Posted: December 20th, 2021

Watch and reflect the Netflix Central Park 5 legal and general research on a topic

Watch and reflect the Netflix Central Park 5 legal and general research on a topic (ethic law or you can choose to write another law + affiliation to the case) please do not write Children and Young Person Act of 1933.

The topic and law you choose need to relate to the file 1(1)(2).

Limit to two pages.

Central Park Five

Summary of the case
Media can skew the minds of the public, especially when it pertains to something political. It becomes hard to change someone’s opinion after they have already read and saw the news; therefore, it becomes even harder to get the jury selection correct for a trial. The media can even change the facts of a case and portray the case as something it is not. This became a problem for five African American/Latino boys who were accused brutally assaulting an 28-year-old white women in New York City’s Central Park.
On April 20th, 1989 Trisha Meili’s body was found in New York City’s Central Park after an evening jog, she had been so badly battered and repeatedly raped that she was in a coma for about two and was left with no memory of the attack. A quick arrest and conviction of five African American/Latino teens – Antron McCray, 15; Korey Wise, 16; Kevin Richardson, 15; Raymond Santana, 14 and Yusef Salaam, 15. These young men will come to be known as the Central Park Five to the rest of America. According to History.com the attack occurred during a violent era with 1,896 homicides on record during 1988, so the police officers were quick to find someone or somebodies to blame. Richardson and Santana were arrested prior to the public knowledge of the attack for unlawful assembly on April 19th. These young boys both 14 and 15 were held and interrogated for hours before their parents were called in. Later the next day Salaam and McCray were brought in for questioning in connection to the brutal attack. According what Salaam wrote in the Washington Post in 2016, when they were arrested, the police deprived them of food, drink or sleep for more than 24 hours. With such abuse from the police the boys were coerced into a confession on videotape following the hours of interrogation and deprivation. Salaam also wrote “under duress, we falsely confessed. Though we were innocent, we spent our formative years in prison, branded as rapists There were a lot of discrepancies in all their confessions, some boys mentioned stabbing her, but there were no stab wounds on Meili, all their locations do not account for the actual location of the attack. Following the conviction after two trials in 1990, McCray, Salaam and Santana were found guilty of rape, assault, robbery and riot; Richardson was found guilty of attempted murder, rape, assault and robbery; Korey was found guilty of sexual abuse, assault and riot. The Central Park Five boys spent between six and 13 years behind bars. The media seemed to skew the mind of the public by publishing stories labeling the teens as bloodthirsty animals, savages, human mutations, and enemies of the white people. Donald Trump even took our full-page ads in the Times, Daily News, The Post, and Newsday with headlines “bring back the Death Penalty. Bring back our Police!” In 2002 Matias Reyes, a convicted serial murderer and rapist already serving a 33 year to life sentence confessed to the attack of Meili that took place back in 1989 which had left her with 75% loss of blood and a severe skull fracture along with a lot of other injuries. Reyes’ DNA was a perfect match to the evidence found on the crime scene. The times wrote that because of the evidence that corroborated with Reyes’ involvements in the crime and noting discrepancies in the earlier confessions, Manhattan District attorney Robert Morgenthau asked a judge to throw out the convictions of the five men originally charged. Judge Charles Tejada ruled in their favor, so the men previously charged were able to file civil lawsuits. The Central Park Five now men all filed a civil lawsuit against New York City for emotional distress, malicious prosecution and racial discrimination. After a decade of arguing, the case finally settled for $41 million dollars.

