By Janell Ross, NBC News, June 2, 2019.
Last month, after a pair of screenings of the director Ava DuVernay’s Central Park Five series in New York — one audience overwhelmingly white and the other overwhelmingly black — a general reaction could be heard.
The series was good, but hard, audience members said as they filed out of the screenings. It was hard to watch.
But the horrific case dramatized in DuVernay’s series was not a 1,000-year flood event, belonging to the country’s past. Elements of what led to the Central Park Five wrongful convictions, experts say, are recurrent and ongoing features of American justice.
The series, released on Netflix on Friday, captures the human price of one of America’s most infamous criminal justice odysseys. In 1989, five boys, all black and Latino and 16 or younger, were falsely accused of a brutal rape in New York’s Central Park. The victim had no memory of the crime and nearly died. After extended interrogations that featured the denial of sleep, food and parents, as well as promises the boys could go home after confessing, four of the five made false confessions, implicating one another in the crime, on tape.
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