City Releases Trove of Documents in Central Park Jogger Case

NEW YORK — On a spring afternoon in 1989, detectives brought a special-education teacher, Daniel Kany, downtown to ask him questions. Stories about a nighttime beating and rape in Central Park had been rippling through his classroom on West 103d Street for days since a student at the school had been arrested in the park.

A 14-year-old student had been making pelvic motions, Kany told detectives, according to a police report. Another student told the teacher he had been in the park at the time of the rape, too — and then hid under Kany’s desk for the better part of a day. A third told Kany he had raped the woman in Central Park. Detectives later said that student was “a confirmed liar.”

None of those students was ever implicated in the rape. They seemed to have been making up stories. But knowing about the attack — or saying you had taken part in it — had become a kind of currency in Kany’s classroom. The distortions that spread — one of many dead-end leads for detectives — showed how a devastating crime morphed into a public spectacle, making it ever more difficult to sift truth from fiction.

Only years later did investigators conclude that five other teenagers who were arrested and confessed to taking part in the rape — the Central Park Five — had been wrongfully convicted. The teenagers, ages 14 to 16 at the time of the attack, said the statements had been coerced. Twelve years after they were convicted in two trials in 1990, another man, Matias Reyes, confessed that he alone had attacked and raped the woman. DNA evidence confirmed his story.

On Thursday night, the case reached a remarkable new juncture when the city released thousands of pages of internal law enforcement documents related to the investigation, including videotaped statements, crime scene pictures and confidential police reports like the one describing Kany’s classroom. Some were evidence at trial and had not been seen since. Others have never before been made public.

The documents do not add many new details to the basic contours of the case, a tale of false confessions obtained from teenagers that has been the subject of innumerable news articles.

But the release was the first part of a larger disclosure of about 100,000 pages of materials related to the notorious case, which inflamed racial tensions and resulted in the wrongful convictions of five black and Hispanic teenagers. For one of the most heavily scrutinized cases in the city’s history, the documents look likely to provide the deepest glimpses yet into how a high-pressure police investigation took a wrong turn and failed to ensnare a serial rapist.

The documents offer snapshots from different stages of the investigation. They describe the attacks on other people in the park the night of the rape, the clothes and nail clippings collected from the defendants and some of the travails of investigating the case: Officers in May 1989 executed a search warrant for a teenager’s jacket, only to be told by the teenager’s mother that the jacket had been stolen.

The attack on the jogger, a 28-year-old investment banker who frequently ran in the park after work, crystallized fears of lawlessness in the city when violent crime was near its peak. It also became a seminal moment in the history of race, policing and the media in New York City. Donald Trump bought full-page newspaper advertisements warning that “roving bands of wild criminals roam our neighborhoods” and declaring: “Bring back the death penalty.”

In 2002, the office of Robert M. Morgenthau, then the Manhattan district attorney, joined a defense motion to vacate the five men’s convictions. Twelve years later, the city agreed to pay $41 million to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit the men filed.

Four of the Central Park Five — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam and Raymond Santana Jr. — spent about seven years in prison. The fifth man, Kharey Wise, served about 13 years.

The woman who survived the severe beating and rape, Trisha Meili, said she herself was hopeful the documents would offer a more complete picture of the investigation: “I am eager to see what’s revealed in the documents that have not been available to the public,” she said.

Jonathan C. Moore, one of the men’s lawyers, said the materials being released publicly 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.”

“You can search high and low,” he added, “and you will not find any evidence that connects any of our five clients to the vicious sexual assault of Patricia Meili.” Linda Fairstein, who oversaw the prosecution as chief of the sex crimes unit, said the documents contained evidence that the Central Park Five had carried out other beatings in Central Park the night of the rape, and that those beatings were linked to the rape. She urged people to watch the full videotaped statements of the defendants, which she said had been distorted in a popular documentary film.

“I’m pleased for anyone who will view them to see the prosecutor did exactly what the prosecutor should do,” Fairstein said. “She was respectful to the letter of the law, respectful to these kids and their parents, and dignified in the manner in which she treated the young men and their families.”

Prosecutors have long argued that the teenagers committed other assaults in the park that night, even if they did not take part in the rape. But Morgenthau’s aides, who asked a judge to throw out the convictions, said there was not enough evidence to prove the other crimes either.

The city says that the records will be disclosed in phases on a city website. The documents were part of the confidential materials the city turned over to the men’s lawyers during the discovery process in their 2003 civil rights lawsuit.

In 2012, The New York Times asked a judge to unseal certain of the materials, and in 2014, the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio, by then having settled the lawsuit, said in a court filing that the case was of “unparalleled significance in this city” and endorsed a review of the record with the goal of a broad release of materials, which the judge approved.

The documents paint a picture of the early stages of a tense police investigation. Early on, investigators tried to determine whether the attacks were racially motivated.

One officer interviewed a Hispanic man who was beaten the same night as the rape: “I asked him if he thought the group was cursing him, or yelling racial remarks, and he said no,” the officer wrote. Two days later, another officer wrote that 10 statements from suspects in crimes in the park that night didn’t suggest racial bias.

Within weeks after the attack, prosecutors had put together a narrative based mostly on the statements of the teenagers who had been arrested, despite inconsistencies in their accounts. They offered stomach-turning details of the attack, but their lawyers said the confessions were coerced from pliable teenagers, some of them questioned without their parents present.

The semen found on the victim did not match the DNA of any of the teenagers accused. Still, the district attorney’s office stuck to that narrative through two trials and several appeals.

The men consistently maintained their innocence, and were sometimes punished for it. In a 1999 psychological evaluation released as part of the trove of documents, a psychologist wrote that one of the men, Kharey Wise, participated in a sex offender program in prison, but “the program identified him as noncompliant because he denies sexually abusing the victim.” A handwritten note from Wise was published as well: “I Wise would like for you to disregard my name for that program you and I talked about,” he wrote.

Along with detailed evidence and previously unpublished police reports, the documents also reveal something more human: the parallel life that the boys might have lived if they had not been sent to prison.

A psychological evaluation of Salaam in 1990 showed that he scored highly on an IQ test and was grappling with ordinary teenage concerns: “low self-esteem” and “confusion about self.” His IQ scores, the psychiatrist wrote, were “indicative of much higher intellectual functioning that is not being tapped at the present time.”