NEW YORK (AP) — As Donald Trump criticized the guilty verdict in his secret trial, he stood in a Manhattan courtroom, the site of one of America’s most infamous examples of injustice. The recent history of New York. And he participated in it.
It’s the same court where five young Black and Latino men were wrongfully convicted 34 years ago for beating and raping a white jogger. The former president placed an ad in a New York City newspaper after the 1989 attack, calling for the execution. of the defendants in a case that stoked racial tensions and that many see as evidence of a corrupt justice formula biased and opposed to acusados. de color.
But on Friday, a day after making history as the first U. S. president convicted of criminal offenses in court, Trump lashed out at that same criminal justice system, calling it corrupt and rigged.
“It’s a scam,” he said of the case filed with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, headed by Alvin Bragg, the first black man to hold the position, and overseen by Colombian Judge Juan Merchán.
“This is a rigged trial. We have not taken that position. We haven’t had this judge,” the potential Republican presidential nominee said Friday at Trump Tower in Manhattan.
Some black Americans found it ironic that Trump would oppose what he called the injustice of his own conviction and that it was in a courtroom that five black and Latino teenagers were wrongfully convicted in a case Trump so vehemently supported. The Central Park Five affair Trump first foray into crime-fighting politics that preceded his fierce populist political persona. For many, Trump has resorted to whistles and openly racist rhetoric in any of the chapters of his public life.
But lately, in his dealings with the Black and Hispanic communities, Trump has followed the language of criminal justice reform advocates. He says African-Americans and Latinos can identify with him because prosecutors must prosecute him as they have many men and other young men. in their communities.
“The conviction of Donald Trump is going to be a challenge for him along with a lot of other black people because, guess what, a lot of black people don’t like other people who violate our laws against criminals,” said Maya Wiley, a civilian from New York. Human rights lawyer and executive director of Leadership. Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
“Other Black people are disproportionately victims of crime. It’s not that they’re on the side of other people who have been convicted of a crime. “
Wiley, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York City in 2021, said the city’s Black and Hispanic citizens also echoed Trump’s comments about the Central Park corridors case.
“They have not forgotten the fact that Donald Trump ran a full-page ad suggesting the death penalty for the Central Park Five, who were exonerated and suffered an abusive system,” Wiley said.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, an advocate for the exonerated men, called Trump’s conviction a symbolic measure of justice for them.
“This is the same construction that Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise entered, day in and day out, as they underwent a show trial for a crime they did not commit,” Sharpton said right after the Ceremony. The verdict is read.
“Now it’s the other way around. Donald Trump is the criminal and those five men are exonerated,” he said.
Yusef 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 if Donald Trump intended to execute me, even if it proved I’m innocent. “
Salaam and the other youths had their convictions overturned in 2002 after evidence linked another user to the crime. Trump refused in 2019 to the exonerated men.
“We are proud that today the formula worked,” Salaam wrote on social media platform X on Thursday. “But we’re dark because we Americans have a former president who has been convicted on 34 separate counts of crime. “
“We have to do more than that. Because we are more than that,” he wrote.
Judith Browne Dianis, executive director of the civil rights organization Advancement Project Action Fund, said Trump has not been subjected to the kind of unfair remedy in the criminal justice formula that black and Hispanic communities are all too familiar with.
“He wasn’t violently arrested by police, he didn’t spend a night on Rikers Island because he couldn’t afford bail, he didn’t even go to jail. He could only pay a battery of lawyers to constitute him and he can pay an appeal,” Dianis said.
Racial justice advocates are also using this historic moment to remind the public that Trump and his affiliates attempted to overturn the will of the electorate by challenging the effects of the 2020 presidential election in districts with a gigantic Black and Latino majority.
The secret trial is just one component of a larger narrative around election 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 ruin an election or to overthrow our government, one thing has long been clear: Donald Trump has no compatibility to constitute American democracy,” Johnson said after Thursday’s verdict.
Johnson, who heads the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, said Trump’s criminal conviction disqualifies him from the Oval Office.
“Given that Black Americans have been denied fundamental human rights because of less egregious crimes, any breakthrough in Donald Trump’s nomination for president would be a blatant breakthrough in white supremacist politics,” he said.
Sharpton noted that he rejoiced at the verