Canadian actor Joshua Jackson was just 10 and living in British Columbia when five teenagers, four Black, one Hispanic, were charged with raping and assaulting the white woman known as the “Central Park Jogger” in New York in April 1989.

“I don’t think I ever had a formed opinion of it at that age,” he says in a phone interview.

But that doesn’t alter his passion for telling the story now of what happened to those boys. He co-stars as the lawyer of one of the teens in Ava DuVernay’s Netflix miniseries When They See Us.

The boys’ convictions were vacated in 2002, after they had already spent years in prison, when the real rapist confessed. They were awarded $41 million (U.S.) in 2014 to settle a lawsuit against the city.

Yet, there are still people who maintain the so-called “Central Park Five” were involved in the attack, among them Donald Trump, who took out full page ads advocating for the death penalty after the five were arrested. When They See Us sets out a heartbreakingly convincing case that they were victims of an egregious miscarriage of justice by a system that concluded their mere presence in the park that night was proof of their guilt.

“Part of the reason why I think this story is so important and pertinent right now, I think we still have that same rush to judgment,” says Jackson, who plays lawyer Mickey Joseph, who defended Antron McCray, just 15 when he was arrested.

“Part of the way that judgment is formed is by media narratives. The broad public narrative was that these children, these boys, were thugs, a gang, were a wolf pack wilding out in the park. It is important to remember that didn’t happen by accident.

“It was part of a concerted effort to dehumanize these children so they could be railroaded through the system.”

American actor Blair Underwood plays Bobby Burns, lawyer for Yusef Salaam, who was also 15 at his arrest. Underwood calls what happened to the teens “a slow lynching” as opposed to today’s “swift and unjust administration of judgment against undeserving Black men and women and children,” as seen in cellphone and body cam videos of Black people assaulted and killed by police.

“It’s all in the same category of crimes against humanity,” he says.

And Jackson has a special message for Canadian viewers who might be tempted to “wag (their) fingers and say, ‘Gosh, it’s so terrible down there.’”

The injustice visited on people of colour in When They See Us “is very much what we do to the First Nations,” he says.

“It’s the robbing of a culture and the systematic injustice visited upon a culture. That is our corollary.”

On April 19, 1989, 28-year-old investment banker Trisha Meili was raped, savagely beaten and left for dead while out jogging in Central Park.

That same night, Kevin Richardson and Raymond Santana, both 14, were arrested for “unlawful assembly” for being part of a group of teens accused of harassing joggers, cyclists and others in a different part of the park. Police quickly concluded the boys had been involved in Meili’s attack.

McCray, Salaam and Korey Wise, 16, were brought in for questioning the next day.

When They See Us shows detectives using manipulation, intimidation and violence to interrogate the boys without lawyers or family members present, wearing down the frightened, tired and hungry teens during hours of questioning until they agreed to make videotaped “confessions” in the hopes they’d be allowed to go home.

There was no DNA or other physical evidence tying the boys to the attack, nor any eyewitnesses, but they were convicted in two separate trials thanks to those confessions, despite discrepancies in the accounts and the fact they had recanted. They served six to 14 years behind bars (in adult prisons in Wise’s case) before serial rapist Matias Reyes confessed.

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I tell Jackson, Underwood and fellow American actor Christopher Jackson, who plays Raymond’s lawyer, that I watched the series’ courtroom scenes feeling the teens would have to be exonerated based on the lack of evidence, despite knowing the outcome of the case.

“You just described our experience shooting it,” says Christopher Jackson.

“I would imagine it’s the same (experience) that the viewer has,” feeling “shock, frustration, astonishment” and also “impotence we couldn’t change what we knew was coming.”

“One of the things I want people to come away knowing is that this kind of thing happens all the time,” adds Underwood.

“A lot of Black and brown people who see this project, they know what to expect. They’re gonna get railroaded. When people survive it and come out the other end, it’s something to celebrate.”

The Central Park Five did indeed come out the other end.

We see the real men’s faces at the end of the miniseries, just before the credits roll.

Four of the five are fathers now. Santana founded a clothing company and Salaam is an author and public speaker. Wise, the only one of the five to remain in New York, started the Korey Wise Innocence Project, which provides free legal counsel to people who are wrongfully convicted.

Joshua Jackson had a chance to meet the men while making When They See Us “and shared this very intense experience of reading through the first two scripts in front of them. We were recreating the end of their childhoods, the worst experience of any of their lives.”

Afterwards, he and other actors at the read-through asked them questions.

“I was amazed at their grace in the situation: to invite us into their lives, to revisit that space with people who were mostly strangers, to give us access to that first-hand.

“We did the best we could to honour their story.”

When They See Us debuts May 31 on Netflix.