AMY GOODMAN: Well, attorneys for the original defendants in the infamous Central Park jogger case held a news conference yesterday calling for a reversal of the convictions now that new evidence has emerged. It was a case that rocked the city. In April 1989, a jogger in Central Park was raped, beaten and left for dead. Five African American and Latino teenagers were convicted. They served many years in jail. The last one just got out of prison several weeks ago after serving 13 years. At the time, the headlines screamed “wolf pack,” “wilding,” “teenagers singing wilding songs in jail.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: It may well have been a deciding factor in the New York state Legislature’s decision to reestablish the death penalty in the state. Shortly after the attack, Donald Trump took out full-page ads in all the New York papers calling for bringing back the death penalty and referring to the young defendants in the jogger case as candidates for execution.

And the news that was barely reported: Just last January, convicted rapist Matias Reyes unexpectedly confessed to the crime. He said he did it alone. Several months later, DNA tests showed that Reyes “proved beyond question” that he had raped the jogger, according to a law enforcement official quoted in The New York Times. The first hearing on the case will be Monday. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office said it is reviewing the case.

AMY GOODMAN: And we’re joined today in the studio by the lawyer for three of the men who were convicted. Michael Tarif Warren is with us; on the telephone, Roger Wareham, who is a co-attorney in this case, and also in the studio with us is New York City Councilmember Bill Perkins, who is an adviser to all of the families involved. Now, just to clarify, Matias Reyes, the man who has come forward now, was never named in this case, but he is a man who was responsible for and convicted of three rapes and a murder soon after the Central Park jogger was attacked. It was in the same area. It was a string of rapes, and, finally, a murder.

Let’s start with Michael Tarif Warren, this case.

MICHAEL WARREN: Good morning, Amy, Juan.

AMY GOODMAN: And what is the evolution of all this information?

MICHAEL WARREN: Well, I think the evolution is, when you take it from the trial, essentially, at the trial, what we knew all along is that the only thing the prosecution had was a manipulated, coerced series of confessions from various of these young boys at the time. I think it’s important to note that the confessions themselves were inherently contradictory. Each one of them contradicted, had internal contradictions, but they contradicted each other. For example, one of them was supposed to have said that the alleged rapes — and this is after many hours of grueling, grueling questions based on a script that these experienced detectives used when they interrogated them. One of them said that it occurred on the reservoir, for example. Another one said, no, it occurred way north of the reservoir. There were all type of contradictions. That’s just one example.

So you basically had a prosecution that was rested on coerced confessions, but beyond that, nothing else. There was no forensic comparison to these young boys. There was no DNA comparison. There was no serological comparison. There was no identification by not only the female jogger victim, but any of the others that they lumped into this so-called pot of stew for purposes of obtaining a conviction, not only with respect to the jogger, but other individuals who were allegedly attacked that night in the park.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Michael, I remember very much that case.

MICHAEL WARREN: Sure.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, in fact, I covered aspects of the trial for the Daily News. And I remember, as many reporters were then, feeling extremely uneasy about the whole — the lynch mentality that was prevalent in the city, but also we went into court, and we watched videotape confessions —

MICHAEL WARREN: Yes.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — of the teenagers. And I remember — I don’t remember which teenager it was at that particular day that I was in the courtroom — seeing a youngster who clearly was very — hardly able to verbalize —

MICHAEL WARREN: Yes.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — what he claimed was happening, but he did admit to being there. And now we’re having this convicted rapist and murderer come forward and say, “Yes, I was there, and I did it alone.”

MICHAEL WARREN: And he did it alone. And beyond that, there has been DNA testing of his DNA and his blood, and his DNA — and his DNA alone — match the semen that was found in the vagina of the victim.

AMY GOODMAN: And at the time, even in court, it was said that the DNA matched none of the young people who had been charged.

