21 June 2014 (21:31 UTC-07 Tango 20 June 2014)/22 Sha’ban 1435/31 Khordad 1393/24 Geng Wu 4712

The exceptional failed city of New York is now paying the families of five falsely convicted people a record $40-million USD!  In 1989 five teenaged boys were tortured into confessing to the crime of rape and murder.   In 2002, the claims of their false confessions by torture were confirmed when the real rapist-killer was found.  A man already in prison, for raping and killing women, confessed to the Central Park murder/rape and DNA evidence proved his confession true.

In an interview with PBS Newshour, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Craig Steven Wilder explained that New York has a long history of police criminality: “…New Yorkers, white and black, had by the 1980s certainly come to fear that the police, and the prosecutors were unable to protect them. In a three-month period in 1984, there was a horrific police brutality case……the vigilante subway shooter, emerged on the scene, and both of those events……captured the extent to which New Yorkers feared both crime and also doubted the capacity of the police and the prosecutors to protect them…..” 

But don’t think this latest multi-million dollar settlement for wrongful imprisonment will change things, Wilder had this warning at the end of the interview: “…..the era of aggressive policing, extensive incarceration periods, et cetera, is not over. Mass incarceration is actually continuing to destroy families and communities.”