True Crime Television as ‘Popular Legality’: Affect,Testimonial Injustice,and the Criminal (In)Justice System in Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us 1

Abstract

This article examines the Netflix true crime series When They See Us (2019) as a form of “popular legality” (Olson 2022). I argue that the show criticizes structural racism in the US criminal justice system and emphasizes this critique on a level of affect. More precisely, it is through an affective engagement of the audience with the show’s protagonists that When They See Us highlights how Black and Latinx communities are discriminated by US law and the criminal justice system. It thereby not only depicts African American and Latinx legal identities as marginalized by the law and legal system, but makes viewers able to feel them to be so. In addition, I argue that the show negotiates issues of testimonial injustice as one form of discrimination against People of Color in the US legal system. This negotiation of testimonial injustice also primarily takes place on a level of affect by inviting the audience to feel the effects that testimonial injustice has on the show’s protagonists.

In this article, I examine the 2019 Netflix limited series When They See Us (WTSU) as a form of “popular legality,” which Greta Olson defines as expressions of the law in popular and mass media. Olson argues that “[t]he specific cultural images of law that are deployed in popular media texts allow people to imagine their legal identities and to interact with more or less dominant narratives about what law is and how it functions.” ² Shifting our focus to the concept of legality when examining representations of the law thus allows us to understand “people’s situated and affective relationships to their legal environment.” ³ In addition, as instances of popular legality, popular TV/streaming shows contribute to how a broader audience feels about the law and legal system by negotiating complex “[c]ultural-legal issues” ⁴ through the medium of audiovisual narrative. This article is thus situated in a body of scholarship that examines how the law is negotiated in popular culture and specifically television/streaming shows. ⁵

WTSU tells the stories of Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam, and Korey Wise, ⁶ who were wrongly convicted for assaulting and raping jogger Trisha Meili in Central Park, NYC, in 1989. In 2002, their wrongful convictions were vacated after the actual perpetrator, Matias Reyes, confessed to the crime and DNA analysis confirmed his story. ⁷ The show uses this true crime case from the late 1980s to criticize contemporary police violence and structural racism in the criminal justice system. To adequately analyze the cultural work of WTSU the show must thus be situated in the Black Lives Matter movement and in what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor recognizes as “the shifting discourse about crime, policing, and race.” ⁸ Indeed, the show dramatizes a continuance of discrimination of Black and Latinx individuals before and by the law since the 1980s.

Through this focus of continuing discrimination, WTSU depicts African American and Latinx legal identities as standing in opposition to the law as it is and criticizes the law and criminal justice system as being racially prejudiced. In fact, in an interview in “When They See Us (Injustice Featurette)” published in the “Trailers and More” section on Netflix, Salaam talks about what he calls the “Criminal System of Injustice.” He argues that there are two criminal justice systems in existence in the US: One system of white privilege that signals the rule of law and in which there are fair trials and a proper defense for everyone, and one system in which Blackness is immediately associated with guilt and in which People of Color have to prove their innocence rather than their guilt. ⁹ Against the background of a growing awareness and demands for accountability for deadly police violence against Black men and women, the show thus dramatizes a publicly less visible form of police brutality, which happens behind closed doors in interrogation rooms in the form of coercive questioning, resulting in the extraction of false testimonies. According to Taylor, “[p]olice brutality [against Black communities] has been a consistent badge of inferiority and second-class citizenship.” She argues that “[w]hen the police enforce the law inconsistently and become the agents of lawlessness and disorder, it serves as a tangible reminder of the incompleteness of formal equality.” ¹⁰ WTSU reflects on and contributes to this debate by dramatizing that—to quote Salaam—even though “[t]he criminal justice system says that you’re innocent until proven guilty[,. . .] if you’re black or brown, you are guilty and have to prove yourself innocent.” ¹¹

This racist default assumption of guilt, People of Color are confronted with in the criminal justice system, becomes most obvious in the show’s affective engagement with “epistemic injustice”—particularly “testimonial injustice.” Miranda Fricker defines epistemic injustice as a form of injustice someone experiences “in their capacity as a knower.” ¹² She distinguishes between “testimonial” and “hermeneutical injustice” as two distinctive forms of epistemic injustice. Testimonial injustice affects what Fricker identifies as one “of our most basic everyday epistemic practices: conveying knowledge to others by telling them[. . .].” ¹³ More specifically, Fricker argues that testimonial injustice occurs when a speaker receives less credibility than they deserve because the hearer is prejudiced against them. ¹⁴ A hearer may, for example, doubt or disbelief a speaker because of sexist or racist prejudices against them. Furthermore, testimonial injustice is a systematic form of injustice that is produced by what Fricker calls “tracker prejudice[s]”—prejudices that “render[. . .] one susceptible not only to testimonial injustice but to a gamut of different injustices.” Testimonial injustice that is produced by these tracker prejudices is thus “systematically connected with other kinds of actual or potential injustice.” ¹⁵ In WTSU, testimonial injustice is produced by prejudices based on race and class and is therefore systematically connected to racial as well as class-based injustice.

