By Reasla Teague
From – https://defendernetwork.com/
Reprinted – by Texas Metro News
Donald Trump is facing accusations of hypocrisy after railing against the criminal justice system that convicted him, given his controversial history with the notorious Central Park Five case.
The Manhattan courthouse where Trump was found guilty is the same venue where five Black and Latino teenagers were wrongfully convicted of assaulting a white jogger in 1989.
At the time, Trump took out full-page ads calling for the youth to receive the death penalty, inflaming racial tensions. His rhetoric exemplified the tough-on-crime posturing that foreshadowed his populist political brand accused of deploying racial dog whistles.
Yet this week, Trump decried his own conviction as a “rigged” “scam” overseen by a Black prosecutor and Hispanic judge, echoing language often used by criminal justice reform advocates for minority defendants. Some Black leaders found glaring contradictions in Trump’s stance.
“Black people haven’t forgotten that Donald Trump took out a full-page ad suggesting the death penalty for the Central Park Five, who were exonerated victims of an abusive system,” said Maya Wiley, a civil rights attorney.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, an advocate for the five exonerated men, called 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 all passed into, day after day, as they endured a show trial for a crime they did not commit,” Sharpton said just after the verdict was read.
“Now the shoe is on the other foot. Donald Trump is the criminal, and those five men are exonerated,” he said.
Yusef Salaam, one of the five who won a City Council seat, said he took no pleasure in Trump’s verdict despite the former president wrongly seeking his execution.
“We should be proud that today the system worked,” Salaam wrote Thursday on the social media platform X. “But we should be somber that we Americans have an ex-President who has been found guilty on 34 separate felony charges.”
“We have to do better than this. Because we are better than this,” he wrote.
Critics argue Trump has avoided the systemic bias plaguing many Black defendants, able to afford top lawyers and avoid jail. His appeal to minority voters by co-opting reform rhetoric is viewed by some as an insincere ploy continuing his pattern of inflaming racial divides.
This report has information obtained from The Associated Press
