Central Park Rape: Damage of false convictions

NYTimes    Exiled from New York, his hometown, Mr. McCray was last seen in public two decades ago as a skinny 16-year-old, practically drowning in a suit that he wore to the Manhattan courthouse where he was tried on charges that he was part of a mob that raped a jogger in Central Park and beat her nearly to death in April 1989. In the television news footage, he often held his mother’s hand as he walked past screaming demonstrators. 

With four other Harlem boys, all of whom refused plea bargains, he was convicted of attacking the jogger and sent to prison. More than a decade later, the convictions of all five were overturned. Another man — a serial rapist and killer who was unknown to any of the five — had convincingly implicated himself as the sole attacker of the jogger. DNA evidence backed his story.[....]

The film lays out the intricacies of the case, the sights and sounds of a brittle era; it will be full of revelations for those who never knew about the crime and how its life-bending effects were multiplied as the wrong people were prosecuted while the right man continued to maim, murder and rape on the Upper East Side.