Ken Burns documentary on the five black teenagers (wrongfully) convicted of a 1989 attempted murder and rape of a white female jogger in Central Park. If you want to be angry at a whole bunch of people at once, this is a good choice to watch. You've got the cops focusing on this group of teenagers for no apparent reason other than they were somewhere in the park that same night. And then they interrogate them for hours and hours without attorneys or family, eventually coercing factually incorrect false confessions from four of them. Then the DA pushes forward with a prosecution with - literally - only the confessions as evidence. The defense attorneys are incompetent, either doing nothing or claiming "well, he just watched" instead of actually saying their guy was not present. It's all a big mess. And, oh yeah, the cops had DNA from the case and DNA from the guy who actually committed the crime and either never compared the two or ignored the results. The end result is a powerful documentary that is well-made but not a complete home run. The question of what crimes the five may have actually committed that night is never answered, for example. Still, this is a good doc. 8/10.
* - The end of the movie states that the boys' lawsuit against NYC and others had yet to reach resolution. Since the making of the movie, a settlement was announced but I don't know if that ever came to fruition. Meanwhile, the DA in the case still thinks the boys are guilty even though the only DNA present at the scene was that of the guy who confessed.
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