Teenagers 'wrongly convicted' for Central Park rape

Most New Yorkers do not care to look back to the days when they were scared to venture out after dark and vicious crime was a reality of their city.

They especially prefer to forget the case of the Central Park jogger, a white investment banker who was brutally beaten and raped while on her daily evening run. Yet that one incident in 1989, which so graphically epitomised the sickness that then gripped a racially polarised metropolis, is again on the front pages.

It has returned because of evidence suggesting the trials that followed might have ended in a huge miscarriage of justice.

Tomorrow, the District Attorney of Manhattan, Robert Morgenthau, will go before a Supreme Court justice to reveal his opinion of the case. Most observers expect he will recommend that five youths convicted in two separate trials of committing gang rape should be exonerated.

The men were either black or Hispanic and aged between 14 and 16 at the time. They had joined about 40 Harlem youths in the park on a rampage.

Some called what they did "wilding" – roaming the dark pathways and with fists and sticks terrorising anyone they could find. About 12 people were attacked that night.

Under interrogation, four of the five made videotape confessions, three of them with their parents in attendance. "We grabbed her legs and stuff. Then we got a bunch of turns getting on her, like, getting on top of her," one said. "This is my first rape. This – I never did this before," said another.

At trial, the jurors did not worry that some of their evidence contradicted the testimony of other witnesses. Nor did the jurors balk at a lack of physical clues to link the youths to the jogger, aside from blond hairs. The jogger, found comatose and bleeding heavily hours later, was a blonde. DNA testing was not good enough then to match the hairs.

Things started to look a little different in January this year.

A convicted murderer and rapist named Matias Reyes told the prosecutor's office that he was the man who intercepted the jogger, dragged her 300 yards, beat her into submission and raped her in the park. He left her for dead, he said, adding that he was alone.

The five convicted of the crime and given sentences of between five and 15 years were already all out of prison. But Mr Morgenthau had no choice but to open a new investigation into the rape.

Very quickly, Mr Reyes' claim began to make sense.

More sophisticated DNA testing ascertained that the blond hairs had not come from the victim. More stunning still was an analysis of sperm found on her body and a sock. It had come from Reyes. By the end of the summer, Mr Morgenthau was hinting that he was inclined towards exoneration. Of the new evidence, he said: "I didn't expect this."

There is more. An examination of the times of the assault on the jogger and the other 11 attacks – one man was beaten to the point of unconsciousness – also raised questions. The confessions of the boys indicated that they had also participated in those attacks.

Yet the rape of the jogger and those other assorted attacks now seem to have happened in roughly the same time window, between 9pm and 9.40pm on 19 April 1989.

If that is true, how could the five have had the time to rape the jogger and join in the wider rampage?

Lawyers for the five – Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Kharey Wise – have increasingly voiced their confidence that the convictions will have to be reversed.

"We know the verdicts must be set aside by virtue of the law," one of the attorneys, Michael Warren, said this week. "Our clients are innocent. There has not been anything demonstrated to the contrary."

The implication is that the confessions were coerced by detectives over-anxious to answer the public clamour for quick convictions.

This does not sit well with everyone in the police department, however.

Some investigators have stepped forward to deny any such thing.

"I believe these kids did it. They said they did it," Bert Arroyo, who was the lead detective on the case, said earlier this year. "The videotapes speak for themselves."

But criminal experts say it is not unheard of for defendants to fabricate confessions, even if they are highly incriminating, because of the pressure of the moment, especially if they come from minority communities. Two of the defendants had unusually low IQ levels.

Last week there were reports that the jogger was intending to waive her right to anonymity with the publication of her book, I am the Central Park Jogger: A Story of Hope and Possibility.