“They radiate a Madonna-like transcendence as they relate how their faith in God has comforted them through the long ordeal as mothers of sons convicted in the Central Park Jogger case.” So begins an article that ran in the Amsterdam News under the headline “Free Our Children.” It quotes from an interview with three of the five mothers of the convicted Central Park wilders. The interview was set up by the deputy majority leader of the City Council, Wm. Perkins, an adviser to the convicted rapists and their families. The black community has long had a hardcore coterie that has claimed to believe that the so-called Central Park Five were railroaded. The confession of convicted murderer and rapist Matias Reyes, given after the expiration of the statute of limitations, has energized them to speak truth to power, as it were.

The Amsterdam News this week also published a column by Wilbert Tatum, the paper’s publisher emeritus. Mr. Tatum says that the newspapers that covered the case “… saw blood. They saw young blacks … and they wanted to kill them.” Of the police, he says, ” … the white police officers must ask themselves each evening, ‘Did I get myself a nigger today?'” He goes on: “the criminal justice system makes an effort to destroy the credibility of the Black male, and very often female, as an integral part of their day, their creed and their mission.”Though occasionally there are cases that vindicate the paranoid, such as Mr. Tatum, and the confidence man, such as the Reverend Al Sharpton, another defender of the convicted rapists, this is not such a case.

These youths have confessed to and were convicted of marauding through the park and committing not trivial juvenile infractions but viciously beating anyone on whom they managed to lay their hands. Reyes’s guilt is hardly the same as their innocence. Yesterday’s Daily News reports that Reyes’ account of the rape — he says he beat the jogger with a tree limb — doesn’t jibe with the physical evidence, which indicates that the wounds that caused her to lose more than 80% of her blood were inflicted with a sharp object, likely a knife. It is crucial to remember that the youths also confessed to and were convicted of sexual assault, not the rape to which Reyes has owned up. Let’s let the chips fall where they may, but let’s not sully the criminal justice system in order to place an undeserved halo on the youths who were wilding in the park on that night.