MICHAEL WARREN: Absolutely. It matched none of the young people who were charged, and it was — first, there was a DNA extraction of the semen swab. And, of course, as a result of that test, there was a single band DNA profile that was produced. But more importantly, it did not match any of these young boys. They attempted to say that that was not enough of a profile. It was not until they conducted a second testing on the sperm that was on the sock that was recovered, and even though that was a single band, as well, that conclusively matched the single band in the first instance, in the sperm on the semen swab, so they had to confess at that point that, in fact, there was enough of a profile and, more importantly, that there was no match to any of these young boys.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, I remember what happened afterwards very well, aside from this case —

MICHAEL WARREN: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: — because in the case of Matias Reyes, the man who has now come forward, he raped a woman in my building. This was right near the rape of the Central Park jogger. There had been a series of rapes in our neighborhood. In fact, one was a rape-murder of a young pregnant mother, who apparently he had come in — her two little kids were with her, and he said, “Your life or your eyes.” He raped and killed her. He raped another woman. And then he came to our building, and as he — he finished raping her. He was ransacking the apartment. She raced downstairs screaming. And the doorman, John Ryan, tackled him. It wasn’t the police who found him. It was the doorman. They got him, and the police then came and got Matias Reyes. Now, clearly they had DNA testing at the time. Clearly, this man was convicted. He’s now serving a life sentence at Attica.

MICHAEL WARREN: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: The MO seemed the same. Was there any connection made at the time?

MICHAEL WARREN: There was no connection made. And that is one of our arguments. Our argument is that less than four to five months after these young boys were arrested, you had Matias Reyes arrested in the same area. He committed crimes in the same area. And, of course, this is — it’s laid out in a book by Harlan Levy, And the Blood Cried Out, and Harlan Levy was the prosecutor in Mr. Reyes’s case. And that case was also before Judge Galligan, who was the same judge that presided over the Central Park case. And, of course, these experienced sex crimes prosecutors who interrogated Mr. Reyes — and not only sex crimes, but homicide prosecutors, you know, who were experienced — they found out, after one initial admission, that he had a profile. And his profile was, number one, not to operate with other individuals. He was a solo act. And number two, it was the same MO, in terms of what he did to his victims, that was done to the Central Park jogger.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to break for stations to identify themselves. When we come back, we’ll continue this conversation. We’re talking to Michael Warren. We’re joined by New York City Councilmember Bill Perkins, and on the line with us, Roger Wareham, another attorney representing the young men who have now come out of prison, some serving up to 13 years. You’re listening to Democracy Now! Back with us in a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: “More Prisons,” Kool DJ E.Q., here on Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, talking about the Central Park jogger case and the calls to reopen this case, to review it now that new evidence has come out linking a man who was never charged in the case, Matias Reyes, who’s serving a life sentence in prison at Attica. With this case, he came forward, found religion, confessed, and they did a DNA test. And the DNA test is a positive match between him and the semen sample on the sock of the Central Park jogger who was raped and attacked in April of 1989.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I’d like to continue with Councilman Perkins, talking about, for those people who are from outside of New York who maybe are not familiar with this case, what the public hysteria and the rush to judgment, what the climate was at the time. You were then not even in City Council. You were a district leader from the neighborhood, East Harlem and the Schomburg Plaza area, where many of these young youngsters lived.

COUNCILMEMBER BILL PERKINS: These were my neighbors. And I was very active in the area of Harlem, East Harlem, as a community leader. And when this event took place, it was a very racially charged atmosphere in the city at the time. And one of the terms that came out at that time, which you didn’t mention, was the term “urban terrorists.” At the time, there was a —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And “wolf packs,” right?

COUNCILMEMBER BILL PERKINS: And “wolf packs,” “urban terrorists.” Koch said “wolf pack.” Dinkins said “urban terrorists.” And Koch said “wilding.” And the whole atmosphere was very charged. There was a very high-profile primary election going on between Dave Dinkins and Ed Koch. And so they were sort of trading epithets to more or less disassociate themselves or appeal to voters or whatever at the time. And it was very, very unfortunate, because the New York Post and other media began to promote this as a very racially charged kind of incident, a young white woman being attacked by Black and Latino men, defenseless, so on and so forth. So it was a very, very bad atmosphere. The young men, for the most part, were going to be tried through the press, tried, convicted and prosecuted through the press, with Donald Trump coming up with the ultimate sentence of death, when he took out an ad in The New York Times, a full-page ad in The New York Times, calling for the return of the death penalty.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I remember in the Daily News, where I worked, one of my colleagues, Mike McAlary, who was a good friend of mine, and since deceased, but who we had many differences on these kinds of issues, and Mike wrote several columns about how the teenagers supposedly laughed and joked about the crime while they were being interviewed or interrogated by detectives in the Central Park precinct, and that really inflamed the city even more, that people were thinking here were these teenagers who had so little value for life that after beating and raping this woman and beating her nearly to death, were joking about it afterwards. And, of course, now, as we’re beginning to look back, we begin to see how much of this was either totally fabricated or planted evidence by detectives leaking information to reporters, who then went along and wrote it without any kind of other corroboration.

