On December 19, 2002, a Manhattan judge vacated the convictions of five men who, as teenagers, had been found guilty in the April 19, 1989, attack on a woman jogging in Central Park. All five had already spent years locked up. A serial rapist had confessed to the crime, and his DNA matched.
The five were Antron McCray and Yusef Salaam, both 15 at the time, Raymond Santana and Kevin Richardson, both 14, and Korey Wise, who was 16 and was tried as an adult. The victim, Trisha Meili, was 28. She was found in a ravine in the park and spent 12 days in a coma. She later made her identity public in a 2003 memoir.
Confessions that did not hold up
The teenagers were held for at least seven hours of unrecorded questioning before videotaped statements began on April 21, 1989, according to Wikipedia's account of the case. Four of them gave videotaped confessions with a parent present. Each recanted within about two weeks and said the statements had been coerced.
The physical evidence never matched those statements. At the first trial in 1990, an FBI expert testified that all five were excluded as the source of the semen recovered in the case. Juries convicted them anyway in two trials that year. McCray, Salaam, Santana and Richardson received five to 10 years in juvenile facilities. Wise received five to 15 years in adult prison and was the last released, in August 2002.
The case drew intense public attention. On May 1, 1989, Donald Trump paid for full page ads in New York's four major newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty.
The real attacker comes forward
In 2002, Matias Reyes, a serial rapist, confessed that he had raped Meili and said he acted alone. His DNA matched the evidence "to a factor of one in 6,000,000,000 people." The office of Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau reviewed the case, and Assistant District Attorney Nancy Ryan recommended vacating the convictions. Justice Charles J. Tejada did so that December. Reyes was never charged for the attack because the statute of limitations had run out.
The settlements and the lawsuits that followed
The five sued New York City in 2003. In 2014, the city agreed to pay $41 million, with about $7.1 million each for four of the men and $12.2 million for Wise, who had served the longest. The city admitted no wrongdoing. New York State settled a separate claim in 2016 for $3.9 million.
Salaam went on to win a seat on the New York City Council in November 2023. In October 2024, the five sued Trump for defamation in federal court in Philadelphia over his remarks at the September 10, 2024, presidential debate, where he said, "They admitted, they said, they pled guilty." The men never pleaded guilty. They were convicted after jury trials.
In April 2025, U.S. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone refused to dismiss the suit, though she threw out a claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress, WHYY reported. Trump's lawyers argued that his statements were "substantially true" and protected as speech on a matter of public concern. His lawyer, Karin Sweigart, called the suit an "unfounded and meritless attack," and his campaign had called it a "frivolous election interference lawsuit."
Why defense lawyers keep citing it
The case is now a standard example of how false confessions happen, especially with juveniles questioned for hours. A law review article in the N.Y.U. Review of Law and Social Change argued that trial judges should play a larger role in spotting potentially false confessions before a jury ever hears them.
It also shows what happens when public pressure runs ahead of the evidence, a theme that came up again in the Duke lacrosse case two decades ago. It is the kind of case defense attorney Daniel Rosenberg and the Two Taps legal panel of Michael Dye and Lloyd Golburgh take apart on the show.
Two Taps News stories summarize reporting and the analysis discussed on Two Taps and Friends. They are not legal advice. Read our standards.
