MovieChat Forums > When They See Us (2019) Discussion > How faithful to real life?

How faithful to real life?

posted 5 years ago by thebucketrider (57)
5 replies | jump to latest

I didn't follow the case very closely at the time and just wondered if the case against the five was really as weak as the series presents and, again according to the series, as the prosecutors acknowledged. Was there no physical evidence tying the accused to the crime and were they really convicted on the basis of inconsistent confessions that they described as coerced? If it is accurate, did the jurors ever explain (at the time or after their exoneration) why they felt those confessions excluded all reasonable doubt about their culpability?

[–] JudgeDredd (125) 5 years ago

Watch the documenteries 'the central park five' you'll see how accurate it really is.
The Series are very accurate.

[–] [deleted] 5 years ago

One thing you need to probably think of is to remind yourself that this is a dramatization of the events. For example, I highly doubt in real life that the group of teens was allowed in the same room together as depicted in the movie where they realized they had been coerced into lying to each other.

That is typically not a good police practice.

Still, that does not take away from the power of this dramatization or of the corruption that did occur to these young men.

[–] thebucketrider (57) 5 years ago

I have no doubt that the series took some poetic license. However, I'm not certain whether the details I asked about were among the embellishments.

[–] cyguration (3951) 4 years ago

As mentioned in the previous comment, the documentary covers your points explicitly. In fact, the documentary makes it a point to go over how the boys were convicted based on a startling lack of evidence.

Much of it was fueled on by the media circus surrounding the case and the police wanting to pin the crime on these boys to get a turnover as quickly as possible. There was no physical evidence, no DNA, no forensics linking the boys to the crime.

In some ways it was a move out of the #MeToo playbook before #MeToo existed, sort of how some celebrities are axed from their jobs and fired from projects based on media-fueled hearsay rather than facts.

In this case, the prominence of the crime jettisoned into the mainstream by the media combined with the bloodthirsty want for justice against the alleged criminals was bigger than the necessity for due process.

[–] atd8vii (592) 3 years ago

It’s accurate to the Ken Burns documentary if you look at it that way, otherwise it completely ignores every inconvenient piece of evidence against them.