COUNCILMEMBER BILL PERKINS: Well, the media, again, played a very, very significant role in not only the general public’s perception of this, but, I think, in promoting the strategy that perhaps the DA’s Office or the police department, whatever the appropriate authorities were, to script a conviction, to script a horrible rape by these so-called urban terrorists, the so-called wolf pack.

MICHAEL WARREN: And also, you know, in line with, Juan —

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Warren.

MICHAEL WARREN: If you look at the fourth chapter in this book by Harlan Levy, the prosecutor of Matias Reyes, The Blood Cries Out, he talks about — he describes Elizabeth Lederer, who was one of the prosecutors in the Central Park case, along with Linda Fairstein. And he describes her as a big-eyed woman who was always in control, always maintaining control over herself. However, after the DNA tests came back from the FBI, she was out of control, as described by him in the book. And she called him to his office, and he went to her office, and she was extremely upset. And she was upset because she felt as though they had a serious problem. And the serious problem was that they didn’t have any evidence against these kids. And he goes on to describe how there were internal contradictions within the statements themselves that were taken by the cops as a result of the scripting process that these detectives entered into. And so they essentially had no case, so they had to engage in what appears to, as we lawyers like to think, a conspiracy. I don’t know if they call it a conspiracy, but they talked about ways of getting around these problems, and they focused in on trying to make these confessions believable. And, of course, the media account or the media coverage of the day also served as a further basis for the ultimate conviction of these young boys.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring attorney Roger Wareham into this conversation. I’m looking at a quote from a retired NYPD detective, John Baeza. He was quoted in a piece by Sarah Wallace on WABC a couple of months ago. It says, “In this case it’s clear what they should have done. They should have continued to look for the suspect who left the semen at the crime scene.” He goes on to say, “Yeah, somebody did drop the ball. A woman was killed because somebody slipped through the net. It’s not pointing a finger at anyone in particular. One of the main things is that the police department’s culture back then is 100 percent different then what it is now. Back then, unapprehended perpetrators were not really sought. Cases were closed and that was it.” He finally says, “The fact they’re very quiet about this, and that they’re holding back on it can only mean, to me, two things: One, this individual is in jail now exonerating others, that may be a problem for them so that’s why they want to keep it quiet, or the fact that this was the same individual, a few months after the Central Park case, went out to rape and murder a pregnant woman.” Roger Wareham, what are the prosecutors saying right now?

ROGER WAREHAM: The prosecutors are saying that they’re investigating. The prosecutors have known about this evidence since January of this year. They’re saying they’re conducting an expeditious and thorough investigation. As we pointed out at the press conference yesterday, our concern is that this is not so much an investigation as a cover-up. And I think the points that you just quoted are very germane.

There was another quote, I think yesterday, in — I think it was in Juan’s paper, the Daily News, where they say, “Well, we always thought there was an unapprehended sixth person,” because now they’re trying to, you know, damage control. And the point we made was that if — once Reyes was identified, once Reyes made the confession, they knew they had a match that didn’t — an unidentified match, three months later, same MO, same area. They never connected it. And I think it goes to the point that Michael was making from the book that Reyes’s profile was totally contrary to the scenario that they had concocted to convict these young men, and to accept Reyes’s story would mean that there was no basis for what they had done and that these young men were unjustly convicted.

We cannot look at what happened to these young men — and this is a — it’s a national question, as well, not just a New York City question, because it speaks to the issue of race in the United States — that the statement that the Supreme Court justice made in the Dred Scott decision in 1857, that a Negro has no rights which a white man need respect, exists to this day. And 1989 was a clear example of that, that a young, white, well-to-do woman was attacked, was beaten in a terrible crime, and it didn’t matter which Black or Latino was going to get convicted, but somebody was going to get convicted for that. And I think that’s the context in which all of the different particulars get played out.

And what’s happening now is that the truth is forcing its way out. And the district attorney’s hesitation and stalling in conducting this, coming forth with their conclusions, because the facts are very clear, we think, are really them trying to see: How do we minimize the damage? How do we explain to the families of people who were killed after the Central Park case, when this guy was still around, where we dropped the ball? How do we — how do we repair the damage that was done to these young men’s lives, to their families? I mean, it wasn’t — this has a ripple effect.

