Central Park jogger case

The Central Park jogger case concerned the assault, rape, and sodomy of Trisha Meili, a female jogger, and attacks on others in New York City's Central Park, on April 19, 1989. The attack on the female jogger left her in a coma for 12 days. Meili was a 28-year-old investment banker at the time. The attacks were, according to The New York Times, "one of the most widely publicized crimes of the 1980s." Five juvenile males—four black and one of Hispanic descent—were tried, variously, for assault, robbery, riot, rape, sexual abuse, and attempted murder. They were convicted of most charges by juries in two separate trials in 1990, and received sentences ranging from five to 15 years. Four of the convictions were appealed; they were affirmed by appellate courts. The defendants spent between six and 13 years in prison. In 2002, Matias Reyes, a Hispanic male who had been a juvenile at the time of the attack, confessed to raping the jogger, and DNA evidence confirmed his involvement in Meili's rape. He also said he committed the rape alone. Reyes at the time of his confession was a convicted serial rapist and murderer, serving a life sentence. He was not prosecuted for raping Meili, because the statute of limitations had passed by the time Reyes confessed. District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, stopping short of saying the five were innocent, suggested to the court that their convictions related to the assault and rape of Meili and the attacks on others to which they had confessed be vacated (a legal position in which the parties are treated as though no trial has taken place), withdrew all charges, and did not seek a retrial. Their convictions were vacated in 2002. The five who had been convicted sued New York City in 2003 for malicious prosecution, racial discrimination, and emotional distress. The city refused to settle the suits for a decade under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, because the city's lawyers felt they would win. However, after Bill de Blasio became mayor and supported the settlement, the city settled the case for $41 million in 2014. As of December 2014, the five men were pursuing an additional $52 million in damages from New York State in the New York Court of Claims. Victim: The victim, then 28-year-old Trisha Ellen Meili, lived on East 83rd Street between York Avenue and East End Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. At the time of the attack she was a vice president in the corporate finance department and energy group of the Wall Street investment bank Salomon Brothers. At the time of the attack, she weighed less than 100 pounds (45 kg). Meili was born in Paramus, New Jersey, and raised in affluent Upper St. Clair, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. She is the daughter and youngest of three children of John, a Westinghouse senior manager, and Jean Meili, a school board member. She attended Upper St. Clair High School, graduating in 1978. Meili was a Phi Beta Kappa economics major at Wellesley College, where she received a B.A. in 1982. The Chairman of Wellesley's Economics Department said: "She was brilliant, probably one of the top four or five students of the decade." In 1986, she earned an M.A. from Yale, and an M.B.A. in Finance from the Yale School of Management. She worked from the summer of 1986 on through the time of the attack as an associate and then a vice president in the corporate finance department and energy group of Salomon Brothers. Meili was referred to in most media accounts of the incident at the time simply as the "Central Park Jogger". However, two local TV stations released her name in the days immediately following the attack, and two newspapers aimed at the African-American community, The City Sun and the Amsterdam News, and black-owned talk radio station WLIB continued to do so as the case progressed. Attorney Alton Maddox, Jr. claimed during a WLIB show that the case was a racist hoax, and questioned whether the jogger had in fact been hurt. In April 2003, Meili confirmed her identity to the media, published a memoir entitled I Am the Central Park Jogger, and began a career as an inspirational speaker. She also works with victims of sexual assault and brain injury in the Mount Sinai sexual assault and violence intervention program. She continues to manifest some physiological after-effects of the assault, including memory loss. Assault: Between 9 and 10 pm on the night of April 19, 1989, approximately 30 teenage perpetrators committed several attacks, assaults, and robberies in the northernmost part of New York City's Central Park. The attacks on Meili and on others in the park that night were, according to The New York Times, "one of the most widely publicized crimes of the 1980s." Trisha Meili, a 28-year-old investment banker, went for a run on her usual path in Central Park shortly before 9 pm. While jogging in the park, she was knocked down, dragged or chased nearly 300 feet (91 m), and violently assaulted. She was raped, sodomized, and beaten almost to death. Investigators' best evidence suggested she was attacked between 9:10 and 9:15 pm, on the transverse through the park from East 104th Street toward West 102nd Street, between the park's East Drive and West Drive. She was found naked, gagged, and tied up, covered in mud and blood, about four hours later, at 1:30 am. Meili was discovered in a shallow ravine in a wooded area of the park about 300 feet (91 m) north of the 103rd Street Transverse. The first policeman who saw her said: "She was beaten as badly as anybody I've ever seen beaten. She looked like she was tortured." She was comatose for 12 days. She suffered from severe hypothermia, severe brain damage, Class 4 (the most severe) hemorrhagic shock, and loss of 75–80 per cent of her blood from five deep stab wounds and a gash on one of her thighs, and internal bleeding. Her skull had been fractured so badly that her left eye was removed from the eye socket, which in turn was fractured in 21 places, and she suffered as well from facial fractures. Doctors attributed her survival to the cold weather as well as the cold mud in which she lay in the hours before she was discovered, which reduced her internal swelling. The initial medical prognosis was that Meili would die. She was given last rites. The police initially listed the attack as a probable homicide. At best, doctors thought that she would remain in a permanent coma due to her injuries. She came out of her coma 12 days after her attack, and spent seven weeks in Metropolitan Hospital in East Harlem. When she emerged from her coma, she was initially unable to talk, read, or walk. A month after the attack, she had difficulty recognizing her mother, and was unable to recall what year it was. She was transferred in early June to Gaylord Hospital, a long-term acute care center in Wallingford, Connecticut, suffering from amnesia, double-vision, and dizziness, and spent six months there working