The Central Park Five: The Central Park Jogger Case (Part II)

Pretrial evidence

Four of the five had confessed to police about other attacks in the park in other areas on the night of April 19, including the assault and robbery of John Loughlin, to which they said they were witnesses or participants. Salaam's unsigned statement also covered the range of actions and crimes.  According to The New York Times, their accounts of these other attacks were accurate, unlike their confessions to the assault on the jogger.  Only Wise made any statement about the different times and locations of the jogger attack, and detectives had taken him to the park to the crime scene before he made his videotaped confession.

Each of the suspects had made different errors in time and place about the jogger attack in their confessions, with most placing it near the reservoir.  None of the five said that he had raped the jogger, but each confessed to having been an accomplice to the rape.  Each youth said that he had only helped restrain the jogger, or touched her, while one or more others had raped her. Their confessions varied as to who they identified as having participated in the rape, including naming several youths who were never charged.  In his untaped confession, Salaam claimed to have struck the jogger with a pipe at the beginning of the incident.

Although four suspects (all except Salaam) confessed on videotape in the presence of a parent or guardian (who had generally not been present during the interrogations), each of the four retracted his statement within weeks. Together they claimed that they had been intimidated, lied to, and coerced by police into making false confessions. While the confessions were videotaped, the hours of interrogation that preceded the confessions were not.

Numerous pretrial hearings were conducted by Judge Thomas B. Galligan of the State Supreme Court of Manhattan, who had been assigned the case. Since 1986, judges were generally assigned by lottery, but the court administrator assigned him to this case.   In one of the pre-trial hearings, on February 23, 1990, Galligan ruled that he would accept the videotaped confessions and Salaam's unsigned statement as prosecution evidence at trial, despite defense counsel's objections.  He said that Salaam's statement was being admitted as evidence because Salaam had lied to the police about his age and showed them false identification.  Salaam was implicated in the rape by the confessions of the other four youths.

Analysis indicated that none of the suspects' DNA matched either of the two DNA samples collected from the crime scene (from the jogger's cervix and running sock), but results were reported as "inconclusive" by the police.

Trials

In 1990 the six suspects (incl. Steve Lopez) indicted in the attack on the female jogger and other crimes were scheduled for trial. The prosecution arranged to try the six defendants in the Meili case in two separate groups. This enabled them to control the order in which certain evidence would be introduced to the court.

Lopez was scheduled to be tried in January 1991, after the two other groups of defendants in the rape and assault case. He had denied any knowledge of the rape in his videotaped confession but was implicated by other defendants' statements. Like the five others, he was also indicted on charges related to the attack and robbery of Loughlin.

First trial

In the first trial, which began June 25 and ended on August 18, 1990, defendants Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, and Raymond Santana were tried. Each of the teenagers had his own defense counsel.  The jury consisted of four white Americans, four black Americans, three Hispanic Americans, and one Asian American.  Meili testified at the trial, but her identity was not given to the court. None of the three defense attorneys cross-examined her.

The jury deliberated for 10 days before rendering its verdict on August 18. Each of the three youths was acquitted of attempted murder, but convicted of assault and rape of the female jogger, and convicted of assault and robbery of John Loughlin, a male jogger who was badly beaten that night in Central Park.   Salaam and McCray were 15 years old, and Santana 14 years old, at the time of the crime.  As such, they were each sentenced by Judge Thomas B. Galligan to the maximum allowed for juveniles, 5–10 years each in a youth correctional facility.

Second trial

The second trial, of Kevin Richardson and Korey Wise began October 22, 1990, and also lasted about two months, ending in December.  Kevin Richardson, 14 years old at the time of the crime, had been free on $25,000 bail before the trial.

Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Lederer had a lengthy opening statement, and Wise broke down at the defense table after it, weeping and shouting that she had lied. He was removed temporarily from the courtroom. Richardson's defense counsel made a motion for a mistrial, because of the potential effect on the jury, but the judge rejected it. The trial proceeded.

The defense attorneys noted that each youth had limited intellectual ability and said that neither was capable of preparing the written statements or videotaped confessions submitted by the prosecution as evidence. They contended that the confessions had been coerced from youths vulnerable to pressure because of their age and their intellectual capacity.

Meili testified again at this trial; again, her name was not given in court. This time one of the defense counsels, Wise's lawyer, cross-examined her. She later said in an interview on Oprah: "I'll tell you what—I didn't feel wonderful about the boys' defense attorneys, especially the one who cross-examined me. He was right in front of my face and, in essence, calling me a slut by asking questions like 'When's the last time you had sex with your boyfriend?'"  Wise's lawyer had also asked her whether she had ever been assaulted by men in her life, suggested that a man she knew may have attacked her, and implied that her injuries were not as severe as they had been presented.

