As a candidate, Bill de Blasio declared that the city has a “moral obligation” to settle with the Central Park Five, and he stuck to that argument in his first comments on what’s reported to be a $40 million settlement with the wrongfully convicted men. “An injustice was done and we have a moral obligation to respond to that injustice,” the mayor said after an unrelated press conference on Monday, adding, “And I think the moral issue is quite clear and obviously was made clear by the court decisions in recent years.” It appears the mayor got a little tripped up when alluding to the legal issues involved. There has been only one court ruling in the case — to vacate the men’s convictions — and as the Bloomberg administration argued for a decade, no court ever found that there was police misconduct. Regardless, de Blasio said it’s time to “do something fair for them” and “for the whole city to turn the page and move forward.”
