Prosecutor wants more time to investigate 1989 park attack

NEW YORK -- More than 13 years after a jogger was found raped, beaten and near death in a muddy Central Park ravine, prosecutors are trying to determine if five teenagers were unjustly convicted.

Prosecutors from Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's office were returning to court Monday to say they need more time to investigate an imprisoned rapist and murderer's claim that he alone attacked the 28-year-old woman on April 19, 1989.

Matias Reyes' claim, backed by DNA evidence, has forced prosecutors to reinvestigate accusations that the defendants, all of whom were 16 or younger at the time, were railroaded by the justice system.

Defense lawyers, civil rights activists and politicians urging the court to set aside the 1990 convictions say authorities mishandled evidence and coerced confessions from the unsophisticated youths.

The five defendants have completed their prison sentences, but their lawyers have said the men now want to clear their names. Morgenthau has said he would file to nullify the convictions, if the evidence warranted that decision.

The prosecutor's office is interviewing the convicted men, detectives and witnesses in the park that night. Forensic tests are being conducted and 15,000 pages of court transcripts and other documents are being reviewed.

Reyes, 31, is serving a life sentence for raping and murdering a pregnant woman and raping three other women on Manhattan's Upper East Side. He told investigators that about three months before his arrest, he raped the jogger, crushed her skull with a rock and left her for dead.

Sometime after midnight, the jogger, an investment banker, was found nearly dead in a puddle of mud and blood.

Within 48 hours, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Kharey Wise had confessed on videotape to beating and raping the woman one called the "jogging lady." A fifth teen, Yusef Salaam, also made admissions, detectives said.

Investigators found virtually no conclusive physical evidence that linked the youths to the attack or to the scene. Prosecutors relied instead on the suspects' statements to win convictions at two trials in 1990.