Prior to his announcement the district attorney asserted that he would make no claims of misdeeds or coercion by cops or prosecutors in the case, but noted that the New York police department had failed to turn over information about a similar attack on a woman in Central Park two days before the jogger was raped.

Prosecutor Nancy Ryan, who led the investigation, had advocated dismissing all the convictions including those not related to the rape--riot and robbery-- before Morgenthau made his recommendation on December 5. Judge Charles Tejada will rule on whether to vacate the guilty verdicts.

"Our children have paid a heavy price and so have our families," said Sharonne Salaam, mother of Yusef Salaam, one of the convicted youth, in response to Morgenthau’s announcement.

On the evening of April 19, 1989, a 28-year-old woman was brutally raped and assaulted while jogging in the park. The case received nonstop, international publicity and within 48 hours police had rounded up more than a dozen Black and Latino youth as suspects. The cops claimed the teenagers were part of a "wilding spree" involving some 30 youth who raped the jogger and assaulted eight others in the park that night.

Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Kharey Wise--all but one under the age of 16--were arrested and charged after giving videotaped "confessions," which they asserted afterwards were coerced. The young men--who have since served their sentences--were convicted despite the lack of physical evidence or witnesses, with the confessions as the primary testimony against them.

Last January new facts came to light when Matias Reyes, an inmate convicted of rape and murder serving a sentence in state prison, reported to authorities that he alone attacked and raped the jogger. DNA testing determined Reyes’s semen did match the only two samples found at the scene. Reyes’s confession forced Morgenthau to begin an investigation into the case.

Over the past few months family members, church organizations, and civil rights groups have held protests demanding the charges be vacated. In October Manhattan prosecutors requested more time for their investigation.

At a picket called to oppose the request, Grace Cuffee, mother of Kevin Richardson, told the press, "We had no time when our sons were convicted in 1989 and we’re not giving them any more time now."

Debate has surrounded the investigation into the more than decade-old case. Police have lobbied against the exonerations, still claiming that the five youth were involved in the attack on the jogger despite the fact that the DNA evidence links only Reyes with the woman. Linda Farstein, head of the New York sex crimes unit at the beginning of the case, told the New York Post, "She [the jogger] was running a 7 ½ minute mile. I don’t believe for a minute he [Reyes] could have caught her."  
 
Publicity with hysterical atmosphere
At the time of the crime and original hearings, the incident received widespread publicity with an hysterical atmosphere. Within a week of the arrests of the five teenagers, New York businessman Donald Trump took out a full page ad in each of New York’s four daily papers to call for reinstatement of the death penalty. "They should be forced to suffer," read Trump’s ad, "and, when they kill they should be executed .... I am looking to punish them."

The case against the youth, which was tried in the big-business press, rested solely on the videotaped confessions. At least one cop admitted lying to trick one of the young men into confessing. Others were denied the right to have their parents present during questioning.

"The record does show that much of what the youths said about the rape was wrong, including when, where and how it took place. Indeed their description of the location, the victim’s clothing and other details makes it seem, in retrospect, almost as if they were talking about another crime," the New York Times acknowledged in a December 1 article.

In the fall of 1989, defense lawyers fought to get the confessions thrown out based on the fact that police tactics used were coercive, threatening and deceitful. Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Thomas Galligan, who presided over the case, rejected all the arguments and declared that the cops and prosecutors had taken extraordinary steps to ensure the accused’s rights. His ruling was crucial given the lack of any physical evidence. At the time of the trial, the lead prosecutor argued that hairs from the jogger were found on two of the boys. Earlier this year DNA testing proved that the hairs were not the victim’s.

FBI testimony at the trial said that DNA testing was "inconclusive" but didn’t mention that the semen found on the woman and her clothes came from only one person and did not match any of the five young men on trial.

Most of the publicity surrounding the case focused on the rape charge, but the youth were also accused of assaulting others in the park that night. None of the five teenagers were identified by any of the eight who were mugged or attacked.

Defense lawyers have noted that the other convictions came as part of a trial where the youth were portrayed as animals in the big-business press and that they should be exonerated of these charges as well since there is no evidence that they committed any of the crimes of which they were accused.

Myron Beldock, a lawyer for Salaam, noted, "Jurors would have been overwhelmed. It would have tainted their perceptions for the rest of the case."

"Our clients are innocent," said Michael Warren, a lawyer for Richardson, McCray and Santana. "There has not been anything demonstrated to the contrary."  
 
 
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