During the presidential debate on Tuesday, Donald Trump appeared to defend his decades-old calls for the reinstatement of the death penalty after five Black and Latino teenagers known as the Central Park Five were wrongfully convicted of rape in New York.
When moderators asked the former president and Kamala Harris to speak on the topic of race in America, Trump struggled to account for his previous remarks questioning Harris’s racial identity – and to deal with his fraught history on the subject.
“I don’t care what she is. I don’t care,” Trump said. “You make a big deal out of something, I couldn’t care less, whatever she wants to be is OK with me.”
In her response, Harris called it “a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has consistently, over the course of his career, attempted to use race to divide the American people”, and reminded viewers that Trump had called for the reinstatement of the death penalty after five young men of color were wrongfully convicted of raping a woman in 1989.
Harris was referring to an ad that Trump purchased in the New York Times in the wake of a brutal assault on a woman in Central Park, calling on the state of New York to “Bring Back the Death Penalty”. The police pulled five Black and Latino teenagers from the park and interrogated them, prompting confessions they later said had been extracted under duress.
Then, in 2002, a convicted serial rapist named Matias Reyes confessed from prison to the crime, and a DNA test confirmed that he had been the perpetrator.
Still, on the debate stage more than two decades after the exoneration of the teenagers, Trump dug in.
“They pled guilty,” said Trump, who also claimed that Mike Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, “agreed” with him on the topic. “They killed a person, ultimately,” said Trump.
The five boys were tried as adults and actually pleaded not guilty. And the victim, Trisha Meili, although almost killed, was found unconscious in the park, survived and testified in court.
Yusef Salaam, one of the five exonerated men who is now a member of New York’s city council, watched the debate live in Philadelphia. Salaam appeared in the spin room after the debate, where he told the Washington Post in an interview: “Here we are right now, full-circle moment, being able to be participants in this great democracy on the cusp of everything really powerfully supporting Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I’m ready for it.”
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