For all of New York’s fast-moving intensity, its past rarely seems to stay behind it. And so it is that 1989’s infamous Central Park jogger case has reemerged with the confession of convicted killer and rapist Matias Reyes. In prison with no chance of parole after his conviction of raping and killing a pregnant woman at Manhattan, he says that he — and he alone — was the man who raped and beat the jogger into a coma. Reyes has had his involvement in the attack corroborated by DNA evidence. The jogger, who had no memory of the brutal events upon awakening from 12 days in a coma, has been named by only one newspaper, the Amsterdam News, which joined with various others in the black community in sympathizing with the young men who confessed to and were, subsequently, convicted in the Central Park jogger case. In one baffling display of symbolism, the Reverend Al Sharpton brought Tawana Brawley to the courthouse to stand in solidarity with the confessed rapists during their trial.

The five convicted rapists, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam, and Kharey Wise, all 14 to 16 years old at the time, were among those rounded up by the police following a rampage by a roving band of 30 black and Hispanic youths who terrorized, robbed, and attacked nine people. It was this incident that brought the word “wilding” into the journalistic lexicon. Each of the boys was advised of and waived his right to counsel, and each gave graphic and largely consistent (both internally and with one another) confessions of his role in the rape. Each did so not in a closed back room while being beaten, but in the presence of family members. One of the boys, Wise, called it “my first rape.” All of them denied actually having had sex with the woman, but each accused the others of having done so. Because much of their questioning was taped, the defense lawyers eventually employed found themselves unable to accuse the police of gaining these confessions through any means beside “subtle pressures,” which we have always thought of as one of the necessary tools of policing.

And consider now, from the relatively safe streets of 2002, the city in 1989, when crime was sky high. Such a rape seemed an act of savagery less isolated than emblematic. The teenagers were brought in on suspicion of involvement in other acts of violence that had been committed in Central Park that night, and it was only because the victim was found that they were then held under suspicion of rape. Reyes’s confession will be used to try to prove that the convictions in the jogger case were erroneous. No doubt this will be carefully pursued. But it will be harder to make a case that those convicted were the victims of a racist system. No one deserves to go to jail for a crime he did not commit, but committing or bearing passive witness to violent crimes in the vicinity of other violent crimes — that is, in an atmosphere of criminal chaos — increases the odds of this happening. Only Salaam took the stand in his own defense. He denied knowledge of the wilding, but had been carrying a 12-inch pipe that night, which he claimed belonged to a friend. Perhaps the appropriate analogue is the case of Charles Schwarz, who, evidence indicates, played some guilty role in the brutal station house sodomy of Abner Louima but has tried to hide behind a blue wall of silence to obscure the exact nature and details of his crime.