A PROSECUTOR SPEAKS UP.(about the 1989 Central Park jogger case)

The case of the Central Park jogger, a young investment banker who was raped and nearly beaten to death on April 19, 1989, stood for years as a symbol of urban predatory violence. In the days immediately after the crime, five teen-agers admitted to police that they had assaulted the woman; they later pleaded not guilty, but they were all convicted and sentenced to prison terms ranging from five to fifteen years. Then, earlier this year, a man named Matias Reyes, who was serving a long prison sentence in another rape case, came forward and said that he alone had raped the jogger. Reyes's DNA matched semen that was found on the jogger and had never been tied to any suspect. The five men convicted in the case, who have all completed their sentences, recently sued to clear their names. In many quarters, the jogger case has now become a different type of cautionary tale--a symbol of the manipulation of young suspects, the risks of false confessions, and the costs of excessive investigative zeal.

Reyes's confession provoked a round of indignant demonstrations, earnest editorials, and some soul-searching within the criminal-justice establishment.But one person who has not been heard from is Linda Fairstein, the prosecutor who led the sex-crimes unit of the Manhattan district attorney's office at the time of the jogger case. In February, Fairstein left the D.A.'s office after thirty years of service, during which she prosecuted such cases as the preppie murder, against Robert Chambers, and earned a reputation as a fierce advocate for victims. Despite her long career in government, no one ever mistook Fairstein for a dull bureaucrat. She wore flashy clothes, socialized with the city's wealthy and powerful, and developed a profitable sideline as the author of best-selling legal thrillers. Her fifth novel will be published in January.

"It's completely dishonest not to mention the context of the rest of the night of the attacks," Fairstein said last week, in her first public discussion of the new developments in the case. "There were at least four other people attacked in the Park that night. Lots of stuff going on." On the day after the assaults, Fairstein went to the Twentieth Precinct, on the Upper West Side, where detectives and her colleague Elizabeth Lederer were interrogating suspects. "I was there to be the eight-hundred-pound gorilla, to help Elizabeth and the cops get the resources they needed. It became clear as I watched and listened to these kids that a few of them knew each other, but most of them hadn't seen each other before," Fairstein recalled. They interviewed dozens of potential suspects. "Twenty to thirty of them were never charged with anything," she said.

At first, the detectives didn't have much to go on. "A kid would say something like 'a dark-skinned guy who lives on 102nd Street,' " Fairstein said. "And these detectives would go out and find him. I think it was one of the most brilliant police investigations I've ever seen." As for the interrogations themselves, Fairstein has no regrets. "We had to use special 'youth rooms,' " she said. "It was a much more friendly atmosphere, not the bare interrogation rooms. Nobody under sixteen was talked to until a parent or guardian arrived. Every kid was in an open space, no handcuffs. This was not an Alabama jail where ...