Awhile back, I watched the Central Park Five, the Ken Burns documentary about five black and Hispanic teens that were accused of raping and beating a white woman in Central Park, before finally being exonerated. The question that the film asks, again and again, is how did this happen? Why did no one ask more questions? Why wasn’t the press more skeptical? Why did no one slow this investigation down? Why didn’t cooler heads prevail? And it made me wonder what would happen if that case happened now. How would things have been different, if it happened in 2014? In the age of Twitter, would those questions have been asked? And how would the people asking them have been treated? Would things have been better, or worse?
What do you think?
I have no clue, because the impulse to be progressive would be split against itself with an embattled minority pit against an embattled gender in the absence of an organizing theory.
Perhaps better though, if only because social media would exaggerate the desire to discuss and argue about it so that more time would have been spent on the issue, with more details potentially coming to light more quickly.
The main reason things might turn out differently today is not social media but the greater awareness among the legal community (and to a lesser extent the public) about the possibility of false confessions being coerced in the manner in which they were.