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Unequal Verdicts: The Central Park Jogger Trials

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Timothy Sullivan is a freelance writer in New York, and a former correspondent and producer for Court TV, who supervised the network's coverage of the trials of Scott Peterson, Michael Jackson, and O.J. Simpson. (Incidentally, the jogger has published her own story: see I Am the Central Park Jogger: A Story of Hope and Possibility.) Ultimately, after five young men were convicted of the crime, the convictions were vacated in 2002 when another man claimed to have committed the crime alone, and DNA evidence confirmed his involvement in the rape.

Sullivan writes in the "Acknowledgements" section of this 1992 book, "This is a book about a handful of trial lawyers and how they dealt with one of the most explosive criminal cases ever to hit the New York courts."

Here are some quotations from the book:

"As the early days went by, the role of race in the crime and its aftermath began to take on more prominence in the coverage. In a city in which race relations had been recently strained by racist killings of blacks in Howard Beach, Queens, and Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, the issue was debated from nearly every perspective." (Pg. 56)
"But a great many African-American and Latino citizens were automatically suspicious of confessions obtained by police from minority teenagers. That distrust of the police was widespread and based on a long history of undisputed oppression and police brutality. Now the results of the DNA tests revealed that there was no conclusive physical evidence against the suspects." (Pg. 90)
"The defense lawyers immediately seized upon this finding to mount a new assault on the state's case. Clearly, they said, the REAL rapist got away. These kids were scapegoats, forced by the cops to confess to a crime they didn't commit." (Pg. 103)
"Harlem itself was split by the case... (Most) were appalled by the violence... But Harlemites also resented what they perceived as the media's trashing of the whole community and the placing of blame on an entire generation of black youth." (Pg. 104)
"Vernon Mason and Colin Moore, who spoke with conviction about a miscarriage of justice having put their innocent, young clients in jail approximately eighteen months ago, still have not filed their promised appeals." (Pg. 316)

Timothy Sullivan is the executive producer of Court TV and still brings news of many big trials to our screens. In Unequal Verdicts, his bestseller from 1992, dealing with the Central Park Jogger case, he ends his final chapter with a description of how "a group of angry boys between the ages of 13 and 17 had used [a bar], along with a rock, a brick and their bare hands, to pound the promise out of [the victim's] future." But let's not forget his final word on the subject: "And on the streets ... lots of people wonder whether her boyfriend did it." Could Sullivan have got it more wrong? He appears never even to have heard of Matias Reyes, the actual rapist, who was in the middle of a murder and rape spree in the same area at the time. And that final, gratuitous swipe at the Jogger's perfectly innocent boyfriend! Can we really believe a word this man tells us about guilt and innocence?