Learning from the Central Park Five: Visions of American Criminal Justice Reform

On April 20, 2016, the MIT Black Graduate Student Association hosted an event to discuss the current American criminal justice system and how race and media portrayals helped to shaped its evolution. The discussion also featured visions and strategies for reform, in hopes that the criminal justice system of the future will more equitably serve the American public. As a vehicle for this discussion, we chose to focus on the Central Park 5 jogger case of the 1990’s, a case the polarized our nation across race and class lines.

Setting the scene with short opening remarks before we previewed the trailer for Central Park Five.

A documentary was released in 2012 that reviewed the details of the case and exoneration of the 5 black and Hispanic teenagers who were wrongly convicted. We were fortunate to bring one of the five men, Yusef Salaam, who was 16 at the time of his arrest. We heard about his specific experiences, and also his opinions on the broader topic of criminal justice reform.

The event was moderated by Prof Malick Ghachem from the MIT History Department. Prof Ghachem is a historian and lawyer, whose research specializes is slavery and abolition, criminal law and constitutional history.

Following the conversation with Yusef, a broader panel tackled the issue of how race and bias influence the criminal justics system. This panel included Prof Natalie Byfield, a journalist and professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at St. Johns University in New York. Prof Byfield covered the Central Park 5 case as a journalist in New York in the 90’s. Joining her was Andrea James, is a community organizer and former criminal attorney. In 2010, Ms. James founded Families for Justice as Healing, an organization focused on the reducing the incarceration of women and mothers. Our last panelist was Prof. Ron Sullivan of the Harvard Law School. Prof Sullivan is a leading theorist in the areas of criminal law, criminal procedure, trial practices and techniques, legal ethics and race theory. In 2014, Prof Sullivan was tasked to design and implement a Conviction Review Unit for the newly elected Brooklyn District Attorney. The unit, designed to identify and exonerate wrongfully convicted persons, quickly became regarded as the model conviction integrity program in the nation.

A lasting sentiment from the event is how common wrongful convictions are, and how the public must hold accountable the prosecutor and police departments to avoid known practices that lead to this unfortunate outcomes. Thank you to my homies Tsehai Grell, Chris Smith, Genea Foster and Candace Ross for helping me bring this conversation to MIT!