Central Park Five Exonerated: DNA Proves Innocence After 13 Years

Justice Charles J. Tejada of the New York State Supreme Court vacated the convictions of all five men wrongfully imprisoned for the 1989 Central Park jogger case, ending one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in American legal history. The exoneration came after Matias Reyes, a convicted serial rapist and murderer serving life in prison, confessed to committing the crime alone—a confession fully corroborated by DNA evidence that definitively excluded all five original defendants.

DNA Evidence Confirms Innocence

DNA testing of semen recovered from the victim matched Matias Reyes “to a factor of one in 6,000,000,000 people,” making him the sole perpetrator. No DNA evidence from any of the five wrongfully convicted men was found at the crime scene. This physical evidence completely contradicted the prosecution’s theory that had sent five teenagers to prison for a crime they did not commit.

Reyes provided investigators with detailed information about the attack that only the actual perpetrator could have known, including specific details about the victim’s injuries and the crime scene that matched police evidence but had never been made public. He stated unequivocally that he acted alone, contradicting the prosecution’s narrative of a group attack that had been central to the original convictions.

The Path to Exoneration

Reyes came forward in 2002 after meeting Korey Wise at Auburn Correctional Facility in upstate New York. He confessed to a corrections officer, setting in motion a reinvestigation of the case. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau conducted a thorough review and concluded that the new evidence “undermined the reliability of the convictions” and supported the motion to vacate.

The five men—Yusef Salaam (15 at arrest), Korey Wise (16), Antron McCray (15), Kevin Richardson (14), and Raymond Santana (14)—had served between six and thirteen years in prison for a crime they did not commit. Their convictions had been based entirely on confessions coerced during hours of interrogation without parents or attorneys present, confessions that contradicted physical evidence and each other in fundamental ways.

Significance

The exoneration exposed catastrophic failures across the criminal justice system: coerced confessions from children interrogated without legal representation, prosecutors who ignored exculpatory evidence and promoted a false narrative, a judge who allowed tainted confessions into evidence, and a media environment so inflamed by racial fear that fair trials were impossible.

The case demonstrated how racial bias can corrupt every stage of the justice process. Five Black and Latino teenagers were presumed guilty, subjected to brutal interrogation tactics that extracted false confessions, convicted despite lack of physical evidence, and imprisoned while the actual perpetrator remained free to commit additional violent crimes (Reyes attacked at least four more women after the Central Park case).

Donald Trump, who had spent $85,000 on full-page advertisements demanding the death penalty for the five teenagers, would refuse to acknowledge their innocence even after DNA exoneration. His continued insistence on their guilt despite scientific proof of innocence would become a defining example of how deeply rooted racial prejudice can resist even conclusive factual evidence.

The Central Park Five case became a watershed moment in understanding wrongful convictions, leading to reforms in interrogation practices, particularly regarding juveniles, and strengthening requirements for corroborating evidence beyond confessions. In 2014, New York City would settle a civil rights lawsuit with the five men for $41 million, approximately $1 million for each year of wrongful imprisonment.