"It's Crushing": The Lasting Trauma of the Exonerated
If there’s one story of wrongful conviction that most people know, it’s that of the Exonerated Five. The New York City teens, all Black or Latino, were convicted in the 1989 rape of a Central Park jogger, and incarcerated for six to 14 years each before another man confessed.
Few people remembered that there was a sixth defendant on that indictment: Steven Lopez, who had accepted a plea deal for a lesser charge before trial and served about three years in prison. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg finally exonerated Lopez this week.
It’s a powerful reminder that even in cases that would seem to be under a microscope, wrongful convictions are shot through the criminal system, and for the innocent, there’s rarely a simple path to exoneration, or back to life on the outside.
“It’s PTSD that all of us in this sort of fraternity suffer,” Herman Atkins told NBC News, in a story this week about the lasting trauma of wrongful convictions on Black men convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. Black Americans make up half of all exonerees, despite being only about 13% of the nation’s population.
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