By Jamiles Lartey, Photo: Steven Hirsch/New York Post/Associated Press, The Marshall Project, July 30, 2022
If there’s one story of wrongful conviction that most people know, it’s that of the Exonerated Five. The New York City teens, all Black or Latino, were convicted in the 1989 rape of a Central Park jogger, and incarcerated for six to 14 years each before another man confessed.
Few people remembered that there was a sixth defendant on that indictment: Steven Lopez, who had accepted a plea deal for a lesser charge before trial and served about three years in prison. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg finally exonerated Lopez this week.
It’s a powerful reminder that even in cases that would seem to be under a microscope, wrongful convictions are shot through the criminal system, and for the innocent, there’s rarely a simple path to exoneration, or back to life on the outside.
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