The Central Park Five Essay

The Central Park Five

Knowing what I did before this class, I didn’t think it was possible to wrongly convict a person, let alone five, to this magnitude. I always thought multiple pieces of evidence were needed to process forward in a case. Everything about this case was handled poorly from the start of wrongfully accusing the five adolescents, to pressuring them to make up confessions, and all the way to the end. This is an incident in which public opinion alone convicted these kids. This portrays how the police and district attorneys regarded these kids as guilty from the beginning before it even reached the courts. Authorities coerced them into making incriminating statements against each other, and they were victims of false arrest, malicious prosecution and racially motivated conspiracy. This was the result of the social injustices in New York City during 1989. At the time this case resulted in convicting five 14-16 year old juveniles and forcing them into giving false statements of guilt just to close a case under pressure. As a result it let the actual guilty person to roam free and commit more rapes while these innocent kids were being convicted.

The pressure from the authorities and prosecuting attorneys forced them into committing false confessions. The interrogators lied to these kids by promising to let them go after answering some questions. The kids were cooperative at the start because they just wanted to go home. Although the interrogators had their own agenda of squeezing confessions out of these susceptible targets. The only dirt they had on the kids was that they were wilding in central park at the estimated time of the assault and rape. They cops had their own racist agenda out too because these were boys of color. This was during a dark period where a majority of the crime that ran rampant was caused by black adolescents because of the new crack epidemic in the streets.

The Police at the Central Park Precinct, the prosecuting attorney,...