For Central Park Five, wrongful conviction meets false equivalence

Fri, 03 May 2013 22:36:00 +0000

In Friday’s New York Times, columnist Jim Dwyer appears to equate the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of five innocent teenagers in the notorious Central Park jogger case -- including Raymond Santana, a co-author of this column -- to the dissemination of an online petition demanding professional accountability against the prosecutor who helped put them there.

“It was a simple task to discover [prosecutor] Elizabeth Lederer on Google, just as those boys were easy to find in the park,” Dwyer writes. “The petition has found someone to blame, repeating the very mistake of the injustice it deplores.”

Indeed, the petition started by Frank Chi (the other co-author of this column) to fire Elizabeth Lederer from Columbia Law School may have affected her online search results. But by reading Dwyer’s column, you’d think her life was ruined. Locked up, key thrown away.

“The Central Park Five”: New York’s darkest hour

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 22:07:00 +0000

If you lived in New York in 1989 – hell, if you lived in America in 1989 and were over 12 years old – then you remember the story of the Central Park jogger. It was a terrible case that seemed to epitomize everything that had gone wrong in America’s greatest city during the reigns of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush -- the toxic combination of exploding Wall Street wealth, skyrocketing crime, the crack epidemic and worsening racial tension. This was the “Bonfire of the Vanities” New York, the “American Psycho” New York, in which newly created or reinforced classes, the super-rich and the alienated poor, faced off in nearly open warfare. The legendary power of that failing city is such that many contemporary visitors to New York still expect the Bronx to be on fire and Central Park to be an uninhabited zone of “muggers and trash,” in the words of my mother-in-law, and are startled by the affluent chain-store bustle of 21st century Manhattan.

Salon.com > The Central Park Five

For Central Park Five, wrongful conviction meets false equivalence

“The Central Park Five”: New York’s darkest hour