Asshole Who Led Central Park 5 Prosecution Mad Enough About Ava DuVernay's Movie to Sue
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Long before the Central Park Five became synonymous with a miscarriage of justice–a worst-case example of violence perpetrated by the legal system–a judge specifically referenced the actions of the woman who led the case’s prosecution, Linda Fairstein, in its result. The five boys, between 14 and 16 years old at the time, had been convicted of several rapes in Central Park with little evidence beyond a series of confessions, elicited after hours of interrogation. (The boys weren’t exonerated until almost a decade later when, in 2002, another man confessed to the crime.) On December 16, 1993, denying the appeal of one of the five, Yusef Salaam, New York Court of Appeals Judge Vito Titone wrote that the case’s interrogation methods were exploitive by design: “There can have been no other reason for [Farstein’s] decisions […] other than to capitalize on his youth and isolation.”
Nearly two decades later, Ava DuVernay ’s When They See Us called attention to Fairstein’s involvement in the case, alleging she actively engineered the prosecution of the Central Park Five. In 2018, a year prior to the Netflix series release, Fairstein would deny this claim in a letter to the New York Law Journal, writing that the Central Park Five’s questioning was “respectful, dignified, and carried out according to the letter of the law.” But Fairstein’s role in the case has been long publicized, with Titone making a similar argument to DuVernay, writing that Fairstein and the police sought to “obtain the evidence they wanted before permitting the defendant to speak with an adult who might interfere with the investigators’ absolute control over his person and environment.”