NEW YORK — While Donald Trump criticized the Guilty verdict During his secret trial this week, he was inside a Manhattan courtroom that was the scene of one of the most egregious examples of injustice in recent New York history. And he had a part in it.
It is the same court where five young black and Latino men were present wrongfully convicted 34 years ago, in the beating and rape of a white jogger. The former president famously took out a newspaper ad in New York City after the 1989 attack, calling for the execution of those accused in a case that stirred racial tensions locally and that many point to as evidence of a biased criminal justice system. against the defendants. by heart.
But on Friday, a day after making history as the first US president convicted of serious crimes in court, Trump exploded the same criminal justice system as corrupt and manipulated against him.
“This is a sham,” he said of the case brought by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, led by Alvin Bragg, the first black man in the position, and overseen by Judge Juan Merchan, who is of Colombian descent.
“This is a fraudulent trial. It shouldn’t be in that location. We shouldn’t have had this judge,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said Friday at Trump Tower in Manhattan.
Some black Americans found irony in Trump protesting the injustice of his own conviction, in a court where five black and Latino teenagers were wrongfully convicted in a case that Trump so vehemently supported. The Central Park Five case was Trump’s first foray into a tough-on-crime policy that preluded his populist political persona. For many, Trump employed dog whistles and also openly racist rhetoric in both chapters of his public life.
But lately, in his outreach to black and Hispanic communities, Trump has adopted the language of criminal justice reform advocates. He says black Americans and Latinos can identify with him because prosecutors are committed to catching him, just as they have been searching for many men and boys in their communities.
“Donald Trump’s conviction will be a problem for a lot of black people because, guess what, a lot of black people don’t like people who violate our criminal laws,” said Maya Wiley, a New York civil rights lawyer and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. .
“Black people are disproportionately victims of crime. It’s not that they just side with people who have been convicted of a crime.”
Wiley, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York in 2021, said the city’s Black and Hispanic residents also remember Trump’s comments about the Central Park joggers case.
“They have not forgotten the fact that Donald Trump took out a full-page ad suggesting the death penalty for the Central Park Five, who were exonerated and were victims of an abusive system,” Wiley said.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, an advocate of five men exoneratedcalled Trump’s conviction a symbolic measure of justice for them.
“This is the same building that Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise walked through, day after day, as they faced a mock trial for a crime they did not commit,” Sharpton said shortly after the verdict was read.
“Now the shoe is on the other foot. Donald Trump is the criminal and these five men are exonerated,” he said.
Salaam, who won a seat on the New York City Council Last year, he said he didn’t like the former president’s guilty verdict “even though Donald Trump wanted me executed even when it was proven that I was innocent.”
Salaam and the other young men had their convictions overturned in 2002, after there was evidence linking another person to the crime. Trump in 2019 refused to apologize to exonerated men.
“We should be proud that today the system worked,” Salaam wrote Thursday on the social media platform X. “But we should be somber because we Americans have a former president who was found guilty of 34 separate criminal charges.” .
“We have to do better than that. Because we are better than that,” 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 know all too well.
“He didn’t have a violent arrest by police, he didn’t spend a night on Rikers Island because he couldn’t afford bail, nor did he go to jail. He could pay a battery of lawyers to represent him and he could pay for an appeal,” Dianis said.
Racial justice advocates are also using the historic moment to remind the public that Trump and his associates sought to overturn the will of voters by challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election in heavily black and Latino districts. The trial of silence was just one part of a larger narrative 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’s an attempt to steal an election or to 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 leads the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, said Trump’s criminal conviction should disqualify him from the Oval Office.
“Because basic human rights have been denied to Black Americans for less offensive crimes, any attempt to promote the nomination of Donald Trump for president would be a gross advancement of the politics of white supremacy,” he said.
Sharpton warned against exultation in the verdict.
“Instead, celebrate by voting 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.
