During that time, she oversaw the prosecution of the Central Park Five case, wherein five teenagers, four African-American and one Hispanic, were wrongfully convicted for the 1989 rape and assault in Central Park of a white female jogger. All five convictions were vacated in 2002 after Matias Reyes, a convicted serial rapist and murderer, confessed to having been the sole perpetrator of the crime, and DNA testing showed he was the sole contributor of the DNA of the semen on the victim. After Reyes's confession in 2002, Fairstein still maintained that the wrongfully convicted teenage boys were guilty and she lauded the police investigation as "brilliant". In 2018, she insisted that the teenagers' confessions had not been coerced.