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Ricky Jackson was wrongly incarcerated and then spent about forty years in prison. Jackson tells his story about what he does after being released.

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He Served the Longest Sentence of Any Innocent U.S. Inmate (360°)

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Donald Trump's Opinion On The Central Park Five - NYTimes

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Donald Trump's Opinion On The Central Park Five - NYTimes

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Donald Trump believed that the five males who were accused for the rape of a white woman in Central Park were guilty; he publicly made this known. Trump also believes that due to this situation, the death penalty should be back in place./

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Op-Ed Contributor

Donald J. Trump rarely apologizes. When it comes to the case of the Central Park Five, he has never even come close.

In 1989, after these black and Latino teenagers from Harlem were accused of assaulting and raping a white woman in Central Park, Mr. Trump spent $85,000 placing full-page ads in the four daily papers in New York City, calling for the return of the death penalty.

"Muggers and murderers," he wrote, "should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes." Though he didn't refer to the teenagers by name, it was clear to anyone in the city that he was referring to them.

Incredibly, 14 years after their sentences were vacated based on DNA evidence and the detailed and accurate confession of a serial rapist named Matias Reyes, Mr. Trump has doubled down.

"They admitted they were guilty," he said in a statement to CNN this month. "The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous."

Mr. Trump is apparently ignorant of our country's epidemic of wrongful convictions, which disproportionately affect minorities, and the prevalence of false confessions in those convictions.

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Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, and Korey Wise in New York City. Known as the Central Park Five, they served prison sentences after being wrongly convicted in the Central Park jogger case. Credit Michael Nagle for The New York Times

He isn't alone. There has been a persistent drumbeat since the sentences were vacated that the Central Park Five were guilty either of rape or of some other crime that night. A 2003 New York Police Department review reached the conclusion that the boys were "likely guilty" of an initial assault on the jogger, even if they didn't commit the rape. Linda Fairstein, who oversaw the sex crime unit in the Manhattan district attorney's office at the time, maintains that the jury reached the correct verdict.

Online, the case against the Central Park Five has become a meme about liberal disregard for law and order, or as the conservative columnist Ann Coulter argued, "liberals are opposed to rape in the abstract, but when it comes to actual rapists, they're all for them."

Why the continued belief in the guilt of the Central Park Five, despite all the evidence to the contrary? Race and racism surely play their role. So does the cognitive trap that psychologists call anchoring and what we call first impressions: Mr. Trump quickly jumped to conclusions about their guilt, as did many in New York City.

And, as Mr. Trump pointed out, four of the five teenagers did confess to being at the scene of the rape. But false confessions are surprisingly common in criminal cases. In the hundreds of post-conviction DNA exonerations that the Innocence Project has studied, at least one in four of the wrongly convicted had given a confession.

In the case of the Central Park attack, the confessions were the only real evidence. DNA testing, a nascent technology in 1989, was used to compare a single sample found on the victim with the profiles of not only the Central Park Five, but also of many of the other kids they had been with in the park. There were no matches. The victim, when she awoke from a coma, had no memory of the attack.

That left only the statements from four of the teenagers: Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Korey Wise and Antron McCray. The fifth, Yusef Salaam, might have confessed, but his mother interrupted the interrogation before he signed anything. A detective was nonetheless allowed to testify that Mr. Salaam had admitted to participating, though he'd given no formal statement.

From the relative comfort of the jury box or Trump Tower, it may be hard to imagine why anyone would admit to a crime he didn't commit. The power imbalance in an interrogation room is extreme, especially when the suspects are young teenagers, afraid of the police and unfamiliar with the justice system or their rights.

The teenagers faced hours of intense interrogations with no lawyers present and often with no parent or guardian, even though they were just 14, 15 and 16 years old. They were denied food, drink and sleep over many hours. And they were terrified.

The young men were all led to believe that they would be allowed to go home only if they said what the police wanted to hear. The four who gave statements admitted to having been present but blamed others for the rape, which they naïvely thought would not incriminate them.

The "confessions" were riddled with problems. As the district attorney's office later found, the 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."

Mr. Trump has also suggested that the teenagers were guilty of something that night because, as he wrote in an editorial for The New York Daily News in 2014, "these young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels."

None of the Central Park Five had ever been arrested before, so Mr. Trump's reference to their pasts has no basis in truth. The five were in the park that night, but they maintain that they did not participate in other attacks, and there is no evidence that they did.

So we are left with Mr. Trump's presumption that because they were black and brown teenagers from Harlem, they must have committed a crime. The idea that teenagers who were in a park while crimes were being committed by others deserved to be labeled rapists and sent to prison for between 8 and 13 years is an affront to our Constitution.

Mr. Trump owes many people overdue apologies. At the top of his growing list should be Mr. McCray, Mr. Wise, Mr. Salaam, Mr. Santana and Mr. Richardson. They were victims of a rush to judgment 27 years ago. They shouldn't still be.

Correction:

An earlier version of this article misidentified the role of Linda Fairstein in the criminal trials of the Central Park Five. Ms. Fairstein was the supervisor of the sex crimes unit in the Manhattan district attorney's office. She was not the prosecutor.

