Pushback from attorneys to Netflix series on Central Park Five

Some prominent attorneys and others involved in the 1989 case of the Central Park Five have begun to push back at the narrative depicted in the controversial Netflix series “When They See Us,” defending their probe and maintaining that both police and prosecutors acted properly.

In an interview last week, former federal prosecutor Michael Armstrong jumped into the fray to say the public castigation of two prosecutors and the police in the aftermath of the series was “outrageous.” 

The series dramatizes events surrounding the April 1989 rape of a white woman who was jogging in Central Park, and the subsequent prosecution of five youths of color whose convictions were later vacated.

Armstrong, who in 2002 was part of a team that reviewed the investigation at the request of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, said the vacated convictions were not an exoneration as some maintain.

“It is a sign of the mythology that is conveniently built,” he said about the furor sparked by the series. 

“It is basically a mob with pitchforks,” added former NYPD Det. Eric Reynolds, who was involved in the investigation and worked with the two prosecutors caught up in the recent controversy, Elizabeth Lederer and Linda Fairstein.

On June 7, in the wake of a virulent social media campaign against her, Fairstein, the former supervising prosecutor-turned-novelist, and her publisher, Dutton, disclosed they had ended their relationship. 

Fairstein struck back last week, saying in a Wall Street Journal guest editorial that the series, crafted by producer Ava DuVernay, “was so filled of distortions and falsehood as to be an outright fabrication.”

Then on Wednesday, Lederer, the prosecutor who actually conducted the trial of the five defendants, resigned from her job as a lecturer at Columbia Law School after students demanded she step down. A spokesman for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said Friday that Lederer, a career prosecutor, remained in good standing with the office.

The convictions of the five defendants — Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam and Kharey Wise — were vacated at the prosecution’s request in 2002 after another man, Matias Reyes, said it was he who raped Patricia Meili, the jogger, the night of April 19, 1989, and claimed he acted alone. His DNA was found at the crime scene.

Days after the Netflix series first ran, Vance said in a statement that he believed the office acted properly in not only asking for the indictment to be dismissed, but also that there was no evidence that prosecutors acted improperly. An investigation by city lawyers also found police acted “reasonably given the circumstances with which they were confronted on April 19, 1989, and thereafter,” Vance said.

In 2002, Armstrong and two other attorneys, former NYPD counsel Stephen Hammerman and private attorney Jules Martin, were asked by Kelly to review police conduct in the interrogations and the investigation. The final 42-page Armstrong report, which delved into court records, the videotaped confessions of the five suspects and other materials, agreed with the trial judge, Thomas Galligan, that cops and prosecutors didn’t coerce the defendants to confess or feed them false statements.

The five defendants had served time in prison for their convictions and later sued New York City in federal court after their convictions were vacated. A federal judge later dismissed the majority of their claims but allowed others to remain.

In an interview, Armstrong, who gained prominence in 1972 as counsel for the Knapp Commission investigating police corruption, said he believed the city and the police would also have been cleared on governmental immunity grounds on the remaining issues that the Bloomberg administration didn’t want to settle. But in 2014, Mayor Bill de Blasio decided to settle the case for nearly $42 million.

Yet Jonathan Moore, one of the lead attorneys in the case for the Central Park Five, insisted in an interview that while some of their claims were dismissed, he was confident that a jury would have found that the cops and prosecutors violated the young men’s constitutional rights by coercing them and feeding them facts.

That risk was too great, forcing the city to settle the case, Moore said.

It's unclear what may happen next. Fairstein’s attorney wouldn’t comment on what potential legal remedies she might pursue.

In her guest editorial, Fairstein said DuVernay’s series portrayed her as an “overzealous prosecutor and a bigot, the police as incompetent or worse, and the five suspects as innocent of all charges against them. None of this is true.”

Reyes' confession, said Fairstein, didn’t take away from any of the admissions by the five defendants that they took part in other violence in the park the night of the attack and may have accosted Meili without raping her.

Greg Robb, an attorney for DuVernay, declined to comment on Fairstein’s published remarks.

Famed Bronx criminal defense attorney Murray Richman said in an interview that, while he is no friend of the police and doesn’t feel warm and fuzzy about Fairstein, he doesn’t believe Fairstein framed the defendants, and said she is being “bushwhacked” by the way she is portrayed.

In a New York Law Journal column on Thursday, Richman said that while it was clear to him that DuVernay’s series was a mix of fact and fiction, such a combination creates problems for the general public’s perception.

“When you add to the truth, you diminish it,” wrote Richman. “Once you have added to it, it is no longer the truth.”

By Anthony M. DeStefano

tony.destefano@newsday.comtonynewsday

Anthony M. DeStefano has been a reporter for Newsday since 1986 and covers law enforcement, criminal justice and legal affairs from its New York City offices.