By Jonathan Allen
NEW YORK (Reuters) – A long overlooked co-defendant of the Central Park Five, a group of teenagers who were wrongly convicted of raping a white woman out jogging in 1989 based on false confessions, is due to be exonerated of a related conviction in a New York court on Monday.
Steven Lopez was 15 when he was first named in the indictment along with other Black and Latino teenagers for the night-time rape and attempted murder of Trisha Meili, an investment banker whose horrific injuries became the subject of sensationalist media coverage.
Lopez later pleaded guilty to robbing a male jogger that same night in a deal with prosecutors that saw the charges alleging his involvement in the attack on Meili dropped, and was sentenced to between one and a half and four and a half years in a state prison.
Meili was beaten and left for dead. The attack was seized upon by local media as an emblem of soaring crime rates in New York City in the 1980s. News stories frequently referred to the boys arrested by the New York Police Department as animals.
Decades before he would become president of the United States, Donald Trump, then a prominent real-estate developer, took out full-page advertisements in city newspapers calling for the boys to be executed.
Later, the five boys convicted at trial were exonerated when the true attacker confessed and was linked to the crime by DNA evidence. The case became a watchword for judicial overreach and racial profiling by both law enforcement and news outlets.
Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise and Yusef Salaam, now known as the Exonerated Five, spent years in prison. They brought a lawsuit against the city, which was settled for $41 million in 2014.
Lopez was not part of that lawsuit, and his story has often been overlooked in coverage of the exoneration of his former co-defendants.
He approached the Manhattan district attorney’s office last year asking that his conviction for robbing the male jogger be reviewed, the New York Times reported.
District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who became the first Black person to hold that office when sworn in earlier this year, said as a result of that review he will move to vacate Lopez’s guilty plea on Monday afternoon in the criminal court in Manhattan.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
