Sarah Burns

Traces the near-fatal 1989 Central Park attack on a woman and the ensuing media frenzy and public hysteria that culminated in the wrongful convictions of five Latino teens, in a report that analyzes regional class and race struggles and the failures of local government and law enforcement.

A Chronicle of a City Wilding

The Central Park Five

I quit with 50 pages left. This has nothing to do with the subject matter. It is obvious that the justice system failed these kids. They weren't saints, but they didn't rape that woman and you can see how much of a losing battle it is once false confessions are given.

I quit because I got tired of Sarah Burns really railroading the defense attorneys. And it is more of a personal issue of mine than anything. Maybe she knows a lot about being a criminal defense attorney, but from her obvious bias about them having ulterior political motives, failing to defend clients, and her relying on the newspaper accounts to gauge how well they were doing just doesn't sit right with me. And she has a degree in American Studies and worked for a civil rights firm in some capacity, so yeah maybe she knows her stuff.

I also kept having issues with Burns throwing out "facts" and not really citing anything. Sure, she gives little paragraphs about how she got information and the books she read to learn more at the end of the novel, but something just felt conspiratorial about not actually citing anything. I don't want to go to 5 different books and find the newspaper articles you used to identify where you found the political motivations of these defense attorneys. Tell me in the book or chances are there isn't enough evidence for you to even say it as conjecture. And don't get me wrong, she makes some good points about the cultural climate that surrounded this crime. I just found myself asking "where is this opinion coming from" more than I'd like for a book of this kind. 

It also just got boring to read. It really turns into short paragraphs of passive descriptions like "x testified this" and "well y should have done this but for some reason they didn't so z did this instead." That just isn't fun to read. Illusion of Justice, The Run of His Life, and even a book about Casey Anthony written by a member of the prosecution were all better written.

The case of the Central Park Five is being revisited with a new acclaimed Netflix limited series on the subject, When They See Us, directed by Ava DuVernay. This is the only book that is going to tell you all you need to know about one of the most infamous criminal cases in American history. A trial that, thirty years on, still bears a striking, and unsettling, resemblance to our current political climate in the era of President Donald Trump. In April 1989, a white woman who came to be known as the 'Central Park jogger' was brutally raped and severely beaten, her body left crumpled in a ravine. Amid the staggering torrent of media coverage and public outcry that ensued, exposing the deep-seated race and class divisions in New York City at the time, five teenagers were quickly apprehended - four black and one Hispanic. All five confessed, were tried and convicted as adults despite no evidence linking them to the victim. Over a decade later, when DNA tests connected serial rapist Matias Reyes to the crime, the government, law enforcement, social institutions and media of New York were exposed as having undermined the individuals they were designed to protect. In The Central Park Five, Sarah Burns, who has worked closely with the young men to uncover and document the truth, recounts the ins and outs of this historic case for the first time since their convictions were overturned, telling, at last, the full story of one of America's most legendary miscarriages of justice.

The Central Park Five A Chronicle of a City Wilding

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