A new documentary revisits the Central Park Jogger case and explores how racism, hysteria and institutional failure wrongfully convicted five teenagers in 1990.

The crime was horrific—on the morning of April 19, 1989, a young white woman—a jogger—was discovered beaten, raped, and left for dead in Central Park. The outrage in New York City, where racial tensions boiled after a decade of high-profile race-related crimes, was intense and swift. Police officials warned of gangs of teenagers, usually African Americans or Latinos, out “wilding” on city streets. Soon enough, five teenagers—Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, and Yusef Salaam—were arrested, tried, and convicted for the attack.

There was no physical evidence connecting the teens to the attack, but after hours of interrogation, the five teens all confessed to the crime.

The confessions were virtually a foregone conclusion. The five, all black or Latino, fit the contemporary narrative of marauding minority teens the public and police seemed to want to believe. Yet, in 2002, their convictions were vacated when Matias Reyes, a serial rapist already in jail for another crime, confessed to the Central Park attack.

The new documentary “The Central Park Five,” directed by Sarah Burns, her husband, David McMahon, and her father, Ken Burns, gives the five men, now all in their late 30s and early 40s, the chance to tell their own story. It also contextualizes the case, exploring how investigators could ignore evidence and wring confessions out of the five men all in the name of a swift resolution.

“Our objective with the film first and foremost is to set the record straight,” McMahon says. “The other thing I think the film achieves is it helps (the men) restore their humanity and their dignity … by telling their story in the film.”

The genesis of the film began in 2003. While Sarah Burns was a student at Yale, she spent a summer interning with a civil rights law firm in New York where she met Santana and Richardson. The Five’s convictions had been vacated the year before and that year, they were beginning work on a civil suit against the city. Burns started researching the case and eventually wrote her undergraduate thesis about the media’s sensationalized coverage of it. The thesis was “a very narrow version” of the story, Burns says, and the project lingered in her mind. “It was something that I always wanted to come back to.”

McMahon suggested she write a book.

“I spent nearly five years working on the book, learning how to be a journalist, doing interviews, talking to people,” Burns says. “For the book, I really had to get to know the people and the characters and New York City at the time and write about all those things in a much more narrative way.”

Early in the process of writing the book, Burns says that she and McMahon realized that making a film was the next step in telling the story. For Burns, the book and the film complement each other by telling the same story from different perspectives.

In the film, through archival footage and news broadcasts from the time, Burns and McMahon re-create the New York of 1989, characterized—at least in media reports at the time—as a “dirty, dangerous place,” McMahon says, full of garbage, graffiti, and roving gangs. McMahon remembers how, as a child, his family drove to Connecticut to take a ferry to Long Island to visit friends so that they wouldn’t have to drive through New York City.

That sensational veneer glossed over real problems: the collapse of the city’s institutions in the face of economic downturn; rising racial tensions spurred by a number of high-profile crimes throughout the 1980s; the crack-cocaine epidemic, and others.

“The movie brings this to life and helps people understand what the context was in 1989 and why people behaved the way they did in response to the news of the crime,” McMahon says. “It doesn’t explain half of it, but it is important to understand the backdrop against which the story is set.”

But most importantly for Burns and McMahon, the film allows the Five to tell their story in their own words. Getting the Five to open up about their convictions, time in prison, and exoneration, was a long process, according to Burns, one that began when she first started researching her book.

“They all were pretty willing right away to participate in the project, but it did take some time for them to open up more. I did a number of interviews over the years, and each time, they would share more and be more open about their stories,” she says. “The interviews we did for the film were the culmination of this process.”

While the image of New York City as a graffiti-covered and garbage-strewn epicenter of crime is a memory, Burns believes that the same core problems of failing institutions and institutional racism are still prevalent there and throughout the country.

“You see it in the NYPD’s ‘stop and frisk’ policy, you see it in Trayvon Martin,” she says. “Those underlying suspicions of minority teenagers and teenage boys are still very prevalent.”

Meanwhile, the sort of coercive police interrogation techniques that lead the Five to confess to the crime but, weeks later, recant their confessions, are still a problem. The Central Park Five were interrogated for some 30 hours; at the end of the interrogations, four of the five agreed to have their confessions videotaped.

“There’s a strange power dynamic” in interrogation rooms, McMahon says.

False confessions happen for a variety of reasons. Those under interrogation might not understand their rights or understand the implications that their statements might have. People under interrogation might think “the truth is on their side,” McMahon says, and, after 30 hours of questioning, are increasingly likely to say something that will get them out of the interrogation room.

Videotaped interrogations—that is, videotaping the whole interrogation and not just the confession—are the norm in 18 states. They are not widespread practice in New York City, but are used in some precincts as part of a pilot program. Videotaping whole interrogations, rather than just confessions, helps to ensure interrogations, and any confessions that police might obtain during questioning, are fair.

When the detectives in the Central Park jogger case were questioned in front of a jury, “They repeatedly said, ‘All we did was ask (the Central Park Five) “And then what happened?”’ and we know that’s not true,” McMahon says.

“There’s a fear among them that (videotaping interrogations) would reveal what they have to do to get these responses. They can’t make any promises and they can’t make any threats, but they can do a lot of stuff that is dicey but is legal.”

While Burns and McMahon hope the film sets the record straight about the Five and the hysteria surrounding the case, the film itself has become a part of the story. In September 2012, attorneys for the city subpoenaed the film’s production company, Florentine Films, and asked for the research material they collected in the course of making the film as part of the ongoing civil suit between the Five and the city. Later, the subpoena was narrowed to only outtakes from interviews in the film. Florentine Films’ attorneys filed a motion to quash the subpoena in November on the grounds that the filmmakers are protected by the same laws that allow journalists to shield their sources. They are awaiting a decision. 

The subpoena is, according to McMahon, a stall tactic that the city is using to drag out the civil suit, now in its tenth year. Burns and McMahon believes the city wants to use interview outtakes to find material it can use against the Five in the civil suit. “They have, over the last 10 years, used every stall tactic they have to keep this thing from going to trial,” he says. “In delaying, it’s intimidating to the Five.”

“The Central Park Five” is showing at The Music Hall on Friday, Jan. 18 at 7 p.m.; Sunday, Jan. 20 at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m.; and Jan. 22-Jan. 24 at 7 p.m.