The Central Park Five should be required viewing for all Americans, but especially New Yorkers. I remember the case of the Central Park jogger, and everyone-the media, the authorities and my thirteen-year old self, thought that these five men raped and nearly killed that poor woman because they confessed. Since then, it has been conclusively proven through DNA that those five children did not do it, and meanwhile the actual rapist continued to brutalize, rape and kill other women.
The Central Park Five examines how an entire city committed such a grievous sin by not only irreparably destroying five children’s lives and their families, but the women who were raped and killed subsequent to the attack. The Central Park Five addresses how both the police and the District Attorney’s office elicited a false confession.
The Central Park Five is one of the few documentaries that benefited from one of the filmmakers being personally involved in the subject matter, but maybe it helped that Sarah Burns collaborated with her father, the renown documentarian, Ken Burns. After the truth came out, I learned never to listen to mainstream media when it comes to alleged black suspects, especially the ones who are no angels.