on her rehabilitation. She was first able to walk again in mid-July. She returned to work eight months after the attack. Remarkably, she largely recovered, with some lingering disabilities related to balance and loss of vision. As a result of the severe trauma, she had no memory of the attack or of any events up to an hour before the assault, nor of the six weeks following the attack. The crime was unique in the level of public outrage it provoked. New York Governor Mario Cuomo told the New York Post: "This is the ultimate shriek of alarm." Arrests, interrogations, and confessions: According to a police investigation, the main suspects were gangs of teenagers who would assault strangers as part of an activity that became known as "wilding". New York City detectives said the phrase was used by the suspects themselves to describe their actions to police. This account has been disputed by some journalists, who say that it originated in a police detective's misunderstanding of the suspects' use of the phrase "doing the wild thing", lyrics from rapper Tone Lōc's hit song "Wild Thing". April 19 was a night when such a series of gang attacks occurred. A group of over 30 teenagers, including the suspects, who lived in East Harlem entered Central Park at an entrance in Harlem, near Central Park North, at approximately 9 pm. The teenagers attacked and beat people as they moved south, on Central Park's East Drive, and on the park's 97th Street Transverse, between 9 pm and 10 pm. Between 105th and 102nd Streets they attacked several bicyclists, hurled rocks at a cab, and attacked a man who was walking whom they knocked to the ground, assaulted, robbed, and left unconscious. A schoolteacher out for a run was severely beaten and kicked, between 9:40 and 9:50. Then, at the 97th Street Transverse at the northwest end of the Central Park Reservoir running track, at about 10 pm they attacked another jogger, bludgeoning him in the back of the head with a pipe and stick. They pummeled two men into unconsciousness, hitting them with a metal pipe, stones, and punches, and kicking them in the head. A police officer testified that one male jogger, who said he had been jumped by four of five black youths, was bleeding so badly he "looked like he was dunked in a bucket of blood." Responding police scooters and unmarked cars, dispatched at 9:30 pm, apprehended Raymond Santana and Kevin Richardson along with other teenagers at approximately 10:15 on Central Park West and 102nd Street. Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, and Korey Wise were brought in for questioning later, after having been identified by other youths as participants in or present at some of the attacks. Contrary to normal police procedure, which stipulates that the names of suspects under the age of sixteen are to be withheld, the names of the arrested juveniles were released to the press before any of them had been formally arraigned or indicted, including one 14-year-old who was ultimately not charged. The media's decision to print the names, photos, and addresses of the juvenile suspects while withholding Meili's identity was cited by the editors of the City Sun and the Amsterdam News to explain their own continued use of Meili's name in their coverage of the story. The five juveniles were interviewed for hours. With a parent or guardian of theirs present, Santana, McCray, and Richardson all made video statements. Wise made a number of statements, on his own, in accordance with the law. Salaam told the police he was 16 years old and showed them identification to prove it, which permitted the police to question him without a parent. After Salaam's mother arrived the police stopped the questioning, but Salaam's admissions were admitted into testimony. In addition, before the raped jogger was even found, one of the other boys the police had rounded up, sitting in the back of a police car, blurted that he "didn't do the murder," but that he knew who did ... Antron McCray, and Kevin Richardson who was sitting beside him agreed, saying "Antron did it". Later, after Raymond Santana was interrogated about the rape and while he was being driven to another precinct, he on his own exclaimed: "I had nothing to do with the rape. All I did was feel her tits." All five confessed to a number of the attacks committed in the park that night, and implicated one or more of the others. None of the five said they themselves actually raped the jogger, but each confessed to being an accomplice to the rape. All five said that they themselves had only helped restrain the jogger, or touched her, while one or more others raped her. Antron McCray said that a "Puerto Rican kid with a hoodie" had been the one who raped the jogger. While he was incarcerated in the Rikers Island jail, Korey Wise told the older sister of a friend of his, according to her testimony, that he'd only held the jogger down. Yusef Salaam made verbal admissions, but refused to sign a confession or make one on videotape. Salaam was, however, implicated by all of the other four, and convicted. Six others were charged with committing crimes in the park that night as well. They pleaded guilty, and received sentences of six months to four and a half years. Salaam's supporters and attorneys charged on appeal that he had been held by police without access to parents or guardians, but as the majority appellate court decision noted, that was because Salaam had initially lied to police in claiming to be 16, and had backed up his claim with a transit pass that indeed (falsely, as it turned out) indicated that he was 16. If a suspect has reached 16 years of age, his parents or guardians no longer have a right to accompany him during police questioning, or to refuse to permit him to answer any questions. When Salaam informed police of his true age, police permitted his mother to be present. Although the suspects (except Salaam) had confessed on videotape in the presence of a parent or guardian, they retracted their statements within weeks, claiming that they had been intimidated, lied to, and coerced into making false confessions. The detectives had indeed used ruses to convince the suspects to confess, with Salaam confessing to having been present only after he was told that fingerprints were found on the victim's clothing. While the confessions themselves were videotaped, the hours of interrogation that preceded the confessions were not. Analysis indicated that the DNA collected at the crime scene did not match any of the suspects—and that it had come from a single, as yet unknown person. Since no DNA evidence tied the suspects to the crime, the prosecution's case rested almost entirely on the confessions. One of the suspects' supporters, Reverend Calvin O. Butts of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, told The New York Times, "The first thing you do in the United States of America when a white woman is raped is round up a bunch of black youths, and I think that's what happened here."