believe confessions (I mean, why would anyone, in a logical world, confess?) but I’m by no means convinced from what I read that they weren’t there.
There is a bizarre disconnect in American judicial policy where some people receive absolute blame for anything someone else did — like if they agree to join in a robbery and the next day without their knowledge one of their buddies goes in and shoots somebody – while other people receive none — like if they are in a mob of people kicking somebody on the ground and the prosecutor can’t prove which one delivered the fatal kick. It is freakish, bizarre, inexcusable. So in judicial terms, they can be ‘innocent’ of the rape even if, say, they knocked the lady to the ground and someone else in the same mob with the same intent jumped on her, or if all they did was ‘feel her tits’. I don’t know if that happened, but for now I’m not convinced to get out my banner and march against someone saying something nasty about them. I’m also not sure where the $41 million in compensation came from – that seems awfully high compared to a lot of people more unambiguously wronged by the police or prosecutors.
So, that the frame up was tailored to fit where possible becomes evidence that it wasn’t a total frame up. That the incrementalism of the techniques used to force them to confess involved starting with browbeating them into confessing to first being nearby, then being present, then to doing small things doesn’t trigger your realization that it was a coercive process run wild until the very last thing, the ‘confession’ to something that the evidence shows they absolutely didn’t do. That the same coercive techniques were used to get rid of inconvenient things like witnesses that placed them elsewhere to allow the frame up to seem credible doesn’t occur to you. Nope, for you that these five were the target makes it likely that they were guilty of some involvement, despite, you know, that the person it can be proved did the crime did the similar crimes he did all alone.
One thing I don’t see in all the apologies of that case is any claim that the kids were just at home watching TV. To the contrary, to quote http://info.nhpr.org/innocence-and-injustice-central-park-five :
Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam and Raymond Santana Jr. — all between the ages of 14 and 16 — were hardly innocents. The night of Meili’s rape, they prowled Central Park and perpetrated random crimes, terrorizing two cyclists and two joggers, beating one severely enough to hospitalize him. After the cyclists reported this scattering of assaults to a nearby police precinct, the teenagers were brought in and held until the arrival of their guardians. Meili’s lifeless and savagely beaten body had yet to be discovered. But when a patrolman found her in the muddy puddle where she’d been left, the young men became immediate suspects. Over the next many hours and into the morning, the police coerced confessions from the group…
I mean, if you’re going to hand $41 million to these fine community role models, I’d have been a lot happier to see the lawyer for that hospitalized jogger on hand to snatch the check out of their hands. I can picture them doing just as much time for the crimes they DID commit.
I’m no fan of Trump – people here know that – but I see no merit in knowingly becoming the sort of liberal that conservatives can put down fairly. I want them always to be in the wrong, and, well, that means sometimes acknowledging when they’re right.
How do you know the Central Park 5 were the specific one or ones, of the reported 40 or so youths having congregated in Central Park that night, who terrorized anyone? Or beat 1 person up? Were these specific charges ever proven in court? Even if the answer is yes, I find it unbelievable that you can “picture” them doing up to 14 years in prison for it. I wouldn’t and I wouldn’t have been happy to see their $41M settlement go to the jogger either. I only wish the settlement had been more than it was, say $15M per person. $75M. Yep.
The duty of a prosecutor is to get justice, not to get a conviction. But our system is so badly broken that these people just try to get convictions regardless of actual guilt, because they’re mean-spirited and/or because they’re trying to get promoted.
Thank you, thank you for writing this article!! I couldn’t agree more! I have been ranting on FB how the media frankly I feel has been a little lazy in jumping to the more salacious “tape” scandal, when they could be reporting on how the tape, Trump’s position on the CP5, as well as his comments about his daughter should just find another job if she was sexually harassed in the workplace to paint a comprehensive portrait of Trump’s views on women, his “law and order” position, and his hypocrisy (especially now that he may be facing child rape charges). It’s so easy for people to dismiss one story, but when you put all the pieces of the puzzle together- it’s pretty damning.
Notwithstanding some of the inane, paranoid ranting below (from photosymbiosis), I very much appreciate this piece. I well recall Trump’s heinous carrying on about the Central Park Five and his utter unwillingness to admit he’d supported imprisoning innocent men after the truth became unassailable.
