The Exonerated Five Inspired Netflix's 'When They See Us' Cast With Their Bravery
Ava DuVernay's Netflix series, When They See Us, is based on the true story of the "Central Park Five."
Five boys were wrongfully accused and convicted of raping and beating a white woman in 1989.
The men have since been exonerated of those crimes and are now in their mid-forties.
Last May, Ava DuVernay shed new light on the 30-year-old case of the Central Park Five with her Netflix miniseries, When They See Us. The scripted series is based on the true story of the "Central Park Five," a group of five teenagers wrongly accused and convicted of a crime they didn't commit. Now, they're known as the "Exonerated Five," since the real assailant was found in 2002.
Over the past two weeks, the miniseries has become one of Netflix's most-watched shows, won a Peabody award, and celebrated its one-year anniversary.
But before that, DuVernay's production company, Array Now, launched Array 101, an educational resource for viewers of When They See Us, to help understand the historical context and work through their emotional responses to it. "So many people came up to me and were like, 'I cried' and 'I couldn’t finish it,'" the director told Gayle King when discussing Array 101. "I think what I failed to do and many people in Hollywood failed to do and other people failed to do was connect the dots between the thing you make and the people who are watching it, particularly young people."
The show is an emotional one, because the case was a highly-publicized example of how systemic racism and implicit bias led to the boys' wrongful conviction and incarceration—which happens with startling frequency. (The Innocence Project exists for this very reason.)
DuVernay signed on to direct the film after connecting with Raymond Santana, one of the Exonerated Five, over Twitter. "I was familiar with the story from growing up, but also I’d watched the Sarah Burns documentary [about it]. In his DMs, I said, 'No one has your story?' And he said, 'No,'" DuVernay told Rolling Stone. "I was just fascinated by the case, not really thinking I’d ever make a film. But once I met him and then gradually met all of the other men, I felt like I had to make it."
Before you tune in to the show, here's everything you need to know about the real Central Park Five:
Who are the Central Park Five?
In 1989, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana Jr., and Korey Wise (who later changed his name to Kharey) were in Central Park on April 19—the night a white female jogger, Trisha Meili, was raped and severely beaten. All five were Black or Latinx teenagers from Harlem between the ages of 14 and 16.
What happened to the Central Park Five?
Simply put, they were wrongly accused—and convicted—of raping and beating Meili, then a 28-year-old investment banker who fell into a coma after the attack. When she woke up, she had no memory of the sexual assault. By that time, prosecutors had already interrogated McCray, Richardson, Salaam, Santana Jr., and Wise, and coerced false confessions from four of the five teenagers, according to the Exonerated Five's lawyers.
The last teenager, Yusef Salaam, might have confessed, too, if his mother had not interrupted the interrogation before he could sign a formal statement, The New York Times reported. Still, the court allowed a detective to testify that Salaam had confessed to taking part in the attack.
Why did the Central Park Five confess to a crime they didn't commit?
It happens—a lot, actually. According to the Innocence Project, 28 percent of wrongful conviction cases that are exonerated using DNA evidence in the U.S. involve false confessions. That percentage jumps to 33 percent when the false confessors are 18 years old or younger at the time of arrest. (Btw, the Innocence Project helped the Central Park Five get exonerated.)
According to The New York Times, the teenagers were interrogated for hours on end, with no lawyers present and often without the presence of a parent or guardian, either. The publication also reported that "they were denied food, drink, and sleep over many hours."
Watch the When They See Us cast talk about their real-life counterparts:
The young men were all led to believe that they only had one way out—telling the police what they wanted to hear. So McCray, Richardson, Santana Jr., and Wise all gave statements admitting to being present at the attack, but blaming others for the sexual assault. They believed saying this would not incriminate them (it did).
The false confessions, perhaps unsurprisingly, were full of inconsistencies. The Central Park Five's formal statements "differed from one another on the specific details of virtually every major aspect of the crime—who initiated the attack, who knocked the victim down, who undressed her, who struck her, who held her, who raped her, what weapons were used in the course of the assault and when in the sequence of events the attack took place," the district attorney’s office learned, according to The New York Times.
Was there any other evidence to convict the Central Park Five?
Nope. The "confessions" were the only real evidence used in the case. None of the Central Park Five's DNA matched the single DNA sample (in the form of semen) found on Meili.
Nonetheless, the district attorney’s office had already created a narrative that McCray, Richardson, Salaam, Santana Jr., and Wise raped and attacked Meili—and stuck to it through two trials and several appeals.
