"Wolf Packs"
A Vicious Hoax

For over a decade, five black and brown boys caught in the cross hairs of the cops and the press suffered in virtual silence in the prisons and hellholes of New York. Although they have recently been exonerated it is useful to review what happened to them, and by so doing to learn how it happened, if we are to learn if it may have happened to others and maybe happening today still.

Integral to this process is the role of the press, a
role that is often underestimated or at least
understated in any real recounting of the now infamous Central Park joggers case in midtown New York. How did the local media fuel the furor that captured the dark imaginations of the city in the spring of 1989? When one recalls the covers of the New York Dailies, and recaptures the visceral spirit of the times, the official media sanctioned rage and hatred directed at the five and by extension their families and their communities is palpable.

Quote "Central Park jogger Wolf packs prey " unquote blared from the cover of the New York Daily News. In a subtitle "female jogger near death after savage attack by roving gang".

Quote "a savage disease called New York" unquote, was the message streaming across the wide expanse
of two pages of the New York Post. There two of
their prominent columnist wrote separate pieces
under the same thicken banner headline. The Post's celebrated Pete Hamil would pen a piece of opinion that seemed to be a declaration of war against the
poor of the city, and served to reduce the five boys from youngsters theoretically armed with the heralded presumption of innocence, to the dark mob who were living exemplars of pathology. He wrote

"they were coming down town from a world of crack, welfare, guns, knives, indifference, and ignorance.
They were coming from a land of no fathers. They were coming from the anarchic province of the poor. And driven by a collective fury, brimming with the rippling energies of youth, their minds teaming with
the violent images of the streets and the movies. They had only one goal, to smash, hurt, rob, stomp, rape. The enemies were rich, the enemies were white" he wrote.

Almost everything he wrote was untrue. They were
presumed to be guilty and it is interesting that all of
the problems with the so-called confessions that have emerged were present before they were formally indicted 13 years ago. And no Supreme Court or trial court in New York, no appellate court, no justice of the court of Appeals, found any of it problematic. These were not citizens or even juveniles, they were monsters and the law is no protector of monsters.
They had every institution of white corporate power arrayed against them, a savage venial press, the
cynical police, and a complacent judiciary, who
were to quote Hamill "driven by a collective fury".

These boys and too many boys like them never had, nor have a chance.

From death row this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.

"Wolf Packs" A Vicious Hoax

"Wolf Packs"
A Vicious Hoax