NEW YORK (AP) — As Donald Trump denounced the guilty verdict of his hush money trial this week, he stood in a Manhattan courthouse that was the site of one of the most infamous examples of injustice in recent New York history. And he had a part in that.
It’s the same courthouse where five black and Latino youths were wrongly convicted of beating and raping a white female jogger 34 years ago. The former president famously took out a newspaper advertisement in New York City in the aftermath of the 1989 attack, calling for the execution of the suspects in a case that sparked racial tensions locally and is cited by many as evidence of a criminal justice system that is biased against suspects. of color.
But on Friday, a day after making history as the first US president to be convicted of a crime in court, Trump branded that same criminal justice system as corrupt and defrauded.
“This is a scam,” he said of the case brought by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office under Alvin Bragg, the first Black person in the role, and overseen by Judge Juan Merchan, who is of Colombian descent.
“This is a rigged process. It shouldn’t have been in that location. We shouldn’t have had that judge,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said Friday from Trump Tower in Manhattan.
Some Black Americans found it ironic that Trump railed against the injustice of his own conviction, in a courthouse where five Black and Latino teenagers were wrongfully convicted in a case that Trump so vociferously supported. The Central Park Five case was Trump’s first attempt at a tough-on-crime approach, which foreshadowed his full-throated populist political persona. For many, Trump used both dog whistles and openly racist rhetoric in both chapters of his public life.
But lately, Trump has adopted the language of criminal justice reform advocates in his outreach to Black and Latinx communities. He claims that black Americans and Latinos can identify with him because prosecutors are out to get him, just as they are out to get many men and boys in their communities.
“Donald Trump’s conviction is going to be a problem for him for a lot of black people because guess what, a lot of black people don’t like people who break our criminal laws,” he said. Maya Wileya New York civil rights attorney and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
“Black people are disproportionately victims of crime. It’s not like they’re just siding with people convicted of a crime.”
Wiley, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York City in 2021, said the city’s Black and Hispanic residents also remember Trump’s comments about the Central Park jogger case.
“They have not forgotten the fact that Donald Trump took out a full-page ad proposing the death penalty for the Central Park Five, who were acquitted and became victims of an abusive system,” Wiley said.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, an advocate for the five acquitted men, called Trump’s conviction a symbolic measure of justice for them.
‘This is the same building where Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef SalaamRaymond Santana and Korey Wise all found themselves on trial day after day, enduring a show trial for a crime they did not commit,” Sharpton said moments after the verdict was read.
“Now the shoe is on the other foot. Donald Trump is the criminal, and those five men have been acquitted,” he said.
Salaam, who won a seat on the New York City Council last year, said he was unhappy with the former president’s guilty verdict “even though Donald Trump wanted me executed even though I was proven innocent.”
The convictions of Salaam and the other young men were overturned in 2002 after evidence linked another person to the crime. Trump refused to apologize to the acquitted men in 2019.
“We should be proud that the system worked today,” Salaam wrote on the social media platform
“We have to do better than this. Because we are better than this,” he wrote.
Judith Browne Dianis, executive director of the civil rights group Advancement Project Action Fund, said Trump has not been subjected to the kind of unfair treatment in the criminal justice system that Black and Hispanic communities are all too familiar with.
“He wasn’t violently arrested by the police, he didn’t spend a night at Rikers Island because he couldn’t afford bail, he didn’t even go to jail. He could pay a battery of lawyers to represent him and he could afford an appeal,” Dianis said.
Racial justice advocates are also using this historic moment to remind the public that Trump and his associates attempted to overturn the will of voters by challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election in heavily Black and Latino districts. The hush money lawsuit was just part of a broader story around electoral justice, said Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, who called the verdict against Trump “a monumental step toward justice for the American people.”
“Whether it is an attempt to steal an election or overthrow our government, one thing has long been clear: Donald Trump is unfit to represent American democracy,” Johnson said after the verdict was heard on Thursday.
Johnson, who heads the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, said Trump’s criminal conviction should disqualify him from the Oval Office.
“Given that Black Americans have been denied basic human rights for less objectionable crimes, any attempt to advance the nomination of Donald Trump for president would be a gross advance in white supremacist policies,” he said.
Sharpton warned against gloating about the verdict.
“Instead, celebrate by casting votes for leaders who will protect democracy – not those who want to kill it.”
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Brown reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Anthony Izaguirre in Albany, New York, contributed to this report.
