Syracuse University announced Friday that Kevin Richardson of the “Exonerated Five” will make history as the first recipient of an honorary Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.
Students petitioned for Richardson to receive the honor last year after he made an appearance on campus to announce a scholarship that had been made in his honor, according to the student-led paper The Daily Orange.
SU Chancellor Kent Syverud announced the historic honor in a virtual ceremony celebrating the school’s Black and Latinx alumni. Though most honorary degrees are typically bestowed as doctorates, Richardson asked to be honored with a bachelor of fine arts, which is the degree he said he would have pursued at Syracuse.
“Syracuse University has never before in its 150 years awarded an undergraduate honorary degree,” Syverud said. “I can’t think of anyone who is more deserving of this unique honor.”
Kevin Richardson, a member of the Exonerated Five, will be the recipient of the first honorary undergraduate degree in university history. Richardson is receiving an Honorary Bachelor of Fine Arts in music. pic.twitter.com/F0I2wQZRiO
— Syracuse University (@SyracuseU) October 17, 2020
Before the arrest that changed his life, Richardson was a promising trumpet player and dreamed of training at Syracuse’s prestigious music program and joining its basketball team, the Washington Post reports.
Richardson was among a group of five Black and Latinx New York teens wrongfully accused and later convicted of sexual assault in 1989. The story of the group of teen boys, labeled the “Central Park 5,” was portrayed in Ava DuVernay’s 2019 Emmy-winning Netflix series, When They See Us.
In April 1989, a 28-year-old white jogger was attacked, raped and left unconscious in New York’s Central Park. When she recovered, she had no memory of the attack, but police focused its investigation on the “Central Park 5,” who were being questioned for another incident that transpired the night of the woman’s attack, the BBC reports.
After police intimidation tactics that deprived the boys of water and food, the group of teens confessed to being involved in the attacks. At 14, Richardson was tried as a juvenile and convicted of several charges that included attempted murder, rape, and robbery.
In 2002, convicted murderer and rapist, Matias Reyes admitted that he carried out the attack on the 28-year-old jogger by himself. Days prior to the assault, Reyes committed another rape near Central Park and that victim linked his description to the now historic crime. Despite police databases containing Reyes' name, they failed to connect him to the attack of the Central Park jogger.
On December 19, 2002, the convictions of the five boys, who had become men, were overturned. According to The Innocence Project, Richardson ultimately served five and a half years of his mandated sentence.
In 2014, the group received a settlement from a lawsuit against the New York City in the amount of $40 million, per Newsweek.
At Syracuse’s scholarship presentation last year, Richardson said the life he’s living now is possible because he put the anguish of being falsely accused behind him.
“It means everything to me,” Richardson told the Washington Post. “It makes everything that I went through as a teenager up until now — it makes it worth it.”
Since the exoneration, the “Central Park 5” has gone on to bigger and better things, including a new moniker as the “Exonerated Five.”
According to People Magazine, many of the men now make speaking engagements and work with the Innocence Project, an organization that works to exonerate wrongly convicted people with DNA testing and policy reform. In 2016, Yusef Salaam, who was also 14 when the boys were falsely accused, received a lifetime achievement award from President Barack Obama.
