I came to this 2012 Ken Burns documentary after watching the 2019 high-profile Netflix TV series "When They See Us" which dramatised the actual events related here. Told mainly through the testimony of the five young men wrongly incarcerated for the rape and vicious attack on a female jogger in Central Park in 1989, it naturally eschewed any dramatic reconstruction of the events, instead letting actual words and contemporary newspaper and TV reports of the time carry the story.
Made not long before the city of New York, without admitting any wrongdoing on its part, made a multi-million dollar settlement to the five, I would like to think this film helped that decision, incomplete as it is, to be made as well as perhaps inspiring the TV show. The documentary obviously has an agenda to clear the boys, the logic of which is irrefutable, but fails to interview any of those who supported and indeed still stand by the original decisions at the two separate trials which put the boys away, such as prosecutors Fairstein and Lederer and a certain, since elevated, property tycoon who from his ivory tower, paid for full-page newspaper adverts demonising the defendants.
The five, only four of whom allowed themselves to be filmed, speak eruditely and passionately about their shared experiences and relate in detail the terrible treatment they received and the awful miscarriages of justice which befell them. Not all of them appear to have come through unscathed.
Grim and depressing to watch for the most part, one only hopes that like the unfortunate victim herself, they come through this terrible experience and live something approaching a normal life from now on and that the railroading tactics employed here by people in authority who should have known better are never repeated, although I have my doubts about that.
Made not long before the city of New York, without admitting any wrongdoing on its part, made a multi-million dollar settlement to the five, I would like to think this film helped that decision, incomplete as it is, to be made as well as perhaps inspiring the TV show. The documentary obviously has an agenda to clear the boys, the logic of which is irrefutable, but fails to interview any of those who supported and indeed still stand by the original decisions at the two separate trials which put the boys away, such as prosecutors Fairstein and Lederer and a certain, since elevated, property tycoon who from his ivory tower, paid for full-page newspaper adverts demonising the defendants.
The five, only four of whom allowed themselves to be filmed, speak eruditely and passionately about their shared experiences and relate in detail the terrible treatment they received and the awful miscarriages of justice which befell them. Not all of them appear to have come through unscathed.
Grim and depressing to watch for the most part, one only hopes that like the unfortunate victim herself, they come through this terrible experience and live something approaching a normal life from now on and that the railroading tactics employed here by people in authority who should have known better are never repeated, although I have my doubts about that.