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The Central Park Five

nytimes.com

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Re: The Central Park Five

#41

Post by woodruffw »

Nasrudith wrote: post #37
gatherhunterer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop-and-frisk is ongoing in New York despite years of data on the fact that police almost exclusively target young Black and Latino men and that the policy has little to no discernible effect on crime prevention or criminal apprehension. The NY branch of the ACLU is a good place to find a summary of the data[1], such as: "in 2011, Black and Latino New Yorkers made up 24 percent of the population in Park Slope, but 7…

To be frank I wonder if the best solution to the major NYPD institutional issues is a purge in the entirety - let none who worked there ever work again. It is only "radical" as a notion because they are in power - we wouldn't bat an eye at banning gang members from high trust jobs even if they were never convicted of anything - just being part of an organization party to such crimes makes them unworthy of the privele…

I'm not opposed to the idea, but I think there are more politically feasible solutions:

1. Expand the CCRB[1], both in number of civilian investigators and their authority to pursue investigations without interference from the mayor/city council/police commissioner. A line has to be drawn somewhere in terms of power granted to an independent review board, but I don't think we've even approached that line yet.

2. Change city/state law to prevent police misconduct settlements from coming out of city coffers. The public shouldn't have to pay twice (or three times, depending on how you look at it) for crimes perpetrated by the police. Settlements should come out of NYC PBA funds, insurance, or some other source that disincentivizes the force as a whole from covering for "bad apples."

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Complaint_Review_Boar...

Re: The Central Park Five

#42

Post by throwaway622019 »

eaurouge wrote: post #36
throwaway622019 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm puzzled: did they actually put five people in jail, even though there was actually one perpetrator? It's actually a pretty complicated case. I'd recommend reading both the recommendation from Morgenthau to vacate the convictions[1] (which ended up happening) and the Armstrong report[2] (which came to the conclusion that the Central Park Five were most likely involved in the attack). Doctors involved in the case…

> The only person who's DNA was found there (who wasn't part of the five) Are you saying the police found DNA of one or more of the five on the victim?

They didn't find DNA from any of the five. They found the DNA from a sixth person the couldn't identify. This person confessed to the crime years later (after the statute of limitations passed), and also claimed he acted alone in that particular attack (the five were part of a larger group participating in multiple random assaults on bystanders that night).

Re: The Central Park Five

#43

Post by dang »

peisistratos wrote: post #28
georgemonck wrote: post #25

The other side of this story: https://web.archive.org/web/20030202084858/http://www.weirdr... I'm sure some hear will object to the tone of the article I am linking to, but if you are going to flag or downvote please tell me what the article gets factually wrong . Because regardless of any bias in attitude of the article's author, if the facts in the linked article are true (eg, Salaam admitting in court that he was…

> if you are going to flag or downvote please tell me what the article gets factually wrong Half the articles on the "Weird Republic" web site you link to are bashing a host of various black people and things. Jesse Jackson, Kwanzaa, reparations for slavery, it's just article after article bashing blacks. I don't have time to read this white trash gutter nonsense, I've heard it enough before. Two comments back you're…

Please don't break the site guidelines yourself, regardless of how bad another comment was. Racial and ideological rants are not ok here, let alone "I look down on pathetic white trash".

Would you please review the site guidelines and use this site as intended? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The Central Park Five

#44

Post by xmmrm »

xrd wrote: post #39

Really fascinating to read the comments here. Lots of discussions about whether they truly were guilty of this crime or another. Not much being said about the fact that they were children and that even if they did commit another crime at another time or were witnesses to the crime or whatever, it's not necessarily a "good thing" that they were in jail long into adulthood. Hacker News showing its true colors here.

they attacked another jogger, hitting 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.

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."

It’s a very “good thing” that they were in jail long into adulthood.

Re: The Central Park Five

#45

Post by dang »

xrd wrote: post #39

Really fascinating to read the comments here. Lots of discussions about whether they truly were guilty of this crime or another. Not much being said about the fact that they were children and that even if they did commit another crime at another time or were witnesses to the crime or whatever, it's not necessarily a "good thing" that they were in jail long into adulthood. Hacker News showing its true colors here.

> Hacker News showing its true colors here

HN is a statistical cloud of millions of people. Since you're commenting here, you're as much a part of it as anyone.