Therefore, I argue that WTSU dramatizes how the law discriminates against People of Color by putting emphasis on this issue of epistemic injustice and its connection to structural racism, police brutality, and the law. Until now, epistemic injustice has primarily been conceptualized and researched by (feminist) philosophers ¹⁶ but has received only little attention from literary or cultural studies scholars, even though “narrative fiction has the capacity to adapt and transform the social imagination, thereby mitigating epistemic injustice.” ¹⁷ Importantly, narrative fiction can counter stereotypes that lead to testimonial injustice in the first place ¹⁸ because it “actively and compellingly engage[s] audience members in perspective taking and in empathetic and emotional engagement with characters’ social identities.” ¹⁹ This affective engagement with the protagonists’ experiences is crucial in WTSU. In fact, it is primarily through this affective engagement that the show negotiates issues of testimonial injustice. Notably, the show never mentions the term “testimonial injustice.” Instead, it invites the audience to feel the testimonial injustice Kevin, Antron, Yusef, Raymond, and Korey are experiencing on a level of emotional engagement.

What is more, this felt experience of testimonial injustice the audience shares with the protagonists is also an essential component in the show’s construction of African American and Latinx legal identities. Following Olson’s call that literary and cultural studies scholars should “embrace the cultural work that ‘popular legality’ does in influencing attitudes about law in general, and also in contributing to specific, local cultural-legal identities,” ²⁰ I argue that the cultural work of WTSU lies in its critique of structural racism throughout the criminal justice system. Moreover, the show depicts African American and Latinx legal identities as marginalized and discriminated against by the law. The model Olson proposes for analyzing popular legality is threefold: It includes an analysis of the text’s modes of production, a formal analysis of the text itself as well as ethnography to examine how audiences engage with the material. ²¹ Accordingly, I will first examine how Netflix modes of production and distribution impacts the show’s creative and formal possibilities and will situate WTSU in Netflix’s growing true crime library. I then turn to an analysis of form and how it is used to elicit affective responses in the audience. The show purposefully employs the audience’s affective engagement with the protagonists to construct African American and Latinx legal identities and negotiate issues of testimonial injustice.

I. Netflix and its True Crime Library

As a Netflix original series, WTSU can be situated in what Amanda D. Lotz calls the “Subscriber Model of Cultural Production.” In contrast to “broadcast- and cable-distributed television,” “internet-distributed portals” like Netflix are not restricted by a linear schedule, but rather they curate a library of content, available to subscribers at all times. ²² Accordingly, internet portals “can maintain content and continue to derive value as long as it remains in their libraries” which constitutes a significant change to “previous content distribution models built upon an initial period of exclusivity and resale through multiple markets.” ²³ In addition, the cultural goods in this library are curated for a “conglomeration of taste groups.” ²⁴ This means that while “[b]roadcast and cable television has targeted younger, whiter, and more affluent audiences” to sell them to advertisers, internet portals which are funded through subscriptions “have the potential to create content for audiences that advertisers have been disinterested in reaching as long as enough like-interested viewers can be aggregated to support the costs of the portal’s programming.” ²⁵ Consequently, since the primary aim is no longer to “collect[. . .] an advertiser-desired audience,” new storytelling possibilities emerge. Portals offer creators the opportunity to “tell stories that have not been deemed as viable for that advertiser-dominated marketplace” and they free creators from a variety of formal constraints such as a specified structure or length of individual programs. ²⁶

WTSU, for example, is a limited series consisting of one season with four episodes that all vary in length. Distribution via streaming services that is not required to stick to network TV scheduling and commercial breaks allows the creators to take up as much time as they need to tell the story they want to tell. While the first episode of WTSU is 64 minutes long, the fourth and final episode runs for 88 minutes, which is almost the length of a feature film. Indeed, each episode can be described as a short feature film with a different thematic focus. While the first episode focuses on the police investigation and the interrogations of the boys, the second episode (71 minutes) is constructed like a classical court-room drama and ends with the guilty verdict. This guilty verdict is the first climax of the show. Episode three and four, then, show the aftermath and the lifelong damage done by the conviction both for the boys as well as their families and communities. Episode three (73 minutes) briefly depicts Antron’s, Kevin’s, Raymond’s, and Yusef’s times in juvenile detention and then focuses on their struggles for reintegration into society afterwards. Episode four is exclusively devoted to Korey’s experience in adult jail and ends with the second climax of the show: The realization that they were, indeed, wrongfully convicted.

