Nearly 20 years since I went to prison for second-degree murder, I’ve been revisiting how the media covered my case. Recently, the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision partnered with JPay and offered every prisoner a free tablet. A friend of mine sent me a documentary Newsweek did about my case in 2015 in 60 separate 30-second videograms. I sat frozen, watching the documentary in Fishkill Correctional Facility for the first time.
It was February 25, 2020 when I first saw it. I was torn between shame and fear for my 19-year-old self—both emotions attacking my senses at the same time. I felt transported back to the ’90s when I was on the run from the law, my face on the cover of every newspaper I passed. “WANTED” was the lone word beneath my teenage mugshot. I found picking one up to read irresistible. Wouldn’t you? Little did I know I would be consuming media about the worst thing I’ve ever done for more than a quarter century thereafter. Since then, I’ve always felt like I was a paragraph or two behind in my own life.
Back in the summer of 1997, I watched Kevlar-covered cops come for me with their guns on cock. Brooklyn was on fire because I made it hot. Sweat dripped over and off my eyelids as I watched the police hunt me down in real time with real bullets.
On May 30, 1997, I participated in a robbery with two other men that resulted in the murder of Jonathan Levin. He was my former 9th grade English teacher. I’m ashamed of my actions and sincerely sorry for what I did. It took me over a decade to face the fact that I had destroyed and hurt so many people.
Perhaps I would have arrived here a lot sooner if truth and restorative justice was a priority for the media. It wasn’t. Selling papers based on a racist superpredator narrative took precedence.
The media systemically portrays young Black men as superpredators, irrespective of guilt or innocence. This framework was really prevalent in the 90s, the first full decade following Joe Biden’s big crime bill. In my case, there was never a question about my involvement—from the beginning it was clear that I was guilty of a crime. Still, the media boxed me in, and society tried to crush me while I was in that box. It’s how the media socially constructs and shapes society’s views about young Black men from urban neighborhoods and in the criminal justice system.
This is how they made me.
The Media Marketed Me To Society As an Urban Monster
There was a murder every 29 minutes in America in 1997, according to FBI statistics. That’s 48 people dead every day for a year. On May 30, 1997, Jonathan Levin was one of them. The media had a right and an obligation to report his murder to society. They did. Unfortunately, they didn’t bother to spill much ink, if any, on the other 47 people murdered that day.
Levin’s death was highly publicized, perhaps because it happened less than a decade after the Central Park Jogger Case. Or maybe because Levin’s father was the CEO of Time Warner Inc, a cable media conglomerate.
The New York City Police Department formed a posse and then went on a manhunt for a Black teenager from the hood, searching in a dozen buildings across Bedford-Stuyvesant and northern Brooklyn. The nightly TV news coverage provided cinematic-like footage of Kevlar-covered figures with long guns hunting me down.
Back then it felt strange running from the police while watching myself do it only minutes after the fact. During their “teenhunt,” not once did I get the sense I would be apprehended and brought to justice alive.
NYPD Commissioner Howard Safir held a press conference where he said, “I can assure you that Corey Arthur is the most wanted man in New York City.” There was an $11,000 reward for information leading to my arrest and conviction. Safir had given law enforcement permission to squeeze on me. The code speak used by officials involved in the case signaled to the public that these were their intentions. “Noose is tightening,” a senior official told the New York Daily News about the hunt. They wanted me dead.
I’d been arrested by the 81st precinct on at least three prior occasions. Each time I was brought out through the back door to be transported to Central Booking. Everyone who gets knocked goes through the back.
They spat their questions at me in a fully automatic fashion with plenty of spittle to smack me in the face while doing it.
This is how they made me.
The perp walk was an issue at trial. My lawyers asked detectives why they deviated from standard protocol. According to court transcripts, Detective Hugh answered, “We took him out the back, so the Press could do what they had to do.” That’s courtroom code speak for “Fuck that nigga. We pushed him out there and let them get their shit off.”
The media was an influential conduit between the masses and the incident. It’s a part of social lynching. It’s the killing of a person’s humanity, while they’re still inside the human body.
Society has been mass socialized to assume that the media is trustworthy and reliable. This assumption is based on the premise that professional journalists are ethical and trustworthy. This is part true, but mostly bullshit. The journalists at my perp walk were supposed to be there to get the truth. Instead, they formed a posse and pushed a false narrative. By all accounts they came to give New York City a new nigga to lynch.
Mayor Rudy Giuliani said that “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of detectives were involved in this investigation” of me. On June 9, 1997, Robert D. McFadden of the New York Times reported what may explain such dispositional use of law enforcement. My lawyers appealed to the public “for tolerance in a case that has raised feelings of outrage in a city where crime has dropped precipitously in recent years and where capital crimes involving people with prominent connections are rare.”
Levin was white and came from privilege and a well-connected family. As the state prepared for trial, the New York Times reported that Manhattan’s District Attorney Morganthau knew Levin’s dad personally through charity work, and that conversations between Morganthau and the Levin family should “be kept private.”
I imagined they discussed the death penalty though. Then-Governor George Pataki wanted the ultimate punishment for me.
“I would supersede any district attorney,” he said, referring to any signaling that Morgenthau might not smoke me. He didn’t, after all. Instead, he set his sights on slumping me slowly in a cell. Thereby effectively showing and not telling Governor Pataki he should go fuck himself.
The streets had something to say about it, too. “Let him die in jail or let him come out as a better person. Two wrongs do not make it a right. That’s not what Levin was about,” Levon Walker said about me to the New York Times. Levon was an 11th grader at the time who knew both Jonathan Levin and me.
