Boston mayor apologizes to Black men wrongly linked to notorious 1989 murder

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu on Wednesday issued a formal apology on behalf of the city to two Black men wrongly accused of the 1989 murder of a pregnant white woman, a high-profile case that deepened rifts between the police force and the Black community.
Declaring the apology “just the beginning of a much longer journey of accountability and action,” Wu presented physical copies of the apology at a press conference to Alan Swanson, one of the two men, and relatives of the other man, Willie Bennett, who was not present.
“To every Black resident, I am sorry not only for the abuse our city enacted, but for the beliefs and the bias that brought them to bear in the first place,” said Wu.
Several U.S. cities in recent years have confronted past wrongs their criminal justice systems inflicted on residents of color. New York City in 2014 settled a $41 million lawsuit with the Central Park Five, a group of Black and Latino teenagers wrongly convicted of raping a white woman jogger in 1989.