The footprints and semen didn’t match; there was no blood or mud on the defendants’ clothing; their supposed confessions were factually wrong; and one police officer testified that the wording in three of the written confessions was his own. A forensic expert testified that the hair samples were “more consistent” with Caucasian than African-American hair, but the prosecution successfully argued that this meant they were not inconsistent. Even after their exoneration, prosecutor Linda Fairstein maintained that the young men had to have been responsible for a number of other park muggings that night, but the timeline does not add up, and none of the victims of those muggings were able to conclusively identify any of the defendants.

A special "Bronx Cheer" should go out to Donald Trump, who took out a full page newspaper ad calling for the teens' execution and for NY to restore the death penalty, and former Deputy District Attorney Linda Fairstein, now a crime novelist, whose conduct in the case was specifically criticized in the dissenting opinion of Judge Vito Titone in Yusef Saalem's case. According to the author of the "When Justice is a Game" article, Judge Titone later told Newsday:

I was concerned about a criminal justice system that would tolerate the conduct of the prosecutor, Linda Fairstein, who deliberately engineered the 15-year-old's confession. . . . Fairstein wanted to make a name. She didn't care. She wasn't a human."