Separating Korey’s experience from those of the other four boys by devoting an entire episode to him highlights the difference in their experiences. In fact, as viewers learn in episode one, Korey is not even a suspect at the beginning of the show. On the contrary, he is only at the police station because he wants to be there for his friend, Yusef. It is his loyalty to his friend that eventually leads to his arrest and prison sentence—the longest of the five. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Ava DuVernay reported that Wise said the following to her when she first approached him: “‘Ava, you can tell my story, but you need to know, right now, I feel that it’s four plus one. Because at least they were together and I was alone. I had a different experience.’” ²⁷ In order to do justice to this different experience and give Korey his own voice and visibility, Korey’s story is told separately.

This emphasis on accuracy and authenticity, which is paratextually highlighted by the show’s creators, situates WTSU in what Elizabeth Walters calls “Netflix’s prolific true crime catalog” or “Netflix’s true crime brand.” ²⁸ According to Lindsey Webb, “the magnitude of true crime visual media is at a historic high” at the moment. ²⁹ It thus comes as no surprise that Netflix has invested significantly in the true crime genre since the success of its true crime documentary Making a Murderer (2015-2018). ³⁰ Moreover, Netflix has produced several true crime “series that overtly challenged foundational elements of the criminal justice system.” ³¹ According to Walters, “Making a Murderer represents a fundamental narrative shift from traditional true crime television, shaking the viewing audience’s core ideological conceptions of the criminal justice system and its perceived parity.” In addition, shows like “The Confession Tapes (2017-) and Exhibit A (2019-) spotlight stories of those who claim their criminal convictions were obtained through flawed forensic evidence or false confessions produced by coercive police interrogations, echoing themes from Making a Murderer.” ³² This illustrates that the issues of false confessions and testimonial injustice as well as the fundamental critique of the US criminal justice system that are also relevant in WTSU can be found throughout the Netflix true crime library.

Even though the label “true crime” is more commonly applied to documentaries, WTSU as a dramatization of a real case can be situated in the genre as well. ³³ According to Jean Murley “television true crime appears in three major forms or types: the crime documentary or reenactment programs, the forensics-driven detective fiction programs, and the crime drama that makes use of real stories for plot.” ³⁴ WTSU falls into the latter category. Generally, true crime can be roughly defined as “the portrayal of real-life crimes” ³⁵ or as “narrative[s] about a criminal act, or acts, based on fact, rather than fiction,” which means that true crime narratives “routinely assert[. . .] claims to truth, attempting to establish [themselves] as accurate and authoritative.” ³⁶ WTSU fulfills these characteristics by depicting a real-life criminal case and the wrongful convictions of Salaam, Wise, Richardson, McCray, and Santana as well as the effect of those wrongful convictions on the rest of their lives.

Indeed, WTSU claims truth and authenticity in its representation of their stories by continuously making use of documentary aesthetics. ³⁷ The series’ final episode, for example, concludes with a text written on screen summarizing their cases and informing the audience about their lives today. In its closing sequence, the show thus shifts from the fictional to the documentary mode by putting the faces from the show’s characters in a sequence with the faces of the men they are portraying. First, a close-up of one of the boys from the show is shown, accompanied by short written explanations of the respective man’s life today. Then, the image from the show is superseded by a close-up of the man who was convicted and exonerated in real life as he looks directly into the camera and at the viewer.

This claim to truth and authenticity is further strengthened by promotional material accompanying the show’s publication on Netflix, specifically the talk show “Oprah Winfrey Presents: When They See Us Now.” The show starts with archival footage of the 1989 trial and Oprah Winfrey summarizing the facts of the case. She states that “[this case] is now a dramatic film series on Netflix called When They See Us.” ³⁸ Then, the original images are replaced by images from the show. During Winfrey’s summary of the original case, which takes about three minutes, the show continuously alternates between images from the 2019 Netflix series and 1980s news footage, images from the trial, and from the actual confession tapes, thereby establishing a strong link between archival material and DuVernay’s dramatization. The talk show itself is then divided into two parts. First, Winfrey interviews creator and director Ava DuVernay and the main cast of the show. Afterwards, the cast leaves (DuVernay stays) and Wise, McCray, Santana, Richardson, and Salaam enter the stage. This conversation with the actors on the one hand and the living men whose stories are told in WTSU on the other continues to strengthen the link between dramatization and reality, situating the show firmly in the true crime genre.

