The New York Times asks:

The conviction of the New York man, Douglas Warney, was scuttled after DNA tests, which prosecutors initially resisted, found the real killer to be a man locked up for a different slaying.

In retrospect, Mr. Warney appears to have been every bit as pliable under interrogation as Earl Washington Jr., a mentally retarded farmhand in Virginia who came within days of execution before his detail-rich confession to a brutal rape and murder was belied by DNA testing.

As in the New York case, the actual Virginia killer was in prison for a different homicide. Earlier this month, jurors awarded $2.25 million in damages to Mr. Washington for a conviction found all the more wrongful by their conclusion that his confession had details only a police investigator could know — and willfully pass on during interrogation.

Surely the two cases, unraveled by the persistence of the Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, are more than mere coincidence. How many other prisoners across the nation were firmly convicted on the strength of manipulated confessions?

Good question.

What re-opened the case and all its old wounds was another confession, this one backed up by DNA tests. Semen found inside the victim and on her sock had always been explained as belonging to a sixth mystery member of the young gang. It turned out to belong to a man named Matias Reyes, a thirty-one-year-old serial rapist. Reyes had a brutal record; he was infamous for gouging out the eyes of his victims.

In prison for a murder and a series of rapes, Reyes confessed in January 2002 to beating and raping the jogger in 1989, all alone. The kids, now young men who have all served their prison sentences, did not know him.

The news sent many in the media into a maelstrom of unresolved questions. Had the press lost its traditional, healthy sense of skepticism in the horror of the moment? How much did an innate mistrust of teenagers, especially groups of black and Latino youths, play into the coverage? Was this case unique, or did it bend future coverage of juveniles?

As it turns out, some journalists and city officials, prompted by the Central Park Jogger case, had been meeting informally and considering such questions for years. The Group, as the informal salon came to be called, met first in the living room of Gerry Migliore, former public affairs director for the city's department of probation, amid the turmoil swirling around the jogger case. It was an unusual gathering. There were reporters from the four main city papers (including the late New York Newsday), papers usually in heated competition with each other. About a dozen journalists and city government officials talked, raged, and even cried as they hashed out personal and professional conflicts. "It got very emotional," says Anne Murray, police bureau chief for the New York Post at the time, now a private investigator. Murray attended because she was conflicted about how the editors had played the original story. "I knew the coverage would be very different if the victim weren't white." The ad hoc group met several times in 1989, then continued sporadically during the next decade, topping out at forty invitation-only guests, and settling into a core of ten.