What happened during the Central Park Five trials?
The prosecutors presented the Central Park Five's confessions as evidence, and a forensic analyst testified that hair found on the victim was "similar" to Richardson’s hair "to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty," according to the Innocence Project. The prosecution also presented a rock found near the crime scene as evidence because it had blood and hair on it that was believed to have come from the victim.
In 1990, all five teenagers were convicted in two separate trials. McCray, Salaam, and Santana Jr. were all tried as juveniles, convicted of rape and assault, and sentenced to five to 10 years. Kevin Richardson, the youngest of the group at age 14, was tried as a juvenile and convicted of attempted murder, rape, sodomy, and robbery. He was also sentenced to five to 10 years.
Unlike the rest of the Central Park Five, 16-year-old Wise was tried as an adult and convicted of assault, sexual abuse, and riot. He was sentenced to serve five to 15 years in prison.
How long were the Central Park Five in prison?
Four of the men, McCray, Richardson, Salaam, and Santana Jr. served about seven years, while Wise, spent about 13 years in prison, per The New York Times. The entire time they were imprisoned, all five men consistently maintained their innocence.
Wise was even identified as "noncompliant" in a sex offender program in prison because, according to a 1999 psychological evaluation of Wise, "he denies sexually abusing the victim."
How were the Central Park Five exonerated?
In 2002, Matias Reyes, a convicted murderer and rapist, confessed that he alone had sexually assaulted and beaten Meili, per The New York Times. DNA evidence confirmed his confession.
Not only that, but the crime fit a pattern Reyes had already established. Just days earlier in 1989, he had committed another rape near Central Park.
The hairs found on Meili (and used against Richardson in trial) were also tested and matched Reyes.
Unfortunately, the men had already served their time, but in 2002, then-Manhattan district attorney Robert M. Morgenthau joined a defense motion to vacate the five men’s convictions. On December 19, 2002, those convictions were officially overturned. In 2014, New York City agreed to pay the men $41 million to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit they filed. They also received a $3.9 million settlement from New York state for being incarcerated, per New York Daily News.
Four years later, in 2018, New York City released thousands of pages of internal police documents related to the Central Park Five case, from videotaped statements and crime scene pictures to confidential police reports, further exonerating the men.
One of the men's lawyers, Jonathan C. Moore, told The New York Times that the public release of the case materials make it clear that Reyes alone committed the rape and that "the prosecution of our five clients, the Central Park Five, was an intentional violation of their rights."
Reyes is currently serving a life sentence for his crimes.
Does everyone believe the Central Park Five are innocent now?
Hmmm, not quite. Linda Fairstein, who was then chief of the sex crimes unit and oversaw the prosecution, maintains that the documents contain evidence that the men carried out other attacks in Central Park the night of Meili's rape and assault (something prosecutors have long argued), according to The New York Times.
In 2018, Fairstein urged people to watch the newly released defendants' full videotaped statements, saying they'd been distorted in a documentary film, The Central Park Five, directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon.
Watch the Central Park Five documentary trailer and decide for yourself:
As for Meili, she doesn't believe that the prosecutors did anything wrong in their initial interrogation and conviction of the Central Park Five. "When that lawsuit was settled, it gave some the impression that the detectives and the prosecutors had acted improperly, and I’d like to see it be acknowledged that there wasn’t a violation of [the teens'] civil rights," she told the New York Daily News in 2018.
"I so wish the case hadn't been settled," Meili also told ABC News' 20/20 in January 2019. "I wish that it had gone to court because there's a lot of information that's now being released that I'm seeing for the first time. I support the work of law enforcement and prosecutors. ... They treated me with such dignity and respect."
Where are the Central Park Five now?
Salaam is now married and lives in another state with his wife and their 10 children (a blended family), The Root reported in 2018. Meanwhile, Santana Jr. lives in Atlanta with his daughter and works as a fashion designer, which often brings him back to New York.
Richardson, along with Salaam and Santana Jr., attended their former high school, Bronx Preparatory High School's, 2017 commencement to receive honorary diplomas, per The New York Times. "When we went to prison, this was taken away from us," Santana said at the time. "It was something we never got to experience. You felt like you were being robbed, and we’ve finally found redemption."
Little to nothing is publicly known about the current whereabouts of McCray and Wise (though they both did receive their honorary diplomas by mail). According to a 2013 interview with Wise, he currently lives in the Bronx and speaks on behalf of the Innocence Project at events.
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