Gossip Grew into Headlines to Ensure a Guilty Verdict
A year later, in October 1998, the jury had been selected and my trial started. Since there would be no physical lynching, the entertainment media did the next best thing and said, “fuck the fallout with Jonathan’s media mogul father and the courts.” They socially slaughtered my humanity. Then they televised it.
During the first week of my trial, “NYPD Blue,” a fictionalized police drama, aired an episode depicting me as a Black teenage superpredator. Professor John J. Dilulio Jr. created the superpredator myth that has since been debunked, but not before folks like Hillary Clinton latched onto this narrative. On October 22, 1998, Barbara Ross of the Daily News reported, “Art at least in the form of ‘NYPD Blue’ too closely imitated the ongoing real-life murder trial.” I was locked up in solitary confinement on Rikers Island during my trial, not only deprived me of my ability to sense the world outside of a cell, but also unable to view the episode.
Not even a systemically racist criminal justice system could deny the volatility of the media’s attack on me. On October 22, 1998, Laura Italian wrote in the New York Post that Assistant District Attorney Karin Dell’Antonio said the episode was “almost verbatim from this case.” This should not have been a problem if the jurors didn’t see it, but at least two alternates admitted that they had. Juror Frances Barnes said it was “too close” and “very chilling.”
My attorney did what damage control he could. “It’s just the networks pimping off a tragedy. Corey was portrayed as an animal. They don’t care about Mr. Levin’s loss of life or Corey’s rights.”
ABC issued a statement the night after the episode aired, claiming it “was not meant as a portrayal of the tragic murder of Time Warner Chief Gerald Levin’s son, Jonathan.” They insisted that they regretted the air date coinciding with the start of the trial.
A Manhattan Supreme Court Justice groaned, “Oh, no,” when she learned of my lawyer’s protest of the show, as the New York Daily News reported at the time. She added that she was disappointed about the timing.
The media sensationalism and the made-for-TV dramatization of my case sold the public a false narrative that the prosecution couldn’t prove.
“There are no ethical constraints that apply to the news media, and certainly not to the entertainment media,” she said. “They don’t have the same truth-seeking function as this court.” This of course amounted to her refusing to do a damn thing about it.
The media sensationalism and the made-for-TV dramatization of my case sold the public a false narrative that the prosecution couldn’t prove. On October 28, 1998, right before the case was given to the jury for deliberation, David Rhodes of the New York Times reported that Carlethia Weeks’ testimony “is the primary evidence presented by prosecutors linking Mr. Arthur to the firing of the fatal shot, the evidence that would be needed for a first-degree murder.” Barbara Ross and Corky Siemaszko of the Daily News reported that Weeks, a former girlfriend of mine (according to the press anyway) said, “[Arthur] told me he couldn’t believe he killed the teacher.” I never told her that.
On November 6, 1998, David Rhodes of the New York Times reported that Weeks testified in court that “she talks to herself and argues with voices.” She also admitted that she has an extensive mental health history of hearing voices. The jury ultimately found her testimony not to be credible.
The press made several other attempts to galvanize me as a monster to the world during the remainder of my trial. On November 11, 1998, the New York Times headline read “Jurors Convict Youth in Killing Of His Teacher.” They went on to explain that, “the jury did not convict Arthur of firing the fatal shot.” They rejected the prosecution’s argument and their star witness, who claimed I fired the fatal shot.
At the end of my trial I was found guilty of what I actually did. On November 10, 1998, I was convicted of murder in the second degree, acting in concert, and sentenced to 25 years to life. It still made me a scumbag – just not the kind the media made me out to be.
Just Because It’s in Black and White Doesn’t Make it Equitable Journalism—or Even True
I believe the media would not have screwed me over if my skin was white. I’ve seen how they’ve treated non-Black people accused of murder.
Take the case of Micheal McMorrow, a wealthy real estate broker who was disemboweled and sunk to the bottom of the lake in New York City’s Central Park. McMorrow was white and privileged and so was at least one of his killers.
However, the media’s coverage of Michael’s killers was very different from how they handled me. Daphne Addela and white-skinned Christopher Vasquez were described as “Baby Face Butchers” and the “Most famous 15 year olds in Manhattan” at the time.
Christopher Vasquez’s white skin and Daphne being the adopted daughter of millionaires influenced how they were portrayed by the media, handled by the criminal justice system, and received sympathetically by the public.
I recently had a friend Google Daphne Addela, Christopher Vasquez, and my respective cases. There were tons of news reports about Levin’s murder. The internet shows one remaining headline about Daphne Addela and Christopher Vasquez from the New York Times. “Body Mutilated to Hide Identity.” All the links to their archives were defunct.
In November of 1998, the month after my conviction, Leslie Stahl from “60 Minutes” tried a different approach. She came to prison and talked to me like a person. She made more progress in the healing process of journalism in that one interview than all of the press that covered my case combined. It was the transition into my redemption story. Then in 2015, I sat down with Newsweek journalist Alexander Nazaryan. The first words I told him were, “The buck stops here. I take full responsibility for Jonathan’s death.” He showed me what good journalism could do, what honesty could do. During that interview I had begun to live my redemption narrative.
Through good ethical reporting, the press has the power to protect the rights of the public, even those accused of murder. It also has the ability to be weaponized and hurt people. In recognition of the aforementioned possibility, we as a society must hold our journalists to a higher standard. Good journalism is written with equality, with respect for the truth. It should never be a social lynching. The truth doesn’t always set you free, but it does always heal.
