Summary:
The documentary started off with the voice of Matias Reyes confessing the crime that the Central Park Five were accused of. Next, we got a summary of how crime was in New York City in the late 1980's. Then, we met each of the Central Park Five boys. Raymond, Antron, Yusef, Kevin, and Kharey did not know each other, but they all lived in Harlem. On April 19,1989, a group of about twenty-five or more teenagers went to Central Park. Among the twenty-five were the Central Park Five, however, none of them participated in the mischief that night. The other kids beat up a homeless man and took his food. The police showed up and the group scattered. Kharey went home, the other four went to go find the rest of the group so they could all go home together. The police came and the group split up again. This time, Kevin was put in handcuffs along with Raymond. They went to the precinct and they waited for the police to call their parents. Parents were called down to the station, but they were not allowed to leave just yet. The police held the kids there because a woman was found in Central Park beaten up and "virtually dead," and she had been raped. The detective on that case told the police at the station to hold the kids there and question them, so they did. Both kids denied even knowing about the woman in the park, saying that they had no idea what they were talking about, and they didn't. The next day, Antron, Yusef, and Kharey were brought in and asked the same questions as Raymond and Kevin. They said the same thing as Raymond and Kevin, they did not know anything about the woman. The police demanded answers, and the kids were growing tired and hungry, so they made up stories. The police were telling every single one of them that the others were putting their name in it, so they all wrote down false statements, thinking they would be able to go home afterwards. They were all (except for Yusef) videotaped as they did vocal confessions, later to be used to put them behind bars. Since Kharey was 16, he was sent to an adult jail. All of the kids were found guilty. Yusef, Raymond, Antron, and Kevin served between 6 1/2-8 years in jail, Kharey served 13 years, since he was 16 years old. While everyone else was out, Kharey ran into Matias Reyes. Matias went around saying that there were people serving time for a crime that he committed. The case was brought back up, and Matias confessed and all of the evident errors from 13 years ago were made clear, proving the Central Park Fives' innocence. Raymond was in jail for an unrelated crime, but his time was cut short because of his proven innocence of his first "crime." Matias went to jail, everyone else was free and lived almost happily ever after. They struggle as adults because years of their youth were taken away from them, and they could not quite catch up to where they were supposed to be in life.
My Response:
This documentary pissed me off. I had never even heard of this case before and I lived on the East Coast for a lot of my life. It makes me so upset because I am black and I do know of cases where black people get more time for the same crime a white person may have done. The injustice in the 80s was not surprising, nor was the unfair treatment of the blacks to me. People think that just because this is New York that racism did not exist. Wrong, when it comes to the Criminal Justice System in ANY state of the United States of America, there will be racism. This documentary is very relevant to what is going on right now in Ferguson, it looks like the country is going backwards rather than forward in the Civil Rights department. The documentary made me extremely sad, because here are these teenage boys who are not mature enough to make tough decisions for themselves, forced into confessing and making up a story that they had absolutely nothing to do with, and then thrown in jail for a minimum of 6 years. I felt especially bad for Kharey because he was the oldest, and was sent to an adult prison. All of these kids were forced to grow up quickly in order to survive and that is completely unfair. But Kharey also lost his father, and couldn't even spend time dwelling on that. Raymond seemed to get the short end of the stick most of the time as well, because his family did not have enough money to get him out on bail, and then after he got out of jail, he started to sell drugs because he was miserable, unable to get a job because he was registered as a sex offender. Kharey said it best, no amount of money could make up for the 13 years of lost time.
Cinematic Response:
I thought the film was very nice. There was not that much of actual footage of the kids, but there were a lot of relevant pictures and old footage and they all looked really nice. There was one shot in particular that I thought was beautiful. It was a cigarette burning and the smoke coming from it on a desk. Then they did a time lapse on it to show how long the kids were being interrogated, waiting to see if they could go home. Antron only wanted his voice on the film, so when he spoke, there were images of him as a teenager and all of the shots they showed were relevant to what they were talking about. I thought the angles were very nice, especially of the pictures. The pictures of this film are really what made it work and fit together.
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