As indicated by the title, the purpose of the show is to provide a voice for Salaam, Wise, Richardson, Santana, and McCray. In fact, Oprah Winfrey points out that the original working title of the show was “Central Park Five,” but DuVernay insisted on changing it because “‘Central Park Five’ felt like something that had been put upon the real men by the press, by the prosecutor, by the police. It took away their faces. It took away their families. [. . .] It dehumanized them.” ³⁹ Changing the title thus also signifies the change in perspective that the show takes. Rather than perpetuating the othering and dehumanization by assigning a group identity to the five men from the outside—exemplified by the moniker “the Central Park Five”—, “When They See Us” is spoken from the perspective of the five, who are the “us” of the title. Consequently, it is the audience that is now cast as “they,” or the other.

In addition, the title “When They See Us” also implies the unspoken phrase “When They Hear Us.” By affectively engaging with testimonial injustice, the show dramatizes all the ways in which they were not heard by the police, the prosecution, the press, or the public before. Accordingly, the show can be read as an attempt to counteract that testimonial injustice by finally providing a dramatic space for their voices and stories. Finally, Hagan argues that the title “When They See Us” also draws attention “to the white gaze” and asks the “audience to interrogate the racial assumptions of white hegemony which assigns a criminality to Blackness, assumptions activated by the mere visual cue to Black people.” ⁴⁰ It thereby denounces the devastating impact of racist prejudices about Black men presenting a threat to white womanhood by showing how these prejudices contribute to systemic oppression within the criminal justice system. Specifically, this critique of the white gaze can be seen in the portrayal of the racial biases of the police investigators, who function as representative of the criminal justice system.

Situating WTSU in the true crime genre is also significant for the show’s cultural work as an expression of popular legality. By repeatedly emphasizing the real-life experiences of Wise, Santana, McCray, Richardson, and Salaam and by claiming truthfulness in its depiction of their stories and voices, the show also claims to depict “true” legal identities. In other words, the show claims to function as a vehicle to express, spread, and make accessible the legal identities and sense of legality of the five men—and many others like them. By turning Wise, Santana, McCray, Richardson, and Salaam into exemplary cases of wrongful conviction and incarceration, the show becomes a vehicle to communicate the legal identities and sense of legality of marginalized and disadvantaged communities more generally. These legal identities correspond to a version of the US criminal justice system that is primarily experienced by People of Color who feel abandoned and discriminated against rather than protected by the law.

II. Affect, Testimonial Injustice, and the Construction of Legal Identities

According to Walters, the “primary currency of true crime” is fear. ⁴¹ Affect is thus central for the true crime genre. ⁴² WTSU also capitalizes on that currency by inviting the audience to feel the fear Antron, Kevin, Raymond, Yusef, and Korey are feeling. Indeed, Jharrel Jerome (Korey) points out that “as an audience member when you’re watching this type of show, you feel that weight, you feel that pain, you feel that anger.” ⁴³ As I will show, this affective engagement to feel the protagonists’ fear, pain, and anger is, on the one hand, achieved through montage sequences and flashbacks and, on the other hand, close-up shots of the boys’ faces. The close-up shots emphasize the boys’ emotive responses to the injustices they suffer from and thereby invite the audience to have the same response. Importantly, the show’s closing sequence in “Part Four” also uses close-ups of the faces (and sometimes tattoos) of the five men who were convicted in real life. These close-ups of the men’s faces imitate the filming technique used throughout the show to make good on the promise that when engaging affectively with the men’s stories, the audience will finally truly “see” them.

Close-up shots of faces are thus used in WTSU to induce mirror reflexes in the audience. According to Noël Carroll, “mirror reflexes are not fully articulated emotional states, but only not-quite-specific, bodily-feeling states, such as vague intimations of distress.” They refer to the act of mimicking the facial expression we see on screen to then form the appropriate emotive response. ⁴⁴ What is more, mirror reflexes help “to keep spectators in virtually continuous affective contact with the pertinent characters.” ⁴⁵ Affective reactions will never be the same for all audience members, but the series clearly works to encourage specific affective engagements through its form and content.