Sarah Burns co-wrote and co-directed the documentary "The Central Park Five."
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

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Opinion | Why Trump Doubled Down on the Central Park Five

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Op-Ed Contributor Donald J. Trump rarely apologizes. When it comes to the case of the Central Park Five, he has never even come close. In 1989, after these black and Latino teenagers from Harlem were accused of assaulting and raping a white woman in Central Park, Mr. Trump spent $85,000 placing full-page ads in the four daily papers in New York City, calling for the return of the death penalty.

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Kalief Browder's innocence comes to a settlement agreement years after his release from jail. Browder was in jail for three years and after being released, he committed suicide due to not being able to adapt to freedom.

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[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
New York City has agreed to pay $3.3 million to settle a lawsuit on behalf of the estate of Kalief Browder, the young Bronx man whose detention on Rikers Island became a symbol of the breakdown in criminal justice in New York and fueled the drive to ban solitary confinement for youths in the city's jails.

Mr. Browder, who was 16 years old when he was arrested in 2010 and accused of stealing a backpack, was detained on Rikers Island for three years - about two of which were spent in solitary confinement - without being tried or convicted of a crime. In 2015, at age 22, he hanged himself at his parents' home in the Bronx.

The settlement, which is cited in a court document, was confirmed by the city and the family's lawyer.

In a statement, the city's Law Department said, "Kalief Browder's story helped inspire numerous reforms to the justice system to prevent this tragedy from ever happening again, including an end to punitive segregation for young people on Rikers Island.

"We hope that this settlement and our continuing reforms help bring some measure of closure to the Browder family," the statement added.

The civil rights and wrongful death action is before a judge in State Supreme Court in the Bronx.

The family's lawyer, Sanford A. Rubenstein, said papers would soon be submitted to the judge "to finalize the resolution of this matter."

"It's a fair settlement, given the tragedy of what happened here," Mr. Rubenstein said. "While no money can ever bring Kalief Browder back, we hope the settlement of this case and the changes that took place at Rikers will result in this not happening to any other victims."

Mr. Browder's case was first chronicled in a 2014 article in The New Yorker, which described how he was beaten by correction officers, and endured repeated delays in the clogged Bronx court.

Mr. Browder also turned down offers to plead guilty, including one that would have allowed for his immediate release, as he insisted on his innocence, the article said. Bronx prosecutors ultimately dropped the case against Mr. Browder, who was released in 2013.

In December 2014, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city had ended the use of solitary confinement for 16- and 17-year-olds. After Mr. Browder's death the following June, Mr. de Blasio said in a statement that "Kalief's story helped inspire our efforts" at Rikers Island.

"There is no reason he should have gone through this ordeal," Mr. de Blasio said, "and his tragic death is a reminder that we must continue to work each day to provide the mental health services so many New Yorkers need."

The de Blasio administration also developed a plan to move Rikers inmates under 18 to a dedicated jail for youths in the Bronx.

In 2016, President Barack Obama wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Post announcing a ban on solitary confinement for juveniles in federal prisons. In it, Mr. Obama cited Mr. Browder's "constant struggle to recover from the trauma of being locked up alone for 23 hours a day" and his suicide.

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Kalief Browder's Suicide Brought Changes to Rikers. Now It Has Led to a $3 Million Settlement.

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What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox .] New York City has agreed to pay $3.3 million to settle a lawsuit on behalf of the estate of Kalief Browder, the young Bronx man whose detention on Rikers Island became a symbol of the breakdown in criminal justice in New York and fueled the drive to ban solitary confinement for youths in the city's jails.

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Randall Adams was wrongfully convicted of shooting a police officer in 1976. In 1989, his conviction was over turned due evidence being found supporting his innocence.

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Emmett Till was lynched at the age of fourteen after being accused of offending a white women. After six decades, the woman who Emmett Till supposedly offended confesses that he did not offend her. Emmett Till was lynched and it was deemed as okay because of the color of his skin.

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Woman Linked to 1955 Emmett Till Murder Tells Historian Her Claims Were False (Published 2017)

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Carolyn Bryant Donham is quoted in a new book as admitting her long-ago allegations that Emmett grabbed her and was menacing and sexually crude toward her, “is not true.”

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Rapper Meek Mill discusses where he comes from and how his environment has impacted his legal system journey.

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Meek Mill Sits Down With Angie Martinez After 169 Days Behind Bars

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Five teenage males of color were wrongfully convicted of committing a crime for rape. The film explains the story of the five males and how they were wrongfully incarcerated due to racial profiling.

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The Central Park Five Official Trailer #1 (2012) - Ken Burns Documentary Movie HD

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Rapper Meek Mill and Co-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers discuss how Meek Mill got interested in supporting reform of the justice system. Meek Mill was placed in jail four times without being committing and had been on probation for eleven years.

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Rapper Meek Mill talks about his new criminal justice reform organization

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This documentary series is about an African American male from the Bronx who spent three years in jail. The series discusses how he spent his time in jail without even being convicted of a crime but was arrested due to racial profiling.

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Time: The Kalief Browder Story | Netflix

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This series traces the tragic case of Kalief Browder, a Bronx teen who spent three horrific years in jail, despite never being convicted of a crime. Watch trailers & learn more.

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This website gives multiple articles about the film The Central Park Five.The perspectives of the filmmakers and the five men that were incarcerated are told through the articles.

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Learn more about The Central Park Five, a film from Ken Burns, which tells the story of the five black and Latino teenagers from Harlem who were wrongly convicted of raping a white woman in New York City's Central Park in 1989.