“The Jogger and the Wolfpack”: An Analysis of the TRANSITIVITY Patterns in the Global Media Coverage of the 1989 Central Park Five Case

Abstract

Common causes of wrongful conviction include eyewitness misidentification, improper forensics, or false confessions (Garrett in Convicting the innocent: where criminal prosecutions go wrong, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2011; Innocence Canada, https://www.innocencecanada.com/causes-of-wrongful-convictions/); whilst none of these factors are in question in this paper, the notion put forward is that a more implicit factor is also at play; that is, the newspaper coverage of a criminal case during the lead up to trial. According to Felton Rosulek (Text Talk 28:529–550, 2008), “[…] linguistic choices conspire together […] and create a specific interpretation of reality”. Thus, this paper explores how the accused and the (alleged) criminal events pertaining to a high-profile case of the 1980s in New York are discursively framed in a range of press coverage across the USA and further afield.