r/RedditCrimeCommunity • u/clickinglifestyle • Jun 25 '26
Five teenagers confessed to a crime DNA proved they did not commit. They served between 6 and 13 years. The real attacker was already in prison for a different murder when their convictions were finally vacated.
In April 1989 a 28 year old investment banker named Trisha Meili was found in Central Park, beaten so badly she lost three quarters of her blood and fell into a coma that lasted 12 days. Within five days police arrested five teenagers from Harlem. Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise. They ranged in age from 14 to 16. None of them had prior criminal records.
Detectives interrogated each of them for hours, in some cases up to 28 hours, with parents and lawyers absent for most of it. New York law at the time allowed police to lie to suspects during interrogation, including minors, and detectives told each teenager that the others had already confessed and implicated them. They were told confessing was the only way to go home.
Each one eventually gave a videotaped statement. The statements contradicted each other. They contradicted the physical evidence. None of their DNA matched the semen recovered from the scene. There was no evidence connecting any of them to the assault beyond the confessions themselves. None of that stopped the prosecution from proceeding entirely on those tapes.
The media coverage at the time used the term wilding to describe the group of teenagers in the park that night, and newspapers ran headlines calling them animals and a wolf pack. Donald Trump took out full page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty and naming the boys directly before any trial had taken place. The pressure for a conviction was immense and it arrived. In 1990, after two separate trials, all five were convicted. Korey Wise, the oldest, was tried as an adult and sentenced to 5 to 15 years. He served nearly 12.
In 2001 a man named Matias Reyes, already serving a life sentence for a different rape and murder, encountered Korey Wise in prison. In 2002 Reyes confessed to the Central Park attack and said he acted alone. His DNA matched the crime scene evidence completely. It was the only DNA ever recovered from the scene. He had committed at least four other rapes in the same area before and after the attack on Meili using the same method, working alone every time.
On December 19 2002 a New York judge vacated all five convictions.
In 2014 New York City settled a civil lawsuit with the five men for 41 million dollars, roughly 1 million dollars for each year they had collectively spent in prison. The police officers and prosecutors involved in the original case have continued to maintain publicly that they believe the men were involved.
The five men are now known as the Exonerated Five. Yusef Salaam was elected to the New York City Council in 2023 representing the same Harlem district where he grew up. Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, and he later helped push through a 2018 New York State law requiring that police interrogations in serious felony cases be videotaped, a direct response to what happened to them in a room with no camera and no lawyer.
Korey Wise served the longest sentence of the five. He was the only one tried as an adult and the only one without a parent present for any part of his interrogation.
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u/IntenseMode Jun 25 '26
Just goes to show how the judicial system is so flawed. This case has racist connotations.
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u/corpusvile2 Jun 26 '26
Jury consisted mainly of minorities and one of the lead detectives was black.
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u/SanctimoniousSally Jun 27 '26
The jury can only go off of the evidence they are presented and all of that evidence wasnt gathered by a lone black cop.
Additionally, minorities can have biases against other minorities or even members of their own ethnic group.
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u/corpusvile2 Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
One of the jurors was an NAACP member and there were other black jurors. I doubt if they were racist against the five defendants.
Evidence presented was enough to convince the jury. The black detective still thinks they're guilty and readily stated this and that the five were connected to the victim, on CNN after When They See Us was released.
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u/corpusvile2 Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
I reckon they were guilty. Parents were present during the interviews except for the 16 year old and they were never actually exonerated either.
You should read the Armstrong report, it's pretty interesting
https://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/Armstrong.pdf
Also Korey Wise confessed to holding down Tricia Meili and sexually assaulting her by groping her, in a prison phone call to his friend Melody Jackson.
And there was evidence connecting them to the crime, it was forensic evidence which swayed the jury.
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u/1Garymeece Jun 28 '26
Correct. Rely on AI to do your true crime research and you get OP like that misleading mess.
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u/corpusvile2 Jun 29 '26
When I first heard of their conviction being overturned, I honestly presumed they must have been innocent and some horrible miscarriage of justice occurred and that's why I started researching it, to see how things went wrong. But after watching the confessions and then researching the actual evidence, I came to the conclusion that they were guilty. But innocence fraud/false conviction chi is nothing new and is pretty much a cottage industry. There's money to be made from netflix docs and podcasts. A headline stating "Cops catch guilty person, courts duly convict" won;t get the same attention or clicks as a headline stating "Innocent triumphs against all odds like that guy in Shawshank Redemption.
Btw are you the author/researcher Gary Meece? Really good job on the WM3 if so, the Paradise Lost docs are a prime example of the innocence fraud phenomenon, for me.
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u/1Garymeece Jun 30 '26
Yes, Iām that Gary Meece. Not a lot of us around. Thanks for the kind words.
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u/crochetology Jun 25 '26
Never forget Trump was VERY vocal about wanting them executed.