Eratosphere - Central Park Five

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The most disturbing thing about a figure like Trump is that he has spent decades doing showily indecent things like calling for the deaths of presumed-guilty-until-proven-innocent young Black and Latino men (the Central Park Five), precisely because he knows that a significant portion of American society will applaud him for saying the racist things they want to hear.

Powerful as he is to do lasting damage to our democracy, Trump is just one guy, and despite what his doctors say about in their glowing reports on his health, he doesn't strike me as someone who is likely to be around to celebrate his 80th birthday. I'm more worried about the millions who still support him and his vile agendas. They'll be around much, much longer than he will. And they'll be waiting to prop up the next would-be dictator who promises to make them great again, at the expense of minorities.

Some proverbs off the top of my head (cued by Jim, above)

Self-reliance will die in silence.

A dog in the manger is our danger.

A narcissist is his own anti-Christ.

The Trump cards are wild canards.

You can lead a Trump to truth, but you can’t make him think.

Sorry, intermittent connection is screwing me.

A couple of weeks ago, I read pretty much the whole Wikipedia article about the Central Park Five jogger incident (which I didn't know anything about till I saw Ralph's thread).
Here is an excerpt that I found quite disturbing:

Quote:

Armstrong Report

Following these events, in 2002, New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly commissioned a panel of three lawyers to review the case.[65] The panel was made up of two lawyers, Michael F. Armstrong, the former chief counsel to the Knapp Commission, and Jules Martin, a New York University Vice President, as well as Stephen Hammerman, deputy police commissioner for legal affairs.[2][65][66][67][68] The panel issued a 43-page report in January 2003.[65]

The panel disputed Reyes's claim that he alone had raped the jogger.[2][65][66] It said there was "nothing but his uncorroborated word" that he acted alone.[65] Armstrong said the panel believed "the word of a serial rapist killer is not something to be heavily relied upon."[65] The report concluded that the five men whose convictions had been vacated had "most likely" participated in the beating and rape of the jogger and that the "most likely scenario" was that "both the defendants and Reyes assaulted her, perhaps successively."[2][65] The report said Reyes had most likely "either joined in the attack as it was ending or waited until the defendants had moved on to their next victims before descending upon her himself, raping her and inflicting upon her the brutal injuries that almost caused her death."[2][65]

As to the five defendants, the report said:

We believe the inconsistencies contained in the various statements were not such as to destroy their reliability. On the other hand, there was a general consistency that ran through the defendants' descriptions of the attack on the female jogger: she was knocked down on the road, dragged into the woods, hit and molested by several defendants, sexually abused by some while others held her arms and legs, and left semiconscious in a state of undress.[65][66]

"It seems impossible to say that they weren't there at all, because they knew too much," Armstrong said in an interview.[69]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case

The same Wikipedia article notes that no DNA evidence ties the five to the crime. This squares awkwardly with any suggestion that they raped the victim, as far as I can see. OTOH, DNA ties Reyes to the crime conclusively. I prefer science to speculation. Just the facts, Ma'am.

Cheers,
John

This story was new to me. In the light of Hillary Clinton's criticism of Trump, I was interested to read this:

Quote:

Five years later, the animalistic premise of “wilding” that When They See Us so vividly illuminates received academic treatment. In his definitive 1995 Weekly Standard essay, “The Coming of the Super-Predators,” John DiLulio Jr.—then a politics and public-policy professor at Princeton—predicted that immediate demographic shifts would “unleash an army of young male predatory street criminals.” These chiefly black and brown youths were, according to DiLulio, “so impulsive, so remorseless, that [they] can kill, rape, maim, without giving it a second thought.” Politicians and the media seized on the “super-predator” idea, just as they had done with “wilding.” Three months after the release of DiLulio’s article, then–first lady Hillary Clinton famously called for authorities to bring “the kinds of kids who are called ‘super-predators,’ no conscience, no empathy … to heel.”

Amid the “super-predator” frenzy, nearly every state passed laws that made it easier to punish children as young as 13 as adults and, in some cases, sentence them to life without the possibility of parole. In 1998 alone, roughly 200,000 youths were put through the adult court system, and the majority of them were black

[The Atlantic]

And here's a fuller version of the quote. She said, “We need to take these people on, they are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators. No conscience. No empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way but first we have to bring them to heel”.

From what I gather, Clinton was at the time lobbying hard for federal "Three strikes" legislation. The speech was made in New Hampshire -- 98% white at the time, and apparently not an area to experience much by the way of violent inner city crime -- and it was a month before the primaries.

Quote:

Originally Posted by John Isbell (Post 437728)

That's true, John, and I agree with you. A person is innocent until proven guilty. Definitely! OTOH, Reyes was (I think I read somewhere in the article) incapable of telling the truth, an inveterate liar. So there might have been others involved, but they will likely never be identified. In any case, it was a tragedy, like too many others in human history.

I don't think there's serious doubt at this point that the five of them were innocent. Five men cannot rape someone and leave no DNA trail behind while a sixth man, uncharged at the time, did leave DNA evidence behind. The only evidence against the five came from confessions which we now know were extracted under circumstances that negate any confidence in their reliability. They were presumed guilty by the police and the DA and abusively questioned until they agreed they were guilty. (I know a lawyer for one of the defendants, and I remember at the time that he seemed sincerely under the impression that his client was innocent).

Thanks, Martin and Roger. I agree with you.

Cheers,
John

You are right, Roger. They were, indeed, abusively questioned and finally succumbed the harsh treatment.