Review of The Central Park Five (2012) by John C — 26 Apr 2013

"Justice is blind" isn't supposed to mean this. As documentaries are supposed to make a viewer think and ponder and wait and think some more, The Central Park Five succeeds on that front while also making one's blood begin to boil.

This is a documentary about a wrongly-convicted set of innocents who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time ... and who also happened to be the wrong color (uhm, they won't say it; but .

..). Based upon the infamous 1989 jogger rape case in New York City's Central Park in which a white woman was beaten, bound, raped and left for dead; Central Park Five is about five young boys between the ages of 14-17 (all having a darker skin tone) who were coerced into giving false statements as New York detectives, police and attorneys wanted a closed-door case to establish that NYC was toughening-up on crime (per beloved mayor Ed Koch).

That their (coerced) false testimonies didn't even match up and NO DNA linked a single one of them to the crime scene, their skin tone was enough to convince the powers that be that they were guilty (because they had been causing trouble elsewhere in the Park that night .

.. and actually at the EXACT same time the woman was raped). Much like the West Memphis Three case, this is yet another example of justice being blind. One of the more interesting elements of the Ken Burns film to me was seeing his portrait/story of 1980s NYC and how night/day different it is compared to the city of today.

While some things have changed, others have remained the same.