Richardson was the only one of the five defendants to be convicted of attempted murder of Meili, in addition to sodomy and assault of her, and robbery and riot in the attack on John Loughlin, another jogger in the park.  He was sentenced to 5–10 years in a juvenile facility.

Korey Wise, 16 years old at the time of the crime, was acquitted of rape and attempted murder. At trial, Melody Jackson—the sister of one of Wise's friends—testified that while incarcerated in the Rikers Island he had told her that he had restrained and fondled the jogger.  Wise was convicted of lesser charges of sexual abuse, assault, and riot in the attack on the female jogger and on Loughlin.  Because of his age and the violent nature of the felony charge, he was tried and sentenced as an adult, receiving 5–15 years in an adult prison.  After the verdict, Wise shouted at the prosecutor: "You're going to pay for this. Jesus is going to get you. You made this up."

Jurors who agreed to interviews after the trials said that they were not convinced by the youths' confessions but were impressed by the physical evidence introduced by the prosecutors: semen, grass, dirt, and two hairs described as "consistent with" the victim's hair that was recovered from Richardson's underpants.

According to an FBI expert who gave evidence at the trial, all five defendants' could be excluded as being the man who had left the two semen samples left inside Meili and on a sock.   In total, 14 men were tested, including the defendants and Meili's former boyfriend, and all were excluded.  The semen belonged to another, unidentified male. Years later, more advanced DNA testing also revealed that the hairs in Richardon's clothes did not match the victim.

Sentencing and appeals

After the guilty verdicts, the judge sentenced the defendants to the maximum for the charges and their ages. The four youths under 16 were sentenced to 5–10 years each. They had been held in a juvenile facility since their arrest. Wise at 16 was tried and sentenced as an adult because of the nature of the violent felony charges against him, under the Juvenile Offender Law of 1978.  He was sentenced to 5–15 years.

Four of the five youths appealed their convictions in the rape case the following year, but Santana did not appeal. Each of the convictions was upheld.

The sentences each of them served is as follows:

Yusef Salaam served 6 years and 8 months in juvenile detention from 1990 to 1996 and was released on parole

Raymond Santana served 6 years and 8 months in juvenile detention from 1990 to 1996 and was released on parole. In 1998, he violated his parole and was sentenced to 3.5–7 years prison on drug charges. He was released and exonerated in 2002.

Kevin Richardson served 7 years in juvenile detention from 1990 to 1997 and was released on parole.

Antron McCray was sentenced to 5–10 years in juvenile detention. He served 6 years from 1990-1996 and was released on parole.

Korey Wise was sentenced to 6–15 years in prison on sexual abuse, assault, and riot. He served 13 years and 8 months in multiple state prisons: Rikers' Island Prison in 1990, Attica Correctional Facility in 1991, Wende State Penitentiary in 1993 and Auburn State Correctional Facility in 2001. In this prison, Wise met Matias Reyes, who was later found to have had actually assaulted and raped Meili. Reyes confessed and Wise was released in 2002.

On appeal, Salaam's attorneys charged that he had been held by police without access to parents or guardians. The majority appellate court decision upheld his conviction, noting that Salaam had initially lied to police about his age, claiming to be 16 and backing up his claim with a forged transit pass that, falsely, indicated that he was 16. This was the age at which a suspect could be questioned without a parent or guardian present. When Salaam informed police of his true age, they allowed his mother entry to the interrogation room.

Biases affecting the convictions

In a 2016 Guardian article, defense counsel William Warren was reported saying that he thought Trump's ads in 1989 had played a role in securing conviction by the juries, saying that "he poisoned the minds of many people who lived in New York City and who, rightfully, had a natural affinity for the victim."  He noted, "Notwithstanding the jurors' assertions that they could be fair and impartial, some of them or their families, who naturally have influence, had to be affected by the inflammatory rhetoric in the ads."  In 2019 Time magazine also assessed Trump's ads in 1989 as having adversely affected the case for the defendants.

In a 1991 New York Review of Books article, which was the first mainstream piece arguing that the Five's convictions had been wrongful, Joan Didion suggested the verdicts stemmed from a cultural crisis, writing that "So fixed were the emotions provoked by this case that the idea that there could have been, for even one juror, even a moment's doubt in the state's case… seemed, to many in the city, bewildering, almost unthinkable: the attack on the jogger had by then passed into narrative, and the narrative was...about what was wrong with the city and about its solution".

