Kevin Richardson walked onstage at Goldstein Auditorium to hundreds of people giving him a standing ovation on Monday evening. He had spent the day touring the Syracuse University campus and was about to engage in a panel with law experts about criminal justice reform.

“I cannot stop grinning,” Richardson said once he was seated.

Richardson told Oprah Winfrey in an interview released in June that he’d dreamed of playing the trumpet in SU’s marching band before he and four other boys were wrongfully convicted for the 1989 rape of a jogger in Central Park. At SU three decades later, he talked about his healing process and discussed justice in the United States.

Candice Carnage, an SU alumna and chief operating officer of The Bronx Defenders, and Paula Johnson, a professor in the College of Law, joined Richardson onstage. Richardson said that, while speaking to crowds and raising awareness is therapeutic for him, his healing is ongoing.

“I still have those moments where I’m by myself and I cry,” he said. “Inside I’m still broken.”

Richardson spent more than five years in a juvenile detention facility before he and the rest of the Central Park Five — Korey Wise, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana and Yusef Salaam — were exonerated in 2002 when the real perpetrator admitted to the crime. The Emmy-nominated Netflix miniseries “When They See Us” chronicles the boys’ journey in what Richardson said was an authentic depiction. He called Ava DuVernay “an angel sent from above” for her work as director.

Richardson now works with the Innocence Project, which employs legal resources like DNA testing to exonerate those who were wrongfully incarcerated. More than 2.3 million people are currently in prison in the U.S., and hundreds of thousands of them are innocent by even a conservative estimation, Carnage said. Of those wrongfully imprisoned, 30% are convicted with false confessions, she said — just like the Central Park Five.

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Richardson said he and the other boys were kept for more than 24 hours without food and water, without counsel and without the ability to communicate to their parents. He referred to the prison system as “nothing but modern-day slavery.”

“The system is built to make you lose hope,” he said.

The panelists discussed the conversation that often happens in black and brown households around navigating interactions with law enforcement. Richardson urged parents and children alike to stay vigilant and understand their Miranda rights, something he said he wasn’t familiar enough with at the time of his arrest. He’s begun having this talk with both his 11-year-old and 20-month-old children, he said.

Richardson plans to spend more time on the SU campus in the future, especially now that there’s a scholarship in his name to help students who look like him, he said. The Kevin Richardson Fund will become part of the Our Time Has Come scholarship program at SU, the university announced at a benefit reception Sunday.

The Kevin Richardson Fund received a $25,000 contribution from an alumna and a $1,000 gift from Yamaha to date, said Rachel Vassel, assistant vice president Office of Multicultural Advancement, before the talk began. Yamaha also gifted a trumpet to Richardson.

He spent time with students in an advanced jazz combo in the College of Visual and Performing Arts on Monday. Syracuse Athletics gave him a No. 44 jersey and a tour of the Carmelo K. Anthony Basketball Center, Vassel said.

Receiving SU’s invitation made Richardson feel like he was a teenager all over again, he said, because he’d “always wanted to wear that orange.” Feeling the trumpet in his hand brought back his passion for music, he said.

“This is the beginning of a beautiful relationship with myself and Syracuse,” Richardson said. “I’m part of the SU family now.”

Published on September 10, 2019 at 12:21 am

Contact Colleen: cefergus@syr.edu | @ColleenEFergus2