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When five Black and Latino teenagers were wrongly convicted of the rape of a jogger in New York City’s Central Park in 1989, Donald Trump bought out full-page ads in all four major New York newspapers with a headline screaming to “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY.”
“I want to hate these murderers and I always will,” Trump wrote. “I am not looking to psychoanalyze or understand them, I am looking to punish them.”
Their convictions were vacated in 2002, and the city paid $41m in 2014 to settle a civil rights lawsuit. Trump has refused to recant or apologize for those statements.
One of those teens, Yusef Salaam, now 50, spent nearly seven years in prison for his wrongful conviction. Last year, he was elected to New York’s City Council, representing Harlem.
On August 22, Salaam stood on stage at the Democratic National Convention to endorse the woman running against the man who wanted him jailed.
Salaam was joined by three of the other exonerated men from the case — Korey Wise, Raymond Santana and Kevin Richardson — to support Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz.
“Forty-five wanted us unalive,” said Salaam, noting Trump’s nickname as the 45th president.
“He wanted us dead,” Salaam said. “Today, we are exonerated because the actual perpetrator confessed, and DNA proved it. … He dismisses the scientific evidence rather than admit he was wrong. He has never changed, and he never will.”
Their story has been the subject of a Ken Burns documentary and the acclaimed series When They See Us by Ava DuVernay, exploring a broken judicial system and the fog of racism and hate that Trump exploited.
“That man thinks that hate is the animating force in America. It is not,” Salaam said. “We have the constitutional right to vote. In fact, it is a human right. Let’s use it.”
Civil rights activist Al Sharpton, who advocated for the men in the 1980s, introduced them to the stage.
“I see a candidate who has sought to reform and uphold the law, and a man who wrongly assumes his mug shot appeals to Black Americans,” he said.
Wise spent the longest time in prison among the five of them. He was jailed for 13 years. The men spent a combined 41 years in prison among them.
Trump “called us animals,” Wise said. “He spent $85,000 on a full-page ad in The New York Times calling for our execution.”
Harris has “consistently committed to making government work for those of us who have been at a disadvantage,” Sharpton said.
Trump, meanwhile, has been “making himself richer and sowing division.”