And to the fact that one news article said yesterday that, “Well, what could they get out of it now? Since they’ve already finished jail, what could they get out of it, aside from having their names exonerated?” As if that’s nothing. And I think that’s what we’re dealing with here in this case, is that these young men have been damaged. They can’t get back the time they spent in jail, but they certainly can have their names exonerated. They can be removed from the sex offender list, which trails them their entire lives. And so, that’s why we’re doing this case. That’s the significance of it. I think it pulls the covers on the so-called criminal justice system, not only in New York City but around the country, when it comes to the question of how Blacks and Latinos are treated once we get inside that system.

COUNCILMEMBER BILL PERKINS: Yeah, there’s another connection that they’re working very strenuously to create, and that is the connection —

AMY GOODMAN: Councilmember Bill Perkins.

COUNCILMEMBER BILL PERKINS: — the connection between Matias Reyes and the five defendants. They’ve visited the defendants’ homes to show them pictures and see if they know Matias Reyes. When they visited defendants’ homes, they did not even know that the report in the Times had come out indicating that Matias Reyes had confessed to the crime. They visited, unannounced, showed the families a set of pitches, one of which included him, and asked, “Do you know anybody in these pictures?” They reacted, “No, we don’t know anybody in these pictures,” and then subsequently found out why those district attorney detectives came to their homes.

AMY GOODMAN: So, they had never told them that he had confessed.

COUNCILMEMBER BILL PERKINS: They had never told them. They didn’t even tell them why they came.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, in other words, that what they’re trying to do now is a fallback theory that Matias committed the attack, but that the other teenagers were present with him.

MICHAEL WARREN: Were with him at the time, exactly.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And that, in other words, that he’s telling the truth about one aspect of it —

MICHAEL WARREN: Exactly.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — in his new confession, but not about the other, that he acted alone.

COUNCILMEMBER BILL PERKINS: But they’ve been so devious about this. They even went to Santana, who’s in prison now for another unrelated charge, and in the same manner showed him the pictures to see if he knew what was going on, if he knew Matias. And he didn’t know what was going on, either, and found out that they had brought Matian Reyes down to the same prison that he was in, to see if they would bump into each other and make some kind of connection.

MICHAEL WARREN: Korey Wise.

COUNCILMEMBER BILL PERKINS: No, they brought Matias Reyes —

MICHAEL WARREN: Oh, that’s right. That’s right. To Santana, that’s right.

COUNCILMEMBER BILL PERKINS: — down to Raymond Santana’s prison, unbeknownst to the Raymond, to see if they would interact. So, there’s been a very devious effort on their part to try to establish a connection between Matias Reyes and the defendants. And they don’t know each other. In fact, in yesterday’s paper, they tried to make a claim that Korey and Matias were in jail at one time together —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And had a fight.

COUNCILMEMBER BILL PERKINS: — and had a fight about the case. But the fact of the matter is that the fight that they had had nothing to do with the case. It had to do with what very often happens in jail: a fight about what channel the TV is going to be on.

AMY GOODMAN: He confessed, Matias Reyes, in January. When was he DNA tested?

MICHAEL WARREN: I don’t know precisely, Amy. But on the basis of information we have, it was around June —

AMY GOODMAN: It took five months.

MICHAEL WARREN: — of this year. Correct. But he was brought down here in May of this year. He was here for three days. He took them to Central Park and pointed out specifically where the attack occurred. He pointed out where he was initially. He took them through the entire scenario of what occurred that night.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And why did he do this?

MICHAEL WARREN: Well, he did it because, according to Matias Reyes, he’s got religion. And when he ran into Korey Wise for the second time, very briefly, up at Auburn penitentiary, he had began to begin to be a follower of the Christian faith. And he said, “Look, I cannot live with myself for what I have done. I have allowed innocent victims to to” — in his words — “to go down for something that I did.” And so, at that point, he decided that he was going to come forward. And he came forward. And when you listen to him, he’s very, very graphic about what took place and very affirmative that he acted alone. In fact — and we obviously want the relief that we’ve requested in motion, setting aside of the verdict. But I think it’s important here for everybody, for all of us, to have a hearing, so that Matias Reyes comes down, and you all, the press and the public, the community, who has been so embroiled with this case all these years, can hear this man describe what he did and what he did alone. And it will be quite impressive, I’m sure, and serve as [inaudible] —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the hearing is going to be before Judge Eduardo Padro.

