NEW YORK, July 25 (Reuters) – A longtime co-defendant of the Central Park Five, a group of black and Latino teenagers wrongly convicted of raping a white woman running in 1989 based on false confessions, was acquitted of a related conviction by a New York judge on Monday.
Steven Lopez was 15 when he was first indicted along with other black and Latino teenagers for the late-night rape and attempted murder of Trisha Meili, an investment banker whose gruesome injuries they became the subject of sensationalist media coverage.
Lopez later pleaded guilty to robbing a male sex worker that same night in a deal with prosecutors that saw charges alleging his involvement in the Meili attack dropped and he was convicted to between 1-1/2 and 4-1/2 years in a state prison.
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On Monday, New York State Supreme Court Justice Ellen Biben granted a motion by Manhattan’s chief prosecutor and an attorney representing Lopez to throw out the plea Lopez entered when she was 17, ruling that it was involuntary, unconstitutional and based in part on false witness statements.
“What happened to you was a profound injustice and an American injustice,” Eric Shapiro Lopez, a defense attorney who was not yet born when his client was charged, told Lopez in court. “They say justice delayed is justice denied and I’m sorry we had to wait 30 years.” Lopez, who now sports a long gray beard, appeared to have tears in his eyes.
Meili was beaten and left for dead. The attack was seized upon by local media as an emblem of rising crime rates in New York City in the 1980s. The news often referred to boys arrested by the NYPD as animals.
Decades before he became president of the United States, Donald Trump, then a prominent real estate developer, took out full-page ads in the city’s newspapers calling for the boys to be executed.
Central Park Five co-defendant Steven Lopez leaves the Supreme Court after being acquitted in New York City, New York, U.S., July 25, 2022. REUTERS/David ‘Dee’ Delgado
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The five boys convicted in the trial were later exonerated when the real assailant confessed and was linked to the crime by DNA evidence. The case became a watchword for judicial overreach, racial profiling by both law enforcement and the media, and police misconduct in coercing confessions from innocent people .
Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise and Yusef Salaam, now known as the Exonerated Five, spent years in prison. They filed 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 acquittal of his former co-defendants.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg told the court that there was no physical evidence linking Lopez to the attacks on any of the runners, and that witness statements naming him had been retracted.
That, along with Lopez’s youth at the time, made the statement involuntary, Bragg told the court.
“Mr. López, we wish him peace and healing,” said the judge after dismissing the accusation.
“Thank you,” Lopez replied, his only remarks to the court.
“That’s settled,” the judge said, as Lopez rose to shake hands with the chief prosecutor.
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Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Cynthia Osterman
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