Two of the central affective responses encouraged by WTSU are those of sympathy and solidarity towards its protagonists. Carroll defines “sympathy as a non-fleeting care, concern, or, more broadly, a non-passing pro-attitude toward another person [. . .] include[ing] fictional characters.” However, he also points out that “[i]n order for us to feel sympathy for a fictional character, we must find the character worthy of our emotions.” This emotive response of sympathy, is often “supplemented by another emotional state—[. . .]solidarity.” ⁴⁶ According to Carroll, solidarity refers to “the complex emotive relation of sympathy-for-the-protagonists plus antipathy-for-the-antagonists.” What is more, “[t]he antagonist instills anger, indignation, hatred, and sometimes even moral disgust in us.” ⁴⁷ In WTSU, this “antipathy-for-the-antagonists” is, on the one hand, directed against individual members of the police or prison staff and, on the other hand, against the law and criminal justice system more generally of which the individual antagonists are representatives. The show achieves the development of sympathy for and solidarity with its protagonists by putting special emphasis on different forms of innocence such as childhood or legal innocence from the beginning onward while at the same time highlighting the racist and coercive practices of the police and other representatives of the criminal justice system.

The focus on the boys’ innocence is first created through the paratexts—before the audience even starts to watch the show: The plot summary refers to “five boys of color.” Similarly, all episode summaries refer to them as “boys.” ⁴⁸ Even though they are, of course, all teenagers rather than children, this focus on boyhood establishes a sense of youthful or even childhood innocence and clearly distinguishes them from adulthood. It is this childhood innocence, which, according to New York Times critic Salamishah Tillet, is restored by the show. ⁴⁹ In addition, since the show is based on the real-life experience of Salaam, Wise, McCray, Richardson, and Santana, the audience knows that their convictions were, indeed, wrongful and that they were fully exonerated in 2002.

The focus on boyhood is then picked up in “Part One” in which the protagonists are introduced as doing what most people would consider “normal” for average boys—regardless of class, gender, or ethnicity: Antron is eating with his father, talking about baseball; Kevin is walking home with his elder sister from his music lesson; Korey is on a date with his girlfriend; Raymond is out with some friends talking about a girl; Yusef is also talking to a friend and joining some other teens on their way to the park. Therefore, before viewers get to know the protagonists as suspects or defendants, they get to know them as average teenage boys enjoying themselves after school. Introducing the protagonists this way has the central function of asking the audience from the start to develop affinity towards them. According to Carroll, affiliation to a fictional character can be achieved by something as simple as having “had a similar experience,” ⁵⁰ and it is not at all far-fetched to say that most people can relate to sharing a meal with a family member, walking home from school, going out on a date, or simply spending time with friends.

Seeing them as happy and lively teenagers allows the audience to develop sympathy for them that bridges social boundaries of class, gender, or race. Therefore, this childhood innocence corresponds to what Carroll defines as the moral goodness of a character. Importantly, for “audiences that exceed regional, ethnic, national, and religious boundaries” to develop sympathy toward a fictional character, that character must be considered “worthy of our emotions” and “the most frequent solution [. . .] to this design problem is to construct protagonists” that the audience deem as “morally good.” ⁵¹ This is especially important for WTSU considering a global Netflix audience that has access to and potentially watches the show. Accordingly, the protagonists’ moral goodness is further strengthened early in “Part One” by actively distinguishing the boys from other teenagers in the park, who indeed show signs of aggression. When approaching a scene in which a few adolescents start beating a stranger in the park, both Yusef and Kevin react shocked, flinch backwards, and run away. This reaction of shock and fear is arguably one of the most common ways of reacting to outbursts of violence—and certainly one most members of the audience would recognize and relate to.

In contrast to the boys and their families, who are represented as multi-dimensional characters that deserve the audience’s sympathy, representatives of the criminal justice system are represented as one-dimensional and in a clearly negative light—especially in their use of physical violence, coercive interrogation techniques, and in their racist prejudices. This construction of a good-versus-evil narrative is important for the audience’s affective engagement with the show because it draws the audience to the side of the boys and does not leave any room for them to sympathize with any members of law enforcement or the prosecution. Indeed, the first time the audience encounters the police is through the eyes of Antron who watches as a police officer tackles Kevin and yells “Little animal, stop!” Kevin screams “Stop it! I didn’t do nothing!”, but the police officer hits him unconscious with his helmet because he is angry Kevin ran away from him. The camera cuts to Antron who is watching the scene hiding behind some bushes. His face which appears as a close-up shot is marked by horror. ⁵² This initial encounter with the police establishes law enforcement as menacing and violent towards Black teenage boys—a portrayal that continues throughout the show. In addition, this scene serves the function of asking the audience to clearly side with Kevin, Antron, and the other boys instead of the police.

Indeed, the next time we see Kevin is in the interrogation room at the police precinct as the interviewing detective tells him that “[t]he sooner you tell us what you know, the sooner you go home.” Kevin’s face again appears as a close-up shot on the screen, which allows the camera to highlight both his insecurity about being alone in the room with two detectives as well as his black eye from his encounter with the police officer the night before. In addition, the close-up shot of his face once more emphasizes his youth. When he rests his head on his hand, admitting that “[he] just got lost” in the park, the detective punches away his arm, demanding him to “Sit up.” ⁵³ Kevin’s insecurity is thus immediately met with both verbally as well as physically abusive actions by the detective. Kevin’s first reaction towards the abuse is asking for his mum, which once more strengthens the image of his childhood innocence.