MICHAEL WARREN: Well —

COUNCILMEMBER BILL PERKINS: Eduardo Padro.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Who I know very well, yeah.

COUNCILMEMBER BILL PERKINS: From the neighborhood.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That actually — from the neighborhood, who is from that neighborhood.

MICHAEL WARREN: Now, I found this out yesterday. I had a meeting with the chief clerk. And for some reason, the — because of a new system, allegedly, the hearing will not be on Monday the 9th now. It will be set back until probably the 17th or 18th. I won’t know until, at the earliest, Tuesday. I will be calling the chief clerk. She will let me know when the hearing will take place, but it won’t be on Monday at 9:30.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, given all the attention that’s going to be placed on the September 11th activities, it’s probably —

MICHAEL WARREN: That’s right. That’s right.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — better to postpone it —

MICHAEL WARREN: That’s right.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — so that there will be full press attention to it.

MICHAEL WARREN: That’s right. That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, the Times sort of saying, “What do they have to gain, since they’ve already served their time?” about the overturning of conviction. Let’s just talk about, among many other things, Megan’s Law. These five young men now — what? Korey Wise just came out, 30.

MICHAEL WARREN: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: He went in at 16, he comes out at 30. They now fall under that federal law, is that right? Is it —

MICHAEL WARREN: They do. They do. It’s —

COUNCILMEMBER BILL PERKINS: They all are now — under Megan’s Law, they all are now required to —

AMY GOODMAN: They’re sex offenders.

MICHAEL WARREN: They’re sex offenders, required to report.

COUNCILMEMBER BILL PERKINS: Sex offenders, publicly identified, and having to report regularly and take different types of courses related to that.

AMY GOODMAN: Pictures on the internet, neighbors alerted.

MICHAEL WARREN: Right.

COUNCILMEMBER BILL PERKINS: So on and so forth. And —

MICHAEL WARREN: And whenever they go to a new jurisdiction, they’re required to report to the authorities in that jurisdiction, whether it be another town or a state or whatever, that they’re there.

COUNCILMEMBER BILL PERKINS: And every time their picture is in the paper, they lose a job. They lose — they lose — they lose friends and whatnot. So, it’s a very, very serious situation for them in terms of their daily life, in terms of moving on with their lives and being able to gainfully be employed and have relationships with the people in a normal way that most of us take for granted.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Roger Wareham, I’d like to ask you, in terms of this, because we’ve also been doing stories about the Los Angeles Police Department destroying all the DNA evidence that could possibly exonerate people who are already in jail, the importance of continuing to utilize DNA evidence to look back at past convictions, especially given the notorious unreliability of so many prosecutors and police departments in terms of the people that they choose to follow through on on particular crimes?

ROGER WAREHAM: Yeah, I think it’s indisputable, the importance of DNA, particularly because even at this point, with the DNA evidence in, we’ve gotten questions from the press about “But they confessed,” as if confessions aren’t coerced, elicited, manipulated. I think the point was made — it might have been Barry Scheck — made the point the other day of several people who have been on death row, who shouldn’t — who would have been executed already, DNA exonerated them from the crimes of which they were convicted, and there were confessions in many of them.

So I think — that’s why I said that this case raises the whole question of how the criminal justice system works. And we’ve got to utilize the new scientific methods and, in the same way, keep the pressure on law enforcement not to do what is happening in L.A. in terms of destroying the evidence there. Now the science helps expose the illegalities that they’re involved in. So what do they do? They Enron it. They destroy the evidence. So I think — we hope that this is a clarion call, not only for the exoneration of these young men, but for people to be very clear around how the criminal justice system works and the importance of citizens to demand that the people whose tax money — our tax money pays for them adhere to the so-called democratic ideals which supposedly drive the society.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Roger Wareham, Michael Tarif Warren and Councilmember Bill Perkins, we want to thank you very much for being with us. We’ll certainly continue —

MICHAEL WARREN: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: — to follow this case.

COUNCILMEMBER BILL PERKINS: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: And if people want to get information on a videotape or audio cassette, CD of this program, you can call 1-800-881-2359. That’s 1-800-881-2359. When we come back, we’re going to continue talking about DNA evidence. And we’re going to talk about one of the largest DNA data banks in this country, and what it has to do, believe it or not, with the stolen election of 2000 and the NAACP settling a lawsuit in Florida related to both the private company and the state and the national election. Stay with us.