Open up the jogger files.

Asserting he is conscience-bound, Mayor de Blasio has approved a $41 million settlement for the five men convicted and then freed in the Central Park jogger rape. “An injustice was done and we have a moral obligation to respond to that injustice,” the mayor said of the compensation to be paid to the then-teenagers swept up in the racially charged prosecution almost a quarter-century ago.

Regardless of de Blasio’s certainty, there has been nothing simple about the case from its start on the night of April 19, 1989, when Trisha Meili, a white 28-year-old jogger, was raped and beaten to within a millimeter of her life.

The defendants — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Kharey Wise — ranged in age from 14 to 16. Four are black; one is Hispanic.

At a moment when New York was ravaged by violent crime and troubled by divided race relations, the Manhattan district attorney’s office in two trials convicted the five for the rape as well as random assaults in the park by a group of teens in what was called a night of “wilding.”

Then in 2002, imprisoned psychopath Matias Reyes confessed that he had committed the rape and insisted he had acted alone. When his DNA matched the the only semen found at the crime scene, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau vacated all convictions, including those for the unrelated assaults.

He employed the legal standard that the juries would likely have seen things differently had Reyes testified at the trials. Importantly, he did not exonerate the five. One result is persistent controversy over the justice they are due.

As de Blasio pays the $41 million, he must release all evidence and testimony gathered in a decade-long federal suit in which the five men alleged police and prosecutors conspired to wrongfully convict them. Those records, now sealed, include the sworn testimony of the five, Reyes’ statements and the testimony of the dozens of cops and prosecutors who sent the teenagers to prison — and who maintain that they acted properly throughout. An NYPD review, conducted by an outside lawyer, reached the same conclusion.

The murk persists because the five were convicted almost solely on the basis of statements they gave to police and prosecutors, including videotaped interviews conducted in most cases in the presence of their parents.

Each of the five put himself at the scene of the rape, while minimizing his own involvement. Each offered details consistent with the known facts. They were variously implicated by their own admissions and the statements of others in four additional assaults and attempted assaults.

Among many examples, with his father and mother present, McCray described the attacks of the night. After his mother left the room, he said he had been the third to assault Meili, and was “on top” while someone else held her down.

In 1994, McCray and Santana admitted to the park assaults in parole hearings, while continuing to assert their innocence in the rape. In 2002, in interviews with detectives reexamining the case, Richardson and Santana did the same.

After Reyes came forward, Assistant District Attorney Nancy Ryan took a fresh look at the five’s statements and deemed them far less solid than they had once seemed. She found “troubling discrepancies” on “virtually every major aspect of the crime — who initiated the attack, who knocked the victim down, who undressed her, who struck her, who held her, who raped her, what weapons were used in the course of the assault, and when in the sequence of events the attack took place.”

Most crucially, Ryan found a point that was not raised by prosecutors or defense attorneys at either trial — that the teenagers implicated themselves in assaults that took place elsewhere in the park at the time of the rape. If true, that is persuasive evidence that the five are, in fact, innocent of any participation in raping the jogger.

That, in turn, points to a catastrophic criminal justice failure — and cause for the mayor to pay compensation on moral grounds, even though there is no known proof of a conspiracy to railroad the five. With the payment, he owes the public the full record of events so it can evaluate his judgment and understand what went wrong in one of New York’s most historic prosecutions.