For years the have claimed these feral thugs were innocent. Yusef Salaam, of the “Central Park Five,” was elected to the New York City Council last week.

They made heroes of these rapist thugs the same way they did Fentanyl Floyd.

NOT SO FAST MY FRIEND..

quote:
“The confessions of Mr. Salaam and the four others who were convicted alongside him were coerced. There was no DNA evidence tying the teenagers — Mr. Salaam, Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Antron McCray — to the brutal attack. Mr. Trump’s racist rantings only inflamed [racial] tensions.”

Two of those claims are laughably false, and the third is utterly meaningless.

Meaningless: It’s a sleight of hand to say that there was “no DNA evidence” tying The Five to the crime. Yeah, that’s probably because in 1989, no one would have been looking for DNA.

Back then, DNA testing was a novel scientific technique. It required much larger samples than are necessary today, and the sample couldn’t be contaminated and the tests weren’t reliable.

You might as well complain that the police didn’t use cellphone tracking, either.

In New York, only a few criminal courts had even been faced with the decision of whether to admit DNA evidence, and no appellate court had ruled on its admissibility.

On the eve of the trial a year later, semen found on the jogger was sent to the FBI for testing (result inconclusive) over the ferocious objections of lawyers for The Five, who argued that “DNA testing is an area still under study and under consideration and has not been regarded in the scientific community of sufficient reliability as to permit its admission into evidence.”

Investigators would have been insane to count on DNA to prove their case. No effort would have been made to collect and preserve it. Just three months before the rape, serial killer Ted Bundy had been executed without anyone thinking to run a DNA test.

Pre-DNA, the way investigators proved their cases was with other evidence — blood and grass stains on The Five’s underwear, for example — interviewing suspects and witnesses and, if they were lucky and the evidence compelling, getting the suspects to confess. That’s exactly how the case against the Central Park Five was made.

Here’s just some of the evidence against The Five:

— When Santana was being driven to the precinct house for general mayhem, he blurted out: “I had nothing to do with the rape. All I did was feel the woman’s tits.”

At this point, the jogger’s body hadn’t been found yet. The police knew nothing about any rape.

— Another boy, picked up with Richardson, told the police that he knew who did “the murder,” naming McCray. Richardson concurred, saying, “Yeah. That’s who did it.”

Again, the police were unaware of any rape or murder.

The next morning, Richardson pointed to the 102nd Street transverse, telling officers, “This is where we got her.”

— Dennis Commedo, part of the larger group wilding that night, told the police that, when he ran into Richardson, he had said, “We just raped somebody.”

— Two of Wise’s friends said that the next day, he told them, “You heard about that woman that was beat up and raped in the park last night? That was us!”

— Another boy arrested for some of the other attacks, but not the rape, told detectives (on videotape) that he overheard Santana and a friend laughing about how they’d “made a woman bleed.”

— A number of the youths brought in the night of the attack implicated Salaam (our newly elected councilman) in the jogger’s rape.

Orlando Escobar, for example, told police he saw Salaam (our newly elected councilman) and others leaving the 102nd Street transverse where the jogger was raped.

— Blood stains were found on Salaam’s jacket. (He’s our newly elected councilman.)

— Salaam (our newly elected councilman) confessed to the rape after the detective questioning him said that fingerprints had been found on the jogger’s clothing. Why would he do that — unless he knew the prints might be his?

Four of The Five gave a videotaped confession, at least three of them in the presence of parents or guardians. Defense attorneys spent weeks attacking the confessions as “coerced,” but two multicultural juries and the trial judge concluded that the confessions were voluntary. Taking the other side is some bimbo with a Netflix documentary, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever.

Moreover, recall that when The Five confessed, no one knew whether the jogger would emerge from her coma and be able to identify her attackers.

Forget embarrassing — it would be career-ending for a detective to have coerced confessions from The Five, only to have the jogger wake up and exclaim, My boyfriend did it! (That was one of the theories shouted by the anti-jogger protesters outside the courthouse, along with the allegation that she was meeting her drug dealer in the park.)

More than a decade later, when psychopathic killer Matias Reyes came forward to “confess” that he alone had raped the jogger — a crime for which he would face no additional punishment — DNA testing on the semen could prove only that he’d raped her, not that he’d acted alone, or whether, as a former cellmate says, he’d heard the jogger’s screams and ran to join the attack in progress.

It was always known that there were other rapists. Thus, in her summation to the jury, prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer said: “Others, who were not caught, raped her and got away.”

Central Park Rape: The Secret Files