Contrary to his statement that Kevin should tell him what he knows, and he can go home, the detective appears to be uninterested in what Kevin has to say. Indeed, the testimonial injustice Kevin, Yusef, Raymond, Korey, and Antron are subjected to is first highlighted by the fact that their initial testimonies about what they did in the park during the night in question are not believed by the detectives. This dismissal of their initial testimonies corresponds to Amanda Fricker’s definition of systematic testimonial injustice, which she defines as “a credibility deficit owing to identity prejudice in the hearer” ⁵⁴ —in this case the detectives’ racist prejudices. Kevin’s repeated testimony that “[he] never saw no lady,” for example, is repeatedly dismissed by them. Again, Kevin’s face is filmed as a close-up shot, highlighting his confusion and growing desperation, and the audience can hear the insecurity in the breaking and stuttering of his voice, close to tears, as he tries to answer the detectives’ questions truthfully. However, the detectives keep confronting him with fabricated testimonies by the other boys who allegedly saw him. The detectives’ voices are raised and one of them is standing, leaning over the table and over Kevin in a menacing way. ⁵⁵ Meanwhile, Kevin’s black eye serves as a constant reminder of his previous encounter with physical police violence and thus frames the interrogation scene in the context of police brutality. In fact, Raymond who is also questioned by two detectives, is actively shoved and pushed, and otherwise physically intimidated when he does not immediately corroborate their story. In contrast to Kevin, he is even tied to the chair with handcuffs subjecting him even further to the detectives’ abuse of power.

The repeated dismissal of the boys’ claims to innocence emphasizes that in the eyes of the (primarily white) police, Blackness is associated with criminality. In addition, the boys all come from low-income families. This intersection of class and race further strengthens this association. Therefore, the testimonial injustice against the boys is grounded in what Fricker identifies as “[identity] prejudices that ‘track’ the subject through different dimensions of social activity—economic, educational, professional, sexual, legal, political, religious, and so on.” ⁵⁶ In this case, these identity prejudices are connected to racist stereotypes of Black criminality ⁵⁷ and men of color being a threat to white women. Webb, for example, mentions the case of Salaam, Wise, Richardson, Santana, and McCray as an example for the continued influence of racist tropes about “Black men [. . .] destroying the tranquility and safety of white women’s lives through disruptive acts of sexual and physical violence” that have been prevalent in society for centuries. ⁵⁸ Accordingly, in the show, the possibility that the boys might be innocent is not even considered by the police. ⁵⁹

WTSU criticizes that, based on these racist prejudices, the boys are dehumanized by the investigators as well as the media. Mr. Burns, Yusef’s defense lawyer, for example, recognizes these racist identity prejudices in his opening statement when he points out that when the media “learned of the female rape victim and that the suspects were all black or Hispanic[, c]onclusions were made.” ⁶⁰ These conclusions can also be seen in the fact that lead investigator Linda Fairstein refers to the young African American and Latino men as “animals” from the start. ⁶¹ In “Part Two,” the press picks up on that language by referring to the boys as a “pack.” ⁶² It thus comes as no surprise that despite the detectives’ alleged interest in finding out the truth, their perception is guided by racial prejudice against the boys from the beginning. This racial bias leads them to dismiss the boys’ testimonies and instead fabricate their own narrative of the events.

This method of carefully crafting and fabricating the story of the rape to fit the narrative the police want finds its peak in the taping of their testimonies—which constitutes yet another form of testimonial injustice. According to Jennifer Lackey, being subjected to manipulative, deceptive or physically coercive interrogation techniques constitutes what she terms “agential testimonial injustice.” ⁶³ This agential testimonial injustice becomes especially obvious in Korey’s treatment by the police. As he is led into a room by one of the detectives, we hear district attorney Lederer’s voice in the acoustic background stating that “[she has] been informed by the detectives that [he] wish[es] to make a statement.” As the detective closes the door, we see a close-up of Korey’s scared and alarmed face. By now, the audience has learned that the fear, that marks the boys’ faces whenever they are alone with a police officer, is justified, and they thus share Korey’s fear of an outburst of police brutality. Indeed, almost immediately Korey is slapped in the face by the detective, who then wraps his hand around his neck and presses him against a wall. The close-up of Korey’s face highlights his agony and invites the audience to feel his pain and the anger about this unlawful and brutal treatment. In the next shot, Korey sits at a desk as Lederer further asks: “You wish to say something?” Again, the camera cuts to Korey being locked in a room with the detective hitting him in the face—this time from a different camera angle. ⁶⁴ This alternating between the scenes of physical police violence and the taping of the confession tape clearly presents the testimony as coerced. Korey—just as the other boys—is thus taped as allegedly credible witness even though his testimony is extracted through coercion. Their taped confessions are thus not an act of knowingly testifying to what has happened, but rather they are a passive act of repeating what the police want them to say. Presenting them as knowers in a case when they are clearly not, completely denies them any kind of epistemic agency and elicits the affective response of anger in the audience.

