When They See You

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

"I think Reyes ran with that pack of kids. He stayed longer when the others moved on. He completed the assault. I don't think there is a question in the minds of anyone present during the interrogation process that these five men were participants, not only in the other attacks that night but in the attack on the jogger." - Linda Fairstein, The New Yorker, 2002

When a city or entire nation pillories one or more based on what's broadcast on television or printed in the papers, that city or nation is automatically on a slippery slope. Witness the growing furious backlash against one Linda Fairstein, bestselling novelist and former assistant DA and head of the celebrated Special Victims Unit within the Manhattan DA's office. Yet prejudging in the print press and television is exactly what led to the wrongful conviction of five teens of color who were completely innocent of the rape, assault and near death of Trisha Meili, a white, affluent jogger in 1989. It became known as the Central Park Jogger Case. Yet, in Fairstein's case, her role in the wrongful convictions has long been well-documented.

     While Donald Trump was stumbling around London and trying to look and act the part of a Royal and, as always, failing comically, Linda Fairstein was busy deleting her Twitter account after the #WhenTheySeeUs and #CancelLindaFairstein hashtags began trending all over the planet. And the reason this happened was the episode dump on Netflix of When They See Us, the four part miniseries detailing what had led to the conviction and exoneration of Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam and Korey Wise, ages 14 to 16.

     The inclusion of Donald John Trump is a very necessary one because it was partly due to Trump's full-page ads costing $85,000 in New York's biggest newspapers calling for the execution of the children before the trial had even begun. Him doing so put pressure on the DA's office to extrude a conviction out of the SVU's office. And that's what they got.

     And while Fairstein certainly cannot and should not be exclusively singled out for their kangaroo court of a trial that eventually became one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in the history of American jurisprudence, she has evaded serious scrutiny and comeuppance in the three decades since the case was brought to trial. Last November, Fairstein received a few grumbles that led to the Mystery Writer's of America rescinding a Grandmaster award they had announced giving her 48 hours before. That was brought about largely through the efforts of mystery author and MWA member Attica Locke.

     Then after the outrage over what Fairstein had done to those boys had died down after the Grandmaster Award was snatched out of her grasping hands, it sputtered out like a neglected campfire and people seemed to forget if not forgive Fairstein for her atrocious perversion of justice. But then the Netflix miniseries premiered over the weekend and that neglected campfire immediately turned into the NYC draft riot fire of 1863. (With supreme irony, soon to be convicted criminal Felicity Huffman of Operation Varsity Blues infamy was cast to play unconvicted criminal Fairstein).

Jogging Memories

The case seemed to be prejudiced from the start. Per the racist and Anglocentric American mainstream media's historical predilections, the assault of Trisha Meili was given front page news. And while Meili's rape and assault certainly needed to be covered, the man who'd eventually confessed to assaulting her, Matias Reyes, had also confessed to assaulting other women. He'd also murdered Lourdes Gonzalez, a 24 year-old mother and stepmother of three, including a newborn infant. Her murder did not get more than a small fraction that Meili's rape and beating had received.

     So much for, "If it bleeds, it leads."

     From a law enforcement standpoint, 1989 was a nightmare of a year for the five boroughs of New York City. 2000 homicides had been committed that year, a figure that was only surpassed in 1990. Mayor Rudy's Broken Windows campaign was still a few years off (and, instead of tackling violent crime as the theory intended, wound up pushing around low hanging fruit like buskers, street vendors and artists [pdf file] over permits). The NYPD, to be fair to them, was at a loss to tackle the problem of maintaining order in a city of 8,000,000 that killed 2000 or more of its own each year.

      Then on the evening of April 19, 1989, Trisha Meili was jogging through Central Park near the 102nd Street transverse where she was violently and brutally raped, stabbed and beaten within an inch of her life. The assault quickly went as viral as anything could in 1989 and the case got an added boost from one Donald John Trump, who, along with his father Fred, was ordered by HUD in 1973 to stop discriminating against potential African American tenants. Trump heard about the assault and quickly took out $85,000 in full-page ads calling for the return of the death penalty and, oddly, the largest police department in the nation.

