An Emotional Walk in the Park

Netflix's recent dramatic mini-series, When They See Us, brought the infamous case of the Central Park jogger back into the news. It was a brutal 1989 assault for which five juveniles were wrongfully convicted, men who then spent decades in jail and endured calls for their execution (including a high-profile one from Donald Trump) before finally being exonerated.

When They See Us received broad critical praise, and it's still on my list to check out at some point. But its arrival first sparked me to go back to a documentary on the subject that came onto my radar a few years ago. The Central Park Five -- a documentary from Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon -- was released in 2012, and was perhaps the first piece to look at the exoneration of these convicted men with anything remotely approaching the zealotry with which they were condemned in the early 1990s.

This is far from the first "documentary of the falsely accused" that I've taken an interest in: there was the Paradise Lost trilogy (plus West of Memphis, a separate look at the same case), and of course the sensations of Netflix and the podcast world, Making a Murderer and Serial. A key difference with The Central Park Five, however, is that these falsely accused men are now conclusively known to be innocent. All those other examples I cite weave elaborate tales (albeit very persuasive ones) of conflicting evidence and rushes to judgment that nevertheless cannot definitively or forensically establish an objective truth. It is possible -- though unlikely -- that you those other documentaries might not persuade you of their argument.

The Central Park Five is thus an anomalous exception. The evidence is threadbare to non-existent. The documentary doesn't have to present you much in the way of an alternative theory of the case, because the main theory of the case is so lacking. This is not a deep dive into crime investigation, nor even on errors in the justice system. There simply isn't much material to work those angles.

Instead, the film really focus on the wrongly convicted men themselves, and on the terrible impact on the lives of their families. The film is about injustice, but it focuses on the injustice at a personal, emotional level. Sprawling into multiple episodes, Making a Murder and Serial can both get caught up in things like "ooo, but the crime scene photos showed this!" -- which, admittedly, is much of the appeal of these sorts of stories as "entertainment." But the emotional cost is just one piece of those sprawling stories. Here, it's very much the story. I certainly understand and appreciate that approach, as these men never really had their stories told in this way before this.

The Central Park Five does succeed in agitating your emotions, your sadness or your rage; it doesn't give you much to do with it. One vital part of all those other movies and series is that all of them spend a lot of time explaining why and how people are motivated to confess to crimes they did not commit. This really feels like a huge takeaway to me that might have actual, practical value in many peoples' lives. I'm not talking about if, heaven forbid, you ever find yourself in a police interrogation room... or even if you find yourself on a jury evaluating the truthfulness of a confession. It's more a tool of empathy that belongs in any human's emotional toolbox -- understanding why people sometimes don't say what they mean, even to their detriment, and understand why that happens and what it looks like.

So ultimately, though I found The Central Park Five compelling, it felt somehow less... essential(?)... to me than some of those other efforts. Perhaps it's a bit ghoulish to think about someone's real suffering like this, on such terms. Perhaps even more so to rank or grade it. But here it is: I'd give the documentary The Central Park Five a B. It's worth a look for those who respond to these sorts of tales, though it's not the most skillful telling of such a tale I've come across.