Literary Group Is Under Fire for Honoring ‘Central Park Five’ Prosecutor

A New York organization that promotes mystery and detective fiction is under fire for honoring a best-selling crime novelist who, before she turned to writing, oversaw the prosecution of five teenage boys, known as the Central Park Five, who were wrongly convicted in a 1989 rape that shocked and divided New Yorkers.

The furor began Tuesday when Mystery Writers of America, creator of the annual Edgar Awards, announced that Linda Fairstein would be one of two writers honored as Grand Masters for literary achievement at the organization’s awards banquet next spring in New York. Fairstein is the author of 20 novels about a fictional Manhattan prosecutor, Alexandra Cooper, modeled on her own real-life past work as the chief of the sex-crimes unit of the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

In June, the city released thousands of pages of internal law enforcement documents from the original Central Park Five investigation — some never previously made public — that reinforced the decision in 2002, based on DNA evidence, to overturn the convictions for all five defendants, who had confessed to the crime.

In July, Fairstein wrote an op-ed in the New York Law Journal defending the prosecution. “The confessions were not coerced,” she wrote.

Another writer and Edgar Award winner, Attica Locke, in a series of tweets Tuesday, urged the organization to honor someone else. “She is almost single-handedly responsible for the wrongful incarceration of the Central Park Five,” wrote Locke, who also worked on filmmaker Ava DuVernay’s upcoming Netflix docudrama on the case.

Locke wrote that Fairstein “never apologized or recanted her insistence” on the boys’ guilt despite their subsequent exonerations. “Just because she has a flourishing publishing career does not mean we should ignore her past — or her continued unwillingness to accept responsibility for ruining five innocent men’s lives,” she wrote. “I cannot support this decision.”

Fairstein fired back at Locke on Twitter, defending her office’s handling of the prosecution while also minimizing her own role in it. “I was neither the prosecutor nor investigator in the case you mention,” Fairstein wrote. “I was certainly NOT the person who ‘single-handedly spearheaded’ the investigation.”

“Why don’t you and I have a civilized conversation, so I can refresh you with the facts?” She wrote. “Thank you.”

Locke, reached by email, declined further comment. “I’ve kind of said everything I want to about it,” she wrote.

Fairstein could not be reached for comment Wednesday, and officials with the Mystery Writers of America did not immediately respond to calls and emails. “We are taking seriously the issues raised by Attica Locke,” read a statement posted to the organization’s website. “Our board is going to discuss these concerns as soon as possible and make a further statement soon.”

On Facebook, novelist Andrew Gross defended Fairstein as a worthy Edgar Award recipient. “But for a person who has devoted her career to real-world situations that have advanced women’s rights to be attacked and demonized by people whose toughest real-world decisions are how to define a gerund or what book to review is a sign that the inmates are truly running the asylum,” Gross wrote.

Kellye Garrett, a novelist, said in an interview Wednesday that Mystery Writers of America should rescind the award if Fairstein does not volunteer to give it up. Garrett praised the organization but said its leaders should explain how they came to choose Fairstein in the first place. “It’s not a secret, her connection to the Central Park Five,” she said.

“They have work to do,” Garrett said, “especially when it comes to inclusivity and embracing writers from marginalized communities.”

At an anxious moment in the city’s history, with violent crime near its peak, police in 1989 arrested five boys, all black and Hispanic and ages 14-16, for the rape and near-fatal beating of Trisha Meili, a 28-year-old white woman who was attacked as she jogged through Central Park after work.

All five youths said their confessions were coerced. But all were convicted in 1990. Four of the teenagers spent about seven years in prison. The other was incarcerated for 13 years.

Twelve years after the convictions, DNA evidence pointed to a serial rapist, Matias Reyes, who confessed to the attack while serving a life sentence for other crimes. The Manhattan district attorney agreed to vacate the Central Park Five convictions in 2002. The five — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana Jr. and Kharey Wise — later received a settlement from the city totaling nearly $45 million.