Central Park Five Summary

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In the Central Park Five were about five boys living in a low-income neighborhood in Harlem, Manhattan. On the night of April 19, 1989, all five boys decided to go to Central Park with 25 other teenagers to go fight, rob and have fun. Later that night, Trisha Meili was sexually assaulted that same night the boys were there. After that attack, the five Black and Hispanic boys whose names are, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise were arrested and taken to investigation, with a lack of evidence that they committed the crime, they stayed there for more than 30 hours without seeing their family, being put under a lot of pressure to confess a crime they didn’t do, and being scared and confused on why they …show more content…

They were placed in prison for 7 years and released on a promise not to get in trouble again. After getting out of prison on their personal record they were known as “sex offenders”, which made it hard for them to get a job and live a stable life, this caused Raymond Santana to sell drugs and go back to prison. Later, Mathias Reyes confessed to doing the crime that the Central Park five boys were wrongly accused of, his DNA evidence proved that he was the one who did it. In 2014 Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise filed for a civil lawsuit against NYC for $41 Million dollars for taking their youth away, for wrongly accusing them, and for emotional distress. What the Central Park Five documentary tells me about the criminal justice system is that they only see race and not the action of the crime in this …show more content…

Because they were Black and Hispanic, they were immediately labeled as criminals. The racism led them to be automatically suspects of the attack on Trisha Meili, this caused them to be treated harshly while being interrogated, being told, “You did it” and not able to see their family, and the role of the media that played in this documentary by making stereotypes toward Black and Hispanic people that they all committed crimes. In the documentary about the Central Park Five it tells us that the criminal justice system will do anything to get the case said and done quickly by, “they had made up a story something like we have your prints on her pants. how did they take my prints and put it on her pants”(39:00-39:10). This shows that the criminal justice system doesn’t care about the case and wants to get it done fast so they can be known as the hero who did justice for the white women who were assaulted by the Black and Hispanic group of boys. Later in the documentary at (1:05:45) it said in a newspaper, “DNA prints fail to identify the jogger’s

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