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Central Park Five Case Study

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Central Park spreads across 843 acres in the heart of New York. It is a calming place where people take their families for a relaxing day, walk their dogs, and exercise by running or walking through. This is a place known for its relaxing views and a place where you would believe a lack of violence to be. This all changed with the Central Park Five case. The Central Park Five case took place in 1989, this case was when five teenage males, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam, and Korey Wise, were charged with the rape and assault of Trisha Meili. These five boys were all present in Central Park the night of Meili’s assault and that night, April 19th 1989, they were taken to the central park precinct. They were questioned for over twenty-four hours and forced to give a false confession. They were proven innocent thirteen years later when Reyes admitted to the crime and was proven guilty. All of the boys spent at least seven years in prison for this crime they did not even …show more content…

He shows how he feels about the whole case and how the boys were falsely accused. He focused on how the boys’ “innocence never go the attention that their guilt did” (Wilder). These boys were guilty from the very beginning until proven innocent thirteen years after the crime was committed. Usually it’s the other way around and a person is innocent until proven guilty. The public was so caught up in the prejudice of the case and just assumed since there was a high crime rate in black and Hispanic boys that they had to have done it. They just wanted justice for the jogger but they never thought of the people on the other side of this case because there was a chance that they could have been guilty. Wilder stated that “these were five kids who we tormented, we falsely accused, we pilloried in the press, we attacked, we invented phrases for the imagined crimes that we’re accusing them of”

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