Section 3: Children and Young Persons Act of 1933
Standard law enforcement procedure calls for the names of criminal suspects ages sixteen and under to be withheld from the press. However, procedure was grossly ignored, and the names of the accused were released to the media, before a single person was indicted. Press found that the suspects they continued to print the information of did not match the typical profile of someone involved in this type of crime. Police had found no drug or robbery relation, and minimal to no criminal record for the combined group. In fact, it had been reported that most of the accused came from stable and secure families. Nevertheless, the media continued to print their information despite the inherent danger publishing this information could cause. These actions proved to only fuel a groupthought theory of gang rape. Several suspected and their families received serious and credible threats. Real estate mogul Donald Trump published full page advertisements in New York City’s top four newspapers. He stated in these advertisements that he desired for all the accused, regardless of age, to “be very afraid.” An excerpt taken from the advertisement reads: “Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer … How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!” Two members of the defense came forward in 2016 to state that these ads had poisoned the minds of New York citizens including those who could’ve been seen as impartial jurors during the case. In 2019, TIME Magazine did a study on these ads and found that they did in fact have an adverse effect on the trail and the defense. So, why was this trail allowed to continue when laws pertaining to it and the procedure behind it were not followed? One of the main categories of press restrictions applies to minors. As stated early, reporting restrictions are almost always imposed when children under the age of eighteen are involved. In fact, in the Children and Young Persons Act of 1933, Section 49 states that, “Subject as hereinafter provided, no newspaper report of any proceedings in court shall reveal the name, address or school, or include any particulars calculated to lead to the identification, of any child or young person concerned in those proceedings, either as being the person against or in respect of whom the proceedings are taken or as being a witness therein.” So, whether a minor is a defendant, victim, or witness, these restrictions should be applied. However, in this case, they were seemingly ignored, whether it was due to gross negligence or something else. Because these restrictions were not followed, it completely twisted the public opinion surrounding this case, adding public pressure to criminalize these five young men on a group thought, fear-based emotionally driven consensus. After the real criminal, Matias Reyes, was convicted of the crime, the defense still believed some sort of apology or reconciliation was in order from a Mr. Donald Trump, who smeared the names of the innocent suspects in public newspapers and was a probable cause of the wrongful indictments. However, the real estate mogul felt seemingly zero need to hold himself accountable for any of the problems caused by his own public record statements and did not offer any apology or help to those whose lives were wrongly affected by his ads and their wake. After the trail, towards the end of 2002, NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly brought in a team of three lawyers to, “determine whether the new evidence (Reyes’ confession) indicated that police supervisors or officers acted improperly or negligently. However, it was found that no misconduct had been found in the investigation. As to why normal code was ignored and why the Children and Young Persons Act of 1933 had zero bearing on the operations of handling these suspects and their information was not said.
“Children and Young Persons Act 1933.” Legislation.gov.uk, Statute Law Database, 1 Aug. 1980, www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/23-24/12/section/49/1991-02-01.
Bowcott, Owen. “Press Intrusion: Don’t Name Suspects in the Media until Charged, Urges MP.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 21 Apr. 2013, www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/21/press-intrusion-name-suspects.
“Trump on Central Park 5.” Trump on Central Park Five: ‘I Hate These People’ (1989), www.msn.com/en-us/video/news/trump-on-central-park-five-i-hate-these-people-1989/vi-AACv6yp.

Section 4: Media Correlation to Laws and The Case
This case has recently been put into its own spotlight, and has now taken the stage into the public’s eyes. Media coverage has recently shown the case through a theatrical Netflix series, PBS film, and newspapers. All of these were released within approximate dates, and they have all shown different perspectives of the story, mostly untrue perspectives. One thing each of these entertainment platforms had in common was that they wanted to portray the best story line to draw attention to the case. In order to do so, they through each of the Central Park Five boys under the bus and convicted them through their scripts, headline covers, and commentaries. This caused a ripple effect, and the viewers began to speak badly of these children too which then caused them to be convicted before even being put on trial.
Through all of these allegations in the news, a lot about the case came through in the newspaper and media. One of the biggest counter arguments was from Donald Trump asking for the “restoration of the death penalty” in order to “properly punish” the Central Park Five kids. Mayor Ed Koch, also made the effort of referring to the five children as “monsters” that need to be punished, in his obituary. With these well-known people speaking so wrongfully about the children, many people followed their words about the case and believed the children were at fault of raping the women. All news reports began to “sensualized” news headlines and helped convict the boys wrongfully as well.
In the Netflix series, the story was not depicted correctly in the way the boys were being questioned. The series showed the boys being beaten, scared, and manipulated through out the investigation by the policemen. In reality, the five boys were questioned in a “ Reid like Technique”, which is an investigation that consists of three different stages. The first stage is fact analysis, the second stage is investigative interview, the third stage is confrontational interrogation. All of these boys were pushed by the investigators to “falsely accuse others” in order to save themselves, but never were they beaten until they told the “truth”. The third stage depicts that the investigator is allowed to leave the room for a brief period of time and come back in with a prop and lie to the suspect about evidence they have on the case. This does not mean they have the right to investigate minors and beat up the suspects in the room, nor did that actually happen to the children in real life. Due to a false story line, Netflix was sued by John E. Raid and Associates for the wrong characterization of Reid Techniques in the story line. Now, in an ethical standpoint, the Netflix series show the children being investigated for long hours, not being given physical needs, promising leniency, and deny the rights of a subject. Through this, the show depicts the policemen as disobeying the Reid Technique rules. This does not mean that Netflix got everything wrong about the story line, they did catch the fear of the children correctly, the manipulation the policemen put them through, and the media release of the children and families personal information and statements. This entirely did cause riots about the case during that period of time, by blaming the children, and proving them guilty before even being put in front of a judge.

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