Former New York City Mayor and 2020 presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg said he has “no idea” about his current stance on the city and NYPD’s handling of the Central Park Five case. “There was an awful lot of evidence presented at that time that they were involved,” Bloomberg, who was mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013, told CBS News on Monday. The five black and Latino teenagers, who came to be known as the Central Park Five, were wrongfully convicted of the 1989 rape and beating of a woman jogging in Central Park and spent years in prison before their convictions were vacated in 2002. The Bloomberg administration spent almost $6 million fighting a civil lawsuit filed by the Five, arguing that the authorities at the time had good cause and acted in good faith. New York City and the five men agreed to a $41 million settlement in 2014, less than a year after Bloomberg left office. “There’s been questions since then about the quality of that evidence. And so it’s, I’ve been away from it for so long, I just really can’t respond because I just don’t remember,” Bloomberg told CBS News. He added that the courts ruled they did not commit the crime, so “that’s the final word and we just have to accept that.”
