Not so black and white
CENTRAL PARK FIVE WRONGLY CONVICTED BUT THEY WEREN’T INNOCENTS
Author, director and producer Sarah Burns was in Toronto earlier this week, taking questions after a screening of The Central Park Five, the 2012 documentary she made with her father, celebrated filmmaker Ken Burns, and her husband, David McMahon.
Ms. Burns was articulate and seemed genuinely passionate about telling the story of the five black and Latino teenagers (now middle-aged men) who were wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1989 rape of a white female jogger in New York’s Central Park.
The men were exonerated when a murderer and serial rapist named Matias Reyes later confessed to the crime, but they had already served between six and 13 years in prison, effectively losing their adolescence.
In the film, which is based on Sarah Burns’ book on the same subject, we get a painfully close look at how readily five kids were cajoled, exhausted and frightened into confessing to a crime they didn’t commit.
And how easily New Yorkers accepted their presumed guilt.
“These young men were convicted long before the trial,” Burns says, “by a city blinded by fear and, equally, freighted by race.”
Through the work in her book and film, as well as in person, Burns comes across as an intelligent, compassionate person driven to tell the world about the horrifying injustice visited upon the five men.
(In the film, four of the five men appear on camera to tell their story, as do some of their devastated relatives, which makes for a heavy emotional impact. The fifth man contributes his comments through voice over.)
Never did I get the sense that Burns was presenting anything less than what she felt was an objective depiction of what happened to the men, and yet it was hard to leave the screening of The Central Park Five (especially when it was complemented by Burns’s candid in-person commentary) without feeling that she and her co-directors have been blinded themselves by their outrage over the unfair, life-destroying treatment the five received.
Don’t get me wrong; the evidence that the Central Park Five were innocent in the rape of the jogger (who eventually identified herself as Trisha Meili) is overwhelming, and pretty much everyone in the world except Donald Trump has come to agree that they should never have been convicted and imprisoned. (OK, maybe everyone in the world except Donald Trump and the prosecutors who worked on the case.)
But whether any or all of the five were innocent of lesser but still serious transgressions and crimes is never fully addressed in the film.
The night of the rape, the men were part of a large group of boys that harassed, attacked and assaulted eight victims in Central Park, some at about the same time that Reyes was assaulting Meili elsewhere in the park. The directors don’t press the men on the extent of their involvement with these incidents, which left several of the victims bloody and unconscious.
And as Manohla Dargis points out in a perceptive 2012 review of the film, someone who only watched the movie wouldn’t know that there were credible accounts that placed several of the five boys in neighbourhood groups that engaged in brutal violence.
Or that many AfricanAmerican New Yorkers were as quick to assume the boys’ guilt as white New Yorkers, not because they were blinded by race, but because, as Dargis puts it, “the fears that gripped so many were not hysterical but grounded in lived, sometimes terrifying experience.”
As a viewer, I felt frustrated.
The film and Burns rightly underline how much damage the police and prosecutors did in the Central Park jogger case by oversimplifying and bending facts to fit a narrative they’d already embraced.
The film and Burns (and her co-directors) then do something similar in kind, if not in effect, by reducing the case to a clear story of bad people wronging good people, rather than the complex mingling of varying human motivations, memories, and consciences that inform the monolithic issue of race.
It was interesting that when speaking to the Toronto audience the other night, Burns called Matias Reyes (whom she spoke with in jail as part of the project) a sociopath; and she seemed to categorize him as simply rotten to the core.
He may be both of those things, and he’s certainly committed vile and horrific crimes.
But isn’t his story — isn’t everyone’s story — slightly more complex? And shouldn’t one of the lessons of the Central Park Five’s ordeal be to search for every person’s individual humanity? To remember that the bad guy has a grieving mother, too?
Questioning and probing a six-year-old movie about an almost 30-year-old crime may seem like a belated exercise, but how and why the Central Park Five ended up behind bars remain surprisingly contemporary questions.
Director Ava DuVernay just issued a casting call for a new Netflix series about the five, and several of the five still appear regularly in headlines related to their ordeal.
That’s why insisting on honouring the intricacies and complications of the story is still a necessary endeavour, even today.
THESE MEN WERE CONVICTED LONG BEFORE THE TRIAL.