"I didn't do it": a phrase of yearning that only survives under adequate and balanced circumstances. We've played our own versions of "Which would you rather?", and instead of blind or deaf being the more oppressive, I always come back to the same proposition; intellectual disability or skin color. Both draw consequences on their basis alone. The first one is inherent, and the second affected by a quasi-curse of white American protestant dominion. Rarely before have I seen this illustrated than on the recent Netflix mini-series, When They See Us, a fine return to cinematic high ground for Ava DuVernay after A Wrinkle of Time (a hyped array of visuals). After the Central Park assaults in 1989, five boys were deemed the perpetrators by way of their presence in the park and association. Now, ask yourself are we comfortable having our long, invested, and perhaps selfless work challenged or questioned by others who weren't involved in the process? I wouldn't say so. Ergo, would this defense tactic, when wielded by the now disgraced Linda Fairstein, worked in favor of the long, invested, and selfless work of the more than 30 detectives, who as Fairstein put it did a "brilliant investigation"? Yes. Yes it did; the only "brilliance" was meeting its time quota for wrapping up the process. In a heated and tragic scenario where answers could only be determined with the intent of closure over an integral, just conviction, the then-infamous Central Park Five were damned to prison and ridicule. Closure, not justice, was uppermost.

The trials made waves on the media. People wanted the boys free, others wanted them jailed, impassioned by the carnage against the mangled, nearly-dead female jogger. All this raging going on inside their skull, it may be therapeutic for deeply disordered people. Because the 13-year story transpires over a 5-episode course, DuVernay plays to the empowered white media elite, her film, the sponsors who enjoy the self-reproach that comes with being reminded of privilege. It's a highly competent career shtick: helpless culpability. I want to see the mindsets of the jogger and other victims, and the mindsets of the manipulative prosecution team. And if to travel backwards to 2016 when Clinton was seen as a more guiltless option, parallel with Trump taking out magazine ads calling for the death penalty, Clinton herself in 1996 encouraged the police force to hone in on "the kinds of kids known as 'super-predators,' no conscience, no empathy"

In a prevailing atmosphere of crack, AIDS, and post-civil rights era struggle, this was a pathetic performance of justice resulting in another notorious and verdict that shifted the national conversation towards the system and false accusations that make their way to the courtroom, and in recent times, the bedroom.