This site has been and is, publishing an avalanche of stories on what the Hillary emails reveal about her — it’s not pretty. I assure one and all, the Hillary partisans are furious and accusing this site of being a Putin pawn, under the control of Russian and etc ad lunitacum.
This article is titled “Donald Trump’s Ugly Attack on the Central Park Five Reflects All-Too-Common Attitude” yet it ends up reaching far beyond that to provide some Clintonian contrasts.
If the article had laid out Trump’s relentless attacks along with the similarities of prosecutors – fine, well done.
Both candidates are vile for their own reasons. The potential of this article is diluted by its politics.
Sure, yet another article by the Intercept (EBay News Outlet) on racism with a political pro-Clinton angle – while the other main story on racism, the Dakota Access Pipeline, gets ignored, even though there was a major court decision on the issue today. Why the silence?
Is it because the major holders of EBay, such as Vanguard Funds and State Street Corp, are also big investors in the Phillips 66-led consortium who is the lead partner in the Dakota Access Pipeline? Is it because the lead investor in Phillips 66, and thus in the Dakota Access Pipeline, is Warren Buffett, who is a big Hillary Clinton supporter, and thus off-limits for the Intercept?
Who do you think you’re fooling with this kind of coverage, really? Yes, we all know, Trump is horrible – but that doesn’t make Hillary Clinton any better, and trying to tap into racism while ignoring the real issues of economic and environmental racism, to give your preferred candidate a boost, is not journalism, it’s just marketing. You might as well be working for some PR firm, and they’d probably pay better too.
You are spamming this site now. This is OFF TOPIC. And it’s bullshit because
This
Story
Matters.
This is an appalling story of American racism and paranoia and it should certainly be told. Sorry if that doesn’t fit your agenda – although I hardly see how it reflects well on the Democratic Party either. Trump is hardly the only problem that this story is about.
And Hillary’s ugly, unfounded attacks on Putin are of greater significance.
Yea the Intercept never publishes shit about the DAP, except of course, when they do: https://theintercept.com/2016/09/01/dakota-access-export/
I too prioritize the Dakota Access Pipeline issue, along with other Native American and environmental issues, over this issue. But this is nevertheless an important issue. It’s not that The Intercept should not have covered this, it’s that they should cover the Dakota Access Pipeline issue also.
As to bias, there are plenty of stories here showing how awful Clinton is. There is no evidence that Clinton is The Intercept’s “preferred candidate.”
Indeed, any systemic disregard for the sanctity of human life is not only morally abhorrent but extremely dangerous – innocence or not. In the US we have empowered the state to quantify the value of unborn life via a viability standard that has not stood the test of time. With the advance of technology, scientists have managed to challenge the existing legal definition of viability to the point where one must consider the moment of conception itself as the defining lower limit of viability. In like manner, the state has been empowered by the people to make a legal determination as to the ongoing viability of convicted felons. In the latter case however, there is typically a reason based determination of life potential made by the justice system that, with each act, reinforces the false perception that we the people are possessed with with a degree of insight into human behavior necessary to the task of quantifying the intrinsic value of human life. With recent advances in neuroscience alone, one can not help but conclude that that which we once legally defined as “premeditated” violent, criminal behavior is better understood in terms of dual inheritance and/or epigenetics.
The Intercept has become way too biased, you showed good potential but I will never read your glorified blog again.
Don’t let the door etc.
True. Good were the times when the Intercept was a good, unbiased source of news.
Take a look of the comments on your posts, and you will see the (not so beautiful) gathering of fascists you were able to call your audience now.
I hope you are delighted if you achieve your goal of electing Trump. He’s just great, isn’t he?
I am sure it’s been fun to mainly ignore all the crap it’s going on on his campaign, and who he is a d represents to our future.
Whatever. Obviously your call… Just never thought an “independent news” channel could become far worse than fox news.
Congratulations, that’s really something.
Glenn must have learned a thing or two in Brasil.
The Intercept has been critical of both candidates.
You seem concerned that your candidate, presumably Clinton, still doesn’t have enough support to win the election despite nearly all of the mainstream media and some Republicans backing her.
Trump is the best Republican candidate for Clinton – one who can provide cover for her crimes and misdemeanors.
If it were someone else, she’d be trailing him in the polls.