Finally, their false confessions receive a significant credibility excess throughout the trial, which become most evident in their resistance to counterevidence. ⁶⁵ As Lackey points out, in cases of false confessions a credibility excess can also constitute testimonial injustice—specifically in instances in which “the testimony of a confessing self is privileged over a recanting self because of prejudice.” ⁶⁶ Without any physical evidence or eyewitnesses to the crime, the boys’ testimonies on tape are the central piece of evidence during the trial and their convictions are based on those coerced testimonies. Mickey Joseph, Antron’s defense lawyer, recognizes that “[they] all know they should be interpreted as coercion and thrown out” and the central defense strategy is, indeed, to prove they have been coerced and are not truthful. Since the audience has witnessed the coercion first hand in “Part One” and thus knows that Joseph is correct, they almost feel a foolish hope that the verdict might be the right one after all and that someone will recognize the truth. However, the boys’ false confessions are resistant to counterevidence during the trial—when the DNA testing of a sock from the crime scene returns negative for all five suspects, for example, Fairstein simply assumes that “there must have been another attacker” ⁶⁷ —and the audience’s hopes are disappointed along with those of the protagonists and their families and communities.

Through the form of a montage sequence at the end of “Part Two,” the show then aims to further strengthen the audience’s growing anger against the criminal justice system. The sequence occurs when the boys await their verdict, and it represents and emphasizes the unjust loss of childhood innocence. As we see close-ups of the protagonists’ faces in the courtroom, the scene cuts to the moments before their arrest I described earlier—Raymond with his friends, Korey on a date, Yusef and Antron going to the park with friends, Kevin on his way home. This montage sequence reminds the audience of these moments of innocent youth that is now lost and abruptly ended by the guilty verdict and thereby highlights the devastating break in their lives that comes with the unwarranted arrest and wrongful incarceration: One night they are free and average teenage boys having fun, the next day they are taken into police custody and enter the criminal justice system, which most of them do not leave again until they are released from jail years later (only Yusef and Antron are able to make bail, while the other three boys remain in police custody during their trials as well). In addition, scenes from their interrogations are edited in, half of them characterized by physical police violence. This editing illustrates a trajectory of injustice starting during the police interrogation and finally eclipsing in the guilty verdict.

When the word “guilty” is read out, Kevin is depicted as having an out-of-body experience to emphasize his shock and the massive impact of this false verdict on the rest of his life. The scene thus dramatizes not only the loss of childhood innocence but also the loss of dreams and plans for the future each of the boys had. As the speaker in the court reads the charges, Kevin closes his eyes. When the word “guilty” is eventually read out, the camera cuts to a close shot of him standing in the street, raising his head in shock and disbelief. Kevin is in the focus of the camera, while the visual background is blurry, which again aims at highlighting his emotional response. The camera then cuts back to the courtroom, showing the desperate and fearful reactions of both the other boys and their family members. The courtroom scenes and Kevin’s out-of-body experience are connected through an extradiegetic sorrowful music that overshadows both the reality of the courtroom and Kevin’s imagination. In his imagination, Kevin is next seen sitting on a chair in the middle of the street, handcuffs hanging from his hand. He raises his trumpet, and the tune he plays starts to merge with the extradiegetic soundtrack. ⁶⁸

Kevin imagining playing the trumpet in this moment symbolizes that his dream of making music also ended with the false conviction. The ending of “Part Two” is thus a direct reference to the beginning of “Part One” in which Kevin excitedly tells his sister that if he keeps stepping up in his music lessons, he “could really take first chair” sometime. ⁶⁹ After Kevin starts playing the trumpet in his imagination, the camera cuts back to the courtroom and to another close-up shot in which Kevin lowers his head with closed eyes, breathing heavily, as a voice in the off repeats the words “the verdict is guilty.” ⁷⁰ These close-ups of the emotional responses of the protagonists induce mirror reflexes of exactly those emotions in the audience and thus ask them to feel their pain, desperation, and loss.

