During New York City’s crack era in the early 1990s, with homicide tallies five times higher than today, the authorities resorted to ruthless law enforcement.
“They’d pull your socks off, pull your pants off.”Crime fell across the country during the ensuing decades in a broad societal shift, and New York become one of America’s safest big cities and a thriving tourist destination.
But in its darkest days police and prosecutors had cut corners and used tactics that left untold numbers of innocent people — mostly poor men of color — imprisoned on bogus murder, rape and robbery charges.
The prisoners’ dogged legal challenges prompted reinvestigations helped by left-leaning prosecutors, advances in DNA testing, pressure from newly formed advocacy groups and generous government restitution, turning New York into a national hotbed of exoneration.
In recent years, one innocent middle-aged man after another has been released, ravaged by years in prison, into a tamer city.
Persons:
”, Derrick Hamilton, reinvestigations
Locations:
New York, Brooklyn