John Siegal was a speech writer in 1990 for Mayor David Dinkins when five Harlem teens were convicted and sentenced to prison for raping a 28-year-old investment banker as she jogged in Central Park on the evening of April 19, 1989. Virtually the only evidence against the teens were their videotaped confessions.
Twenty-two years later, Siegal has once again crossed paths with the case, this time as a Baker & Hostetler partner representing filmmaker Ken Burns’s production company in response to a City of New York subpoena seeking access to unused footage from a new documentary, The Central Park Five.
