Korey Wise was the oldest of the five teenagers wrongly convicted in the 1989 Central Park jogger case, and among the Central Park Five he served by far the longest sentence: more than thirteen years in adult maximum-security prisons before DNA evidence and another man’s confession cleared him in 2002. He was sixteen at the time of arrest, one year past the New York threshold that automatically funneled him into the adult system while his four co-defendants, all younger, went to juvenile facilities and were released after roughly six or seven years. That single age difference shaped the rest of his life.
How a Sixteen-Year-Old Ended Up at the Precinct
On April 19, 1989, a woman jogging in Central Park was brutally attacked. Police pulled in dozens of teenagers who had been in the park that evening. Wise was not one of the initial suspects. He walked into the precinct voluntarily to support his friend Yusef Salaam, who had been called in for questioning. Once he was inside, detectives shifted their attention to him.
The interrogation stretched for hours. Wise was sixteen, had a documented hearing impairment, and struggled with a learning disability. For substantial portions of the questioning, no parent, guardian, or attorney was present. Detectives used tactics associated with the Reid Technique, a confrontational method built on presenting evidence (real or fabricated), minimizing the moral seriousness of the crime, and systematically breaking down a suspect’s denials. The approach offers no reliable way to separate a truthful admission from a false one, and researchers have long flagged it as especially dangerous with minors.
What came out of that room was a statement full of inconsistencies that did not match the physical evidence at the crime scene. No forensic evidence connected Wise to the victim. The statement itself became the prosecution’s case.
The 1990 Trial and Sentence
Wise went to trial in 1990 on charges that included attempted murder, sexual abuse, assault, and riot. Prosecutors leaned almost entirely on the interrogation statement, presenting it to the jury as a voluntary confession. The defense pointed to the absence of any physical evidence tying him to the attack, but the recorded narrative was hard to overcome in the courtroom.
The jury acquitted Wise of attempted murder and the top sexual-assault count. It convicted him of assault, sexual abuse, and riot. The sentence was five to fifteen years.1Innocence Project. Korey Wise Because New York at the time automatically prosecuted sixteen-year-olds as adults, Wise entered the adult correctional system immediately.
Thirteen Years in Adult Prison
While the four younger defendants served their time in juvenile facilities with some access to education and rehabilitative programming, Wise cycled through some of New York’s harshest institutions: Rikers Island, Attica, Elmira Correctional Facility, and Auburn Correctional Facility. These environments were built around control and confinement, not the developmental needs of a teenager.
He spent stretches of his sentence in solitary confinement, and has spoken publicly about experiencing solitary as a form of protection from violence in the general population. “I wanted to stay alive. I don’t know why I wanted to stay alive, but I guess that’s the only great thing you can do,” he said in a 2019 talk at Western Michigan University. Frequent transfers between facilities disrupted any continuity, educational resources were scarce, and a hearing-impaired teenager with no support system had few defenses against day-to-day prison life.
He served over thirteen years, close to the maximum end of his sentence. His co-defendants served roughly six to seven years each in juvenile detention. The gap was driven entirely by his age at arrest.
Exoneration in 2002
The break came in 2002 at Auburn Correctional Facility. Wise crossed paths with Matias Reyes, a convicted serial rapist and murderer serving 33 and one-third years to life for a string of sexual assaults and a murder on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Reyes confessed that he alone had committed the 1989 Central Park attack.
Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau opened a reinvestigation. Forensic analysts tested a rape kit that had been in storage for more than a decade. The DNA matched Reyes and excluded all five of the convicted men. Reyes’s account was consistent with the physical evidence in ways the teenagers’ coerced statements had never been.
On December 19, 2002, Justice Charles J. Tejada of the New York State Supreme Court granted motions filed by both the defense and the District Attorney’s office to vacate every conviction against all five men. The records of Wise, Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, and Raymond Santana were cleared.
The 2014 Settlement
After exoneration, the five men filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the City of New York, alleging malicious prosecution and violations of their constitutional rights. The case ran for more than a decade before the city, under Mayor Bill de Blasio, agreed in 2014 to a settlement totaling $41 million. The four men who had served roughly seven years each received $7.125 million apiece. Wise received $12.25 million, the largest individual share, reflecting the years he spent in adult prison after the others had gone home.2Innocence Project. Judge Signs off on 41 Million Settlement with Central Park Five
The Korey Wise Innocence Project
In 2015, Wise directed part of his settlement to the University of Colorado Boulder’s law school, funding its existing innocence program through a multiyear gift. The program was subsequently renamed the Korey Wise Innocence Project in his honor.3University of Colorado Boulder. About Us – Korey Wise Innocence Project It investigates claims of factual innocence, providing legal representation and investigative work in post-conviction proceedings. As of its most recent public reporting, the project had over 150 applications on its screening waitlist and was actively working on roughly fifteen cases.4University of Colorado Boulder. Our Work – Korey Wise Innocence Project
Laws That Changed Because of the Case
Two structural failures in Wise’s case eventually drew legislative responses in New York.
Raise the Age
At the time of Wise’s arrest, New York was one of only two states that automatically prosecuted sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds as adults for all criminal offenses.5New York State. Raise the Age That policy is what sent him into maximum-security adult prisons at sixteen. In 2017, New York passed the Raise the Age law, changing the age of criminal responsibility from sixteen to eighteen.6New York State Senate. NY Senate Bill 2017-S4121 Under the revised law, sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds charged with most offenses are handled in family court or a specialized youth part of criminal court. Serious violent felonies can still result in adult prosecution, but the default changed. Had this law existed in 1989, Wise’s path through the system would have looked very different.
Recorded Interrogations
New York now requires law enforcement to video record entire custodial interrogations conducted at detention facilities when the case involves a Class A-1 felony, predatory sexual assault, or other serious violent felony offenses. The recording must run from the reading of rights through the end of questioning. If police fail to record a qualifying interrogation, the court must consider that failure when ruling on the admissibility of the statement, and the jury can be instructed to weigh the absence of a recording when evaluating voluntariness.7New York State Senate. New York Criminal Procedure Law 60.45 In 1989, none of these protections existed, and the most pressured early hours of questioning in the Central Park case happened off camera.
The Exonerated Five
The case returned to public attention in May 2019 with Ava DuVernay’s Netflix miniseries “When They See Us,” which dramatized the arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment of all five men. The series drew massive viewership and triggered real-world consequences: Linda Fairstein, who had supervised the original investigation as head of the Manhattan DA’s sex crimes unit, faced boycotts of her novels and resigned from multiple boards, and Elizabeth Lederer, the lead trial prosecutor, resigned from her teaching position at Columbia Law School.
The five men now refer to themselves as the Exonerated Five, rejecting the “Central Park Five” label that defined them by a crime they did not commit. In 2022, Central Park renamed one of its entrances in their honor.
Of the five, Wise’s story most starkly shows how a single legal threshold can multiply harm. Being sixteen instead of fifteen at the time of arrest meant adult prosecution, adult prison, solitary confinement, and thirteen years instead of seven. The coerced statement that put him there has become a reference point in interrogation reform, and the money he directed to the Innocence Project that carries his name continues to fund the kind of legal work that might have freed him sooner.