MovieChat Forums > The Central Park Five (2014) Discussion > My take...

My take...

posted 12 years ago by alita-terry
14 replies | jump to latest

I went…I cried…and then I got angry.
The Central Park Five
How can five baby-faced black and latino children be tried and convicted of the rape, burglary and attempted murder of a 28 year-old female financier from the upper eastside of Manhattan…when not one shred of evidence implicated them in the crime?
No DNA of theirs was on the victim or at the scene of the crime
No witnesses
No acceptable timeline
How can New York City detectives question and interrogate 14 year old kids for 30 hours without their parents present?
To be honest, I can see how and why it happened? The general perception and image of black and latino boys has always been negative or villainous. Birth of A Nation anyone? And the NYPD has never impressed me.
What I really want to understand, is how the hell did we allow this to happen to these children? They were 14 and 15 years old!!!
The film showed footage of the coerced confessions, the “perp walk” and finally the trial. I could not help but notice that these boys and their mothers were left abandoned by their own community. How a community can turn a blind eye to this miscarriage of justice and then four years later rally around the likes of O.J. Simpson just amazes me. We have some soul-searching to do.
The worst part of this film was when the verdicts returned guilty. Watching these inconsolable mothers reach for their boys as they were handcuffed, was too much for my heart. One of the boys said that he did not want to show the court any emotion. He did not want to give them that satisfaction. But, once they were put in the back of the van, every last one of them broke down and sobbed like babies. And that is what they were…just babies.

[–] jimmyberluti1 12 years ago

babies............please. They were "wilding", Targeting white people to beat and rob.
Not sure if they are guilty of rape....but the guilty of hate crimes.

[–] 12 years ago

[deleted]

[–] jimmyberluti1 12 years ago

Blacks have killed far more whites in the past 100 yrs then the other way around.

[–] flimflamsam 12 years ago

you don't live in the south do you?

I hope you've got an army of raisins because I've got a major scoop

[–] Stan_Kubricks_Mentor 12 years ago

"Blacks have killed far more whites in the past 100 yrs then the other way around"

Not only do YOU "jimmyberluti1" have a clear ideological prejudicial bias but YOU DON'T KNOW JACKCRAP ABOUT HISTORY. The numbers of blacks - males, females, kids, elderly - that have been killed by white mobs FAR and away outnumber the numbers of whites killed by blacks. Until sociological and economic and political developments put a stop to it around the 1950s, the numbers of blacks killed by roving mobs of whites burning and attacking whole black neighborhoods usually resulted in tens/dozens of blacks dead in the attacks. Add up the untold numbers of these attacks across the United States from the beginning of the 20th Century to the 1950s and the numbers are incredibly high.

YOU "jimmyberluti1" are one seriously stupid fook.

_________________________________________

"If you really want something in life you have to work for it. Now quiet, they're about to announce the lottery numbers."
Homer Simpson

[–] Xyzzy 12 years ago

>>And who is going to hold those white men accountable for the lynchings and the murders that they committed?

"Those white men"? You mean the ones that they robbed and beat had been lynching black people? Surely you're not suggesting targeting white men on the basis of them being white men, based on the crimes of other white men is legitimate!

Why, that would make you a racist.

-------
http://bitmaelstrom.blogspot.com/
Fight the storm.

[–] daimposter 12 years ago

"Not sure if they are guilty of rape..."

Go F*%# yourself. It's obvious you think they deserved it even if they are innocent.

[–] Stan_Kubricks_Mentor 12 years ago

YOU ideological prejudicial bias is showing: the teens were targeting EVERYONE they came across in the park. They jumped a homeless guy. We don't know what ethnicity the person was but given the number of homeless black males in Manhattan, we can surmise the "homeless guy" was more likely black than white.

_________________________________________

"If you really want something in life you have to work for it. Now quiet, they're about to announce the lottery numbers."
Homer Simpson

[–] yayasan40 12 years ago

You obviously did not watch the movie. You sound ignorant and stupid. Just please do some research before you go shooting off your mouth on IMDB. It makes you look like a complete idiot.

[–] cajunbluesbaby 12 years ago

OK I haven't seen this movie, but I have a logical point to make. Just because it's happens on film, doesn't mean it's necessarily entirely true. All things can have bias & can even omit facts to serve that bias. Doing research should be more than just watching a documentary about an event. Just sayin'. I will do some more research myself on this from multiple sources as well as watch this film before I form an opinion on the guilt or innocence of these boys. That's the way to win an argument with someone not just say "You haven't seen the movie. Do ur research" Just watching the movie isn't enough to give a person the full perspective one would need to make an argument.

[–] Creativebizmgmt 12 years ago

BTW "wilding" was a term invented by the NYPD to incite anger and convict these innocent boys. To my knowledge it's never been used before or since. Guess you fell for it.

[–] kute_lokita 10 years ago

JImmyberluti1, yet the detectives working on this case have been constantly under investigation by internal affairs for falsifying police records... hmmm!

[–] JaneSchmo 12 years ago

I'm white and I was horrified and angered watching this film and also near tears at many points. Horrible, just horrible. No words for this. Obviously hindsight is 20/20- but it is appalling how obvious their innocence should have been.

If this had happened at a more enlightened time- if race and class were taken out of the equation, if the accusers hadn't been poor young black men, if the victim wasn't a wealthy and educated white yuppie woman, if the police and prosecutors hadn't been so blind, if lynch mob mentality hadn't taken over the city, if the media hadn't engaged in a circus- these kids would never have even been charged!! They would have been let go in a matter of days, if not even sooner. A few minutes of logical thinking should have unraveled the whole case the police and state had against them. I have a very strong suspicion that if a bunch of white kids had been accused of attacking a poor white woman, this would have been immediately straightened out. Or forget straightening out. It wouldn't have occurred in the first place.

The four "confessions" did not match one another in the least bit!! Not one of the so-called testimonies even somewhat matched another one. Hell, the confessions weren't even consistent in themselves!! And all four didn't match the known and objective facts!! Which apparently none of the people involved in the case even bothered to look at.

Had these kids not been black, not been poor, had competent defense, their confessions would have been immediately thrown out. Someone admitting to assault and rape does not even know where it actually TOOK PLACE?! That alone should have stopped the investigation dead in its tracks.

[–] EmElleCee 12 years ago

They released their names in the press too. They were minors. They weren't supposed to do that. Not only were they subjected to misplaced hate from the prosecutors but the public. You can't yell at people who weren't proven to be guilty. I myself wondered why would they make those confessions but I came to understand by the end of the documentary. I sat saying to the screen, "why would you guys do that to yourselves?" It's so sad how the guys mentioned they got in their faces screaming "that's him. That's the guy who did it." They made them feel guilty. They never dealt with any interrogations. They didn't realize the gravity of their situations. The prosecutors were out to punish them without any proof. They just wanted to get paid. Evil. And during the documentary a man asked why did their parents allow them to be questioned without attorneys. Just so sad.