The 2012 documentary examining the wrongful conviction of five teenagers in the Central Park jogger case was The Central Park Five.
The film was directed by Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns, and David McMahon. It revisits the 1989 assault of a jogger in New York’s Central Park and follows the arrests, police interrogations, trials, convictions, imprisonment, and eventual exoneration of five teenagers: Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise.
The convictions were vacated after convicted murderer Matias Reyes confessed in 2002 and DNA evidence supported his account. The case became a major example of how racial prejudice, sensational media coverage, public pressure, and coercive interrogation can distort criminal justice. The five men later reached a settlement with New York City in 2014.
Sarah Burns’s research began partly through her work as a paralegal for attorneys representing the men in a civil lawsuit. A frequent mix-up is with When They See Us, Ava DuVernay’s scripted 2019 miniseries about the same case; The Central Park Five is the documentary.