     Five teenagers of color who happened to be in Central Park that night were swiftly arrested and four of them had confessed to the assault on Meili's person. It didn't matter to Fairstein, who'd supervised the police interrogations, that there was no physical evidence linking them to the crime, that some of the children were beaten by NYPD detectives, that Meili was in a coma for nearly two weeks and subsequently had no memory of her attack or of her attackers (the DNA of two males was found on her)...

     ...or that Fairstein knew for a fact those five boys were completely innocent.

     The frustrated NYPD's conduct was nothing short of deplorable. Not only did they beat some of the suspects into making their confessions, they interrogated some of the youths without their parents being present and even ignored its long-standing policy of not releasing the names of suspects under 16 and dutifully fed them to the press. In a year in which the city was racing to 2000 mostly unsolved homicides, the department was desperate to appear as if they were finally getting a handle on violent crime, even though they did anything but.

30 Years and $41,000,000 Later

Four of the boys had appealed their convictions and all were denied. The Central Park Five, as they came to be known, were convicted for 5-15 years. Then 13 years later, in 2002, Reyes had confessed to Korey Wise in Riker's Island that he had raped and assaulted Meili. Admissible DNA evidence, that didn't exist in 1989, confirmed what Reyes had confessed. A judge had vacated the conviction and the five boys, now grown men, were freed. The Armstrong Commission, in a pathetic attempt to shore up Fairstein's now-destroyed case, decided that "the word of a serial rapist killer is not something to be heavily relied upon."

     I guess it was lost on the commission that Reyes' DNA, however, was.

     So, to sum up, five boys were arrested within hours of a white female banker getting raped, stabbed and beaten, their confessions were plainly coerced, in Fairstein's presence, were able to get a conviction from an ethnically highly-inclusive jury, and they spent 13 years in prison and would've surely served their full sentences were it not for a confession from the actual perpetrator.

     And it still took the men 11 more years after filing a civil suit against the city before they were finally awarded $41,000,000 by a judge. Fairstein had by this time retired from the DA's office to concentrate full time on writing novels in 2002, the same year Reyes had confessed to his crime and the release of the wrongly-convicted men. And here's where the criticism of Fairstein reaches a fever pitch:

     As with Donald Trump, whose cognitive abilities (especially regarding race) should never be taken for granted, Fairstein has not only not apologized for her own deplorable conduct and basing a high profile prosecution on irrational prejudice and not the lack of evidence, she still insists on their guilt. As the epigraph shows, she'd told the New Yorker the year the convictions were vacated, "I think Reyes ran with that pack of kids. He stayed longer when the others moved on. He completed the assault."

     This, despite the fact that in his year-long crime spree in Upper Manhattan, Reyes was never known to have used an accomplice. Reyes worked at a bodega on 102nd St, across the street from the 19th Precinct and just feet from the Central Park Transverse where Meili had been brutally assaulted. Indeed, one can easily see more than a passing similarity between this case and the premise for the 1996 Sally Field and Kiefer Sutherland thriller, An Eye For An Eye (Sutherland's character, Robert Doob, was also a serial rapist and murderer who worked at a bodega).

     And, most damning to Fairstein, the murder of Lourdes Gonzalez occurred on June 13-14, 1989, less than two months after the attack on Trisha Meili. Instead of canvassing 102nd Street (Don't forget, the bodega at which Reyes worked was feet from the 102nd St. transverse and directly across from the 19th Precinct), Fairstein and the NYPD grabbed five handy suspects, violated their civil rights and convicted them without any physical evidence whatsoever.

     A young mother of three is in her grave because of Fairstein. Her blood is on her hands. And that's why I fully support the effort to boycott Fairstein's books on both Barnes & Noble and Amazon, get her publisher Penguin-Random House-Dutton to cancel her remaining contracts and have revoked her position as a board of trustee member for Vassar College. And if that isn't enough for you, consider that Fairstein is in negotiations with Lifetime to have her The Real SVU made into a series and was once on Harvey Weinsteins's legal team.