January 1991 plea bargain for Lopez

Although Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Lederer had said she would not accept a plea deal for any of the defendants indicted in the rape case, she did come to agreement with Steve Lopez and his attorney in the court on January 30, 1991, prior to a new jury being selected for his trial. He was considered the final of the six defendants in the jogger trial. Because Lopez had not acknowledged participating at all in the rape in his statement to police and prosecution witnesses had withdrawn from testifying, based on what they said was fear of self-recrimination or "fear of their own safety", according to Lederer, the prosecution's case was extremely weak.  Although some of the five defendants who had been convicted had accused Lopez in their statements of the most severe violence against the jogger, these could not be used against him because of their convictions.

After agreeing to the plea deal, Judge Galligan allowed Lopez to remain free on $25,000 bail until sentencing.  He was sentenced in March 1991 to 1½ to 4½ years, after pleading guilty to the mugging of jogger John Loughlin. Because Lopez was younger than 16 at the time of the crime, he was sentenced to serve his time in a juvenile facility.

Serving time

The four youngest of the five convicted defendants each served between six and seven years in juvenile facilities. Richardson, Salaam, and Santana attended classes. Each earned a GED and also completed an associate degree while there.

Richardson and Salaam were released in 1997. Afterward Salaam talked about how important family was. He was part of an Islamic community and served as a spiritual leader at his youth facility, but talked about how important his mother's visits had been. He was held at a juvenile facility in upstate New York about five miles from the Canadian border and hours from New York City, but she came to see him three times a week.

Wise had to serve all of his time in adult prison and encountered so much personal violence that he asked to stay in isolation for extended periods. He was held at four different prisons, having asked for transfers in the hope of improving his situation.  He was released in August 2002, the last of the five men to leave prison.

Through this period, each of the five continued to maintain their innocence in the rape and attack of Meili, including at hearings before parole boards. While they acknowledged "witnessing or participating in other wrongdoing" in the park, they each maintained innocence in the attack of Meili.

Convictions vacated in 2002

Assailant

In 2001, convicted serial rapist and murderer Matias Reyes was serving a life sentence in New York State. He had never been identified as a suspect in the Central Park attack on Meili, although he had been at large at the time. Reyes was believed to have raped another woman in the same area of the park during the day on April 17, two days before the attack on Meili. Initially, the Meili case was investigated as a homicide, and the April 17 rape was investigated as a rape assault, which resulted in a lack of comparison of the DNA recovered in the two cases.  The NYPD did not have a DNA database until 1994; after that, detectives and prosecutors had access to common information about DNA from evidence and taken from suspects in certain crimes.  During the summer of 1989, Reyes raped four more women, killing one; and was interrupted after robbing a fifth.

In 2001 Reyes met Wise when they were held at the Auburn Correctional Facility in upstate New York.  In 2002, Reyes told officials that on the night of April 19, 1989, he had assaulted and raped the female jogger. He was 17 years old at the time of the assault and said that he had committed it alone.  Reyes was then working at an East Harlem convenience store on Third Avenue and 102nd Street, and living in a van on the street.

District Attorney Robert Morgenthau appointed a team led by Assistant District Attorneys Nancy Ryan and Peter Casolaro to investigate the case, based on Reyes's confession and a review of evidence. Reyes provided officials with a detailed account of the attack, details of which were corroborated by other evidence which the police held.  In addition, his DNA matched the DNA evidence at the scene, confirming that he was the sole source of the semen found in and on the victim "to a factor of one in 6,000,000,000 people".  In announcing these facts, Morgenthau also said that the perpetrator had tied up Meili with her T-shirt in a distinctive fashion that Reyes used again on later victims in crimes for which he was convicted.

Based on interviews and other evidence, the team believed that Reyes had acted alone: The rape appeared to have taken place in the North Woods area after the main body of the thirty teenagers had moved well to the south and the timeline reconstruction of events made it unlikely that he was joined by any of the defendants. In addition, Reyes was not known to have been associated with any of the six indicted defendants. He lived at 102nd Street, in what locals considered another neighborhood. None of the six defendants in the rape mentioned him by name in association with the rape.

Reyes was not prosecuted for the rape of Meili because the statute of limitations had passed.  At the time of his confession, Reyes had been convicted and sentenced to life in state prison for raping and robbing four other women in the summer of 1989, murdering one of them and robbing another. In a plea deal, he pleaded guilty to the top counts in each of the five cases on November 1, 1991.

DNA analysis of the strands of hair found on the clothing of two of the defendants, conducted with advanced technology not available at the time of their trial, established that the hair did not belong to the victim, despite what the prosecution had testified to at trial.

Based on the newly discovered evidence, each of the five men who had been convicted of charges related to the rape of Meili filed motions to have their convictions set aside and for the court "to grant whatever further relief may be just and proper."