This affective emphasis on structural racism in the criminal justice system and the attempt to make the audience feel the impact of the boys’ wrongful convictions also continues in “Part Three” and “Part Four.” “Part Four” specifically attempts to not only give voice and visibility to Korey’s experience in prison, but also to make the audience feel some of his pain. By strengthening the audience’s affective relationship to him, the show also aims at strengthening its argument about the injustice of the criminal justice system on a level of affect. Indeed, a major part of the episode focuses on Korey’s inner life in the form of memory flashbacks, voice-over conversations from the interrogation and trial and imagined conversations he has with his loved ones during solitary confinement. The audience sees him fantasizing about what would have happened if he had stayed with his date the night of the crime instead of joining his friends in the park. Stuck in solitary confinement because of death threats against him, he remembers being on a date with his girlfriend—a scene the audience is already familiar with from “Part One.” This time, however, Korey imagines to say: “I’m staying here.” He whispers the words in his cell and in the next shot, his imagined-self speaks them to Yusef and to the other boys as he decides to stay on his date rather than go to the park with them. The scene alternates between his fantasy of continuing his date with his girlfriend and his imagining-self in solitary confinement. With closed eyes, his imagining-self repeats several of the words that he also speaks in his fantasy, highlighting the fact that it is all made up. ⁷¹

Eventually, fantasy and reality increasingly overlap as Korey starts to both hear his girlfriend’s voice and see her in his prison cell as well. More precisely, after she asks his imagined self to take her to Coney Island in the fantasy sequence, the camera cuts to him sitting in solitary confinement. He opens his eyes upon hearing her voice saying “Come on, Korey” and finds her standing in his cell. He takes her hand, and the cell door opens to the boardwalk at Coney Island—further merging fantasy and reality in this film sequence. The edges of the images are blurry and tinted in pink which marks it as an escapist fantasy. In addition, the color pink signifies that despite the horrors and violence Korey has endured in prison so far, he has still preserved that youthful innocence and moral goodness from before his conviction. As he is sitting on a bench with his girlfriend, the camera cuts back to his imagining-self in the prison cell. It is this imagining-self that has been convicted as a sex offender that is depicted to ask her: “Can I kiss you?” ⁷² His asking for consent for a kiss stands in stark contrast to the alleged rape he is convicted for—once more denouncing the racist prejudice evoked during the previous investigation that follows Korey through the prison system as well. The scene thus once more highlights his moral goodness to strengthen the sympathetic relationship and solidarity the audience feels towards him and emphasizes the injustice of the system that took this life from him.

III. Conclusion: Connecting the Past to the Present

WTSU turns Richardson’s, McCray’s, Salaam’s, Santana’s, and Wise’s wrongful convictions and fight for justice into an example for continued forms of systemic racism and social and legal injustice against African American and Latinx communities. Indeed, even though their case has been settled for a while by the time the show is released in 2019, the historical and cultural context of its release stands in direct relation to the historical context of the true crime case. Most prominently, the show draws a direct connection to the Trump presidency. It makes visible Donald Trump’s involvement in the case such as the fact that, in 1989, Trump published a newspaper ad for $85,000 “calling for the execution of the[. . .] teenage boys.” ⁷³ In WTSU, Deloris, Korey’s mother, first sees this ad calling for her son’s death on TV while buying groceries. In addition, Sharonne, Yusef’s mother, and her friend watch Trump claim on TV that “I think sometimes a black may think that they don’t really have the advantage or this or that, but [. . .] if I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black, because I actually believe they have an actual advantage today.” In the context of his presidency, the insertion of this footage which highlights Trump’s expressed ignorance and denial of structural racism into the shows’ diegesis criticizes the fact that through his presidency this ignorance and denial become legitimized. Furthermore, Sharonne’s friend’s reassurance that she should not worry about him because “[h]is 15 minutes almost up,” ⁷⁴ is proven wrong in the context of the show’s publication, when Trump has been in office for over two years.

In conclusion, as a form of popular legality WTSU criticizes structural racism in the US criminal justice system which finds expression most prominently in police brutality, racist prejudices, and testimonial injustice in the show. Importantly, this critique is emphasized on a level of affect by inviting the audience to feel the injustice, pain, and anger the show’s protagonists feel. Moreover, WTSU functions as a vehicle to communicate African American and Latinx legal identities as marginalized by the law or even violated by it. The show thereby encourages an affective response of anger towards the law and criminal justice system in its audience. Finally, by encouraging its audience to build solidarity with its protagonists, the show also asks its audience to build solidarity with disadvantaged and marginalized communities in general.