A run of comments sharing a common quality doesn't show anything about "true colors"—pure randomness exhibits the same patterns. What happens, though, is that after seeing a few (say, 3) comments taking an offensive or opposing position, people feel surrounded by hostile voices, and that feeling 'sticks' to the community in the form of the perception "HN is X". HN isn't X. It just feels that way after a few noticeable signals in a row.

Re: The Central Park Five

#46

Post by DuskStar »

themgt wrote: post #34
timcederman wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Armstrong report is pretty clear in saying how likely it is the 5 were involved in the assault: > The report concluded that the five men whose convictions had been vacated had "most likely" participated in the beating and rape of the jogger and that the "most likely scenario" was that "both the defendants and Reyes assaulted her, perhaps successively." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case#Armst.…

The report is incredibly damning. Just to use one example, Korey Wise is in the NYT, described as: Wise, 16, wasn’t a suspect, but he agreed to go with his friend for moral support. He ended up being charged as well No description of why he would be charged. Clearly a gross miscarriage of justice. Armstrong report: In addition, several statements were made by witnesses to officers investigating the incident and by th…

Shit like this significantly contributes to the legitimacy of calling the NYT "fake news".

When you tell a story from one side, and one side only...

(I don't mean that it's a good thing to call news orgs "fake news". I mean that if someone is already calling you "fake news", you should really take care to have impeccable reporting to avoid giving those accusations weight)

Re: The Central Park Five

#47

Post by rayiner »

xrd wrote: post #39

Really fascinating to read the comments here. Lots of discussions about whether they truly were guilty of this crime or another. Not much being said about the fact that they were children and that even if they did commit another crime at another time or were witnesses to the crime or whatever, it's not necessarily a "good thing" that they were in jail long into adulthood. Hacker News showing its true colors here.

None were children. All were older teenagers. The central requirement of criminal culpability is being able to intellectually distinguish rights from wrong. There was no indication that they were too young to properly understand that difference.

Re: The Central Park Five

#48

Post by eaurouge »

throwaway622019 wrote: post #42
eaurouge wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only person who's DNA was found there (who wasn't part of the five) Are you saying the police found DNA of one or more of the five on the victim?

They didn't find DNA from any of the five. They found the DNA from a sixth person the couldn't identify. This person confessed to the crime years later (after the statute of limitations passed), and also claimed he acted alone in that particular attack (the five were part of a larger group participating in multiple random assaults on bystanders that night).

Got it. Then this sentence is incorrectly phrased:

> The only person who's DNA was found there (who wasn't part of the five) is the person who claims that there was only one attacker (he confessed to the crime and made the claim that he was the only attacker after meeting one of the five in prison).

Should be:

> The only person whose DNA was found there is the person who claims that there was only one attacker (he confessed to the crime and made the claim that he was the only attacker after meeting one of the five in prison).

I would argue that your comments in brackets are also irrelevant, because it appears to be suggesting something for which there is no basis for. In other words, he confessed to the crime, period. And his DNA was found on the victim. So we know he is guilty, period.

Re: The Central Park Five

#49

Post by bilbo0s »

rayiner wrote: post #35

One of the things I hate about coverage of false convictions is that all the nuance gets lost. It’s important to note that the Central Park five were convicted of multiple attacks in the park, of which the rape of the jogger was one. Their responsibility for the other felonies are not seriously contested: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-myth-of-the-central-park-f... > Was what happened to the Central Park Five comp…

Yeah but for all we know, they didn't commit those crimes either. I mean, they, "confessed", to a lot right. There were "witnesses", to them doing a lot right.

They may have done all of what they confessed to, or they may have been tortured and done none of it. That's the problem with bent police forces and court systems, there's just a baseline confidence issue. That baseline confidence issue creates the conditions that make people perfectly justified in being skeptical. And winning that confidence back is extremely difficult. In fact, depending on how bad the conditions are, it may not even be possible.

When torture is allowed into the judicial process either overtly or covertly, the integrity of the entire system eventually degrades over time.

EDIT:

On re-reading that, it sounded bad. I didn't mean that they might have been tortured. I understand that torture was part of the process. So perhaps I should have written:

"...or they may have done none of it, and the torture prompted confessions..."

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