New Book Examines Central Park Jogger Case and False Confessions

Innocence Project Co-founder Barry Scheck, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jim Dwyer, author Sarah Burns and member of the Central Park Five Raymond Santana recently participated in a symposium at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law that discussed the Central Park jogger case and false confessions.

Burns is the author of a new book, “The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding,” which exposes the truth about false confessions.

In 1989, five teenagers between the ages of 14 and 16 were arrested and questioned in the brutal attack of a female jogger in Central Park. 

The confessions were presented as evidence though they differed in the time, location, and participants of the rape.

The young men were wrongfully convicted of rape and waited more than a decade before DNA evidence exonerated them and implicated the real perpetrator—a convicted murderer and rapist.

Burns is producing a documentary film based on this book with her father, filmmaker Ken Burns.

Read an excerpt from The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding

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Read a review from The Boston Globe

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Read more on the Central Park Five:

Antron McCray

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Kevin Richardson

,

Yusef Salaam

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Raymond Santana

and

Korey Wise

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Understand the causes:

How false confessions happen

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