One of ‘Central Park Five’ to speak Friday in North Las Vegas

Raymond Santana Jr., one of the “Central Park Five” who spent five years in prison for a violent crime he did not commit, will be in Las Vegas on Friday night to speak at the College of Southern Nevada.

Santana is set to speak from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Nicholas J. Horn Theatre at CSN’s North Las Vegas campus, 3200 E. Cheyenne Ave., according to a release. It is free and open to the public.

Santana and four other teens were wrongly sentenced to prison in a 1989 rape which occurred in Central Park in New York City. Their convictions were overturned in 2002, when an imprisoned man confessed to raping the woman.

The convictions and exonerations were the subject of a recent Netflix series “When They See Us.”

Since his exoneration, Santana has become an advocate for criminal justice reform. His speech will be a part of CSN’s Den Talks speaker series, the release said.

“Santana is a powerful speaker and I applaud our student government for encouraging dialogue on a topic as important as the treatment of minorities in our criminal justice system,” CSN President Federico Zaragoza said in the release.

Contact Dalton LaFerney at dlaferney@reviewjournal.com or at 702-383-0288. Follow @daltonlaferney on Twitter.