The Central Park Five  is a 2012 documentary film about the Central Park Jogger case, directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon. It was released in the US on November 23, 2012. Critic A. O. Scott of The New York Times said of the film, which he ranked as the fifth best documentary of 2012: “A notorious crime — the rape of a jogger in Central Park in 1989 — is revisited in this painful, angry, scrupulously reported story of race, injustice and media frenzy.

Mass hysteria always makes perfect sense when we are trapped in it. It can take decades — or even longer — before the crazed irrationality of a particular episode shows itself for what it was. That realization comes through with considerable force in a new documentary  about the case of the five black and Hispanic teenagers who were wrongly convicted in the beating and rape of a young, white jogger in Central Park in the spring of 1989.The film, written and produced by the documentarian Ken Burns, with his daughter, Sarah Burns, and her husband, David McMahon, offers a matter-of-fact but profoundly disturbing depiction of the forces that led citizens, politicians, the media and the criminal justice system to brush past yawning gaps in the evidence in the case. The five teenagers, aged 14 to 16, were convicted — based on confessions they say were coerced — in what former Mayor Ed Koch describes in the film as “the crime of the century.”

The convictions were overturned in 2002, after a serial rapist and murderer, who had staged a similar attack in the park just 48 hours before the one on the jogger, stepped forward to admit his crime, saying that he had acted alone.

An exhaustive investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office corroborated the man’s story — noting that his DNA had been found at the scene and that there was no physical evidence to tie the five teenagers to the very bloody crime scene. The investigation report, which recommended that the court overturn the convictions, seemed to suggest that the five should never have been indicted at all. But by that time, Kharey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam and Raymond Santana had completed their sentences and been robbed of their young lives.

Read more here:

That Terrible Time by Bob Herbert

I think it is now impossible to know what the five accused boys — now men — did or did not do to the jogger. But whatever the truth is, there was no provision in the reality of New York in 1989 and 1990 that could have accommodated their acquittal. We pronounced them guilty the first time we ever heard of them, and they remained guilty, until now.

Bob Herbert, your OPINION piece is a real POS. You helped destroy the lives of young innocent boys and don’t even have the decency to apologize. Your conscience has been seared with a hot iron.

Elizabeth Lederer, Bob Herbert, Pat Buchanan, Donald Trump & Pete Hamill..may God have mercy on your souls for the railroading of 5 innocent young boys who should have never been arrested. How do you sleep at night?

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, you need to do what is RIGHT for the Central Park Five.

Settle the case now!