The Central Park Five : a chronicle of a city wilding /

IN the wake of the 1989 rape and near-fatal beating of a 28-year-old white woman named Trisha Meili (known to many as the Central Park jogger), and after the arrests, confessions and eventual convictions of one Latino and four African-American teenagers for the crime, the media relentlessly asked: How did this happen? In her slim but ambitious book, "The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding," Sarah Burns tackles this same question, but with a changed referent. "This," rather than signifying a horrific gang rape in New York City's bucolic backyard, here signifies a preventable miscarriage of justice that put five Harlem teenagers behind bars for a crime they didn't commit. Each of the boys - Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Korey Wise and Raymond Santana Jr. - served between 7 and 13 years. Their convictions were vacated in 2002 by the New York State Supreme Court, after a confession and DNA analysis linked a serial rapist, Matias Reyes, to the crime. Burns's book joins a crowded field. Not only did the jogger case dominate headlines in 1989-90, but Joan Didion's 1991 essay on the subject, "Sentimental Journeys," provides an indelible portrait of New York at that time; scholars including Patricia J. Williams and Susan Fraiman have parsed the case's fraught nexus of race, class and gender; Meili herself published a best-selling book, "I Am the Central Park Jogger," in 2003; coarser pundits like Ann Coulter continue to exploit the case whenever possible; and its legal twists and turns still garner headlines. Burns's book is novel in that it is the first sustained consideration of the case since the young men's convictions were vacated. This redirection alone - along with Burns's exhaustive synthesizing of trial transcripts, interviews and articles - makes "The Central Park Five" an important cultural document, and unquestionably worth reading. This is Burns's first book, and she proves herself an energetic researcher and gatherer, as well as a writer with a fine sense of organization and pacing. Her narrative is riveting, even (or perhaps, one must say, especially) in light of its horrors. Here I refer not only to the grisly details of the many brutal crimes the book recounts, but also to its swift tour through America's violently racist past and present, in which the criminal justice system so often plays a starring role. Especially impressive is Burns's tracking of the accused from the evening of the assault to the present in just over 200 pages, a feat she accomplishes by moving briskly between a tight focus on the case and much broader strokes. Alas, these broad strokes keep her from offering the kind of incisive social analysis the story so desperately needs. Burns's acknowledgments indicate that she interviewed everyone from Ed Koch to Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project to Matias Reyes to the families of the five. Yet she often erases specific speakers and sources, opting instead for washes of impersonal, sometimes platitudinous generalizations, many of which rely on grammatical obfuscations to soften insights that could have been razor sharp. When Burns tells us, for example, that the "myth of the black man as bestial and sexual . . . was used as a justification for much of the heinous violence, including lynchings, that was perpetrated on blacks in the wake of emancipation," or that "the belief that confessing to a serious crime will lead to being released, however irrational, is commonly cited as a reason for falsely confessing," I found myself increasingly anxious to hear her name who used the justification, who commonly cites such a belief, and so on. This imprecision also makes the author seem occasionally unmindful of the political implications embedded in her more sweeping statements. She writes, for instance, that the rape "exposed the deepest fears of New Yorkers in the 1980s, and also in the country at large," and that the case shows us "who and what we fear." Burns's intentions are firmly antiracist, but this "we" troubles, as it presumes the reader to share in certain white racist fears and, by extension, in whiteness itself. Further, now that we are in the midst of an even more pronounced financial crisis than that of the 1980s - one that has provided yet another alibi for those perennially committed to slashing services for the neediest of citizens - Burns's loose suggestions that cuts in the late '70s in New York were "needed to keep the city from going bankrupt," or that many poor AIDS patients somehow "found themselves" without homes or hospital beds, or that working-class ethnic whites were "pushed to enclaves along the outer edges of the city by the growing minority population," seem strangely at odds with her express desire to ferret out root causes of inequities and injustices. Two other problems linger. The first is that in its fervent desire to protest the wrongful convictions of the teenagers for the rape of Meili, the book is blurry on the question of what role they may (or may not) have played in the attacks on several others in the park that evening, including John Loughlin, another jogger. Directly confronting the complexity of the situation would not have diminished Burns's critique; it would have helped us imagine forms of justice that don't rely on oversimplified narratives of innocence. The second problem lies in Burns's repetitive indictment of the media's use of animal terminology (like "wolfpack" and "wilding") to describe the boys charged with Meili's assault. Her insights on this account are spot on, and her historical unpacking of such racist terminology constitutes some of the book's best writing. Unfortunately, her reliance on this theme over any sustained analysis of the socioeconomic power structures that have depended on the subjugation of African-Americans for nearly four centuries renders her argument tinnier than it need be. The book's closing assessment is astonishingly disappointing: "The Central Park jogger case and the fear of crime from the 1980s still haunts the memories of many New Yorkers, and the use of animal terms to describe disorderly minority teenagers continues without reflection or remorse." If only such a haunting, or such terminology, were the bulk of the problem. Such a finale sent me straight to Angela Davis for a reminder of what a pull-no-punches analysis of systemic racism sounds like. THE most useful aspect of "The Central Park Five" may not be its analysis of racism, but rather of false confessions. The videotaped statements made by four of the five boys were undoubtedly the most damning evidence used against them at trial. The question of how and why they offered such inventive, graphic testimony about their involvement in the rape remains, for many, a bafflement. Burns labors hard to explain how intense interrogation can bring a suspect, especially a young one, to the irrational conclusion that falsely confessing "will improve a dreadful situation." The crucial word here is "irrational." In one of the book's most heartbreaking moments, Wise - the oldest but "least developed emotionally and intellectually" of the five, Burns writes - is cross-examined by an assistant district attorney, Elizabeth Lederer. Referring to the part of Wise's confession in which he demonstrates how the other boys supposedly punched Meili, Lederer asks, "Did the police make you do what you did on the videotape, punching with both fists?" Wise answers: "Somehow." His response speaks to his bewilderment, but by this point we've learned that Wise has it exactly right. In the shadow of the "war on terror," which has sharply amplified the ethical and legal problems posed by presumptive guilt and "harsh" interrogations, and after rulings like the Supreme Court's 2009 decision denying inmates a constitutional right to post-conviction analyses of DNA samples, Burns's gripping tale may serve as an allegory for some of the most pressing criminal justice issues of our time. Sarah Burns asks how five Harlem teenagers ended up behind bars for a brutal crime they did not commit. Jogger case protesters in Manhattan on Dec. 5, 2002. Maggie Nelson's latest book, "The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning," will be published next month.

The brutal 1989 rape and beating of the woman known as th. Central Park jogge. is seared into our national consciousness. Burns does a remarkable job of examining what hasn't been as faithfully remembered as the crime, that the five youths convicted and imprisoned for it were all exonerated in 2003, after another man confessed, and a DNA match was made. She also thoroughly dissects the reasons why th. wildin. so transfixed the nation, for reasons having everything to do with racism and class. She compellingly condemns the criminal justice system and the media, both of which were far too quick and eager to judge. She tracks the crime, the first trial, and the overthrowing of the first convictions from the day when the lives of one young investment banker, Patricia Ellen Meili, and five Harlem youths intersected. Straightforward, thought-provoking reportage.--Fletcher, Conni. Copyright 2010 Booklist

Everyone in New York City (and likely beyond) is familiar with the beginning of the story of the "Central Park Jogger," a white woman who was raped and left for dead in 1989. What happened next, though, is far less well known, making this powerful book feel especially necessary as it answers the question ("whatever happened to those kids?") that became as troubling as the horrific event itself. In her first book, Burns bravely revisits the details of that night, along with the months and years that followed. Weaving together extensive interviews with the teenage boys (now men) initially convicted and their families, while simultaneously providing extensive cultural context, Burns examines the forces that ultimately obliterated any genuine or humane attempt to uncover the truth. Astoundingly, despite such methodical research, no mention is made of Joan Didion's seminal 1991 essay, "Sentimental Journeys," which originally articulated most (if not all) of these same challenges to the city's psyche. However, Burns deserves credit for bringing the injustice these young men endured to light in the 21st century. As she draws attention to Mayor Bloomberg's recent mention of "wilding," it's clear that the city's narrative continues to ignore the poor until someone is needed to blame. A documentary with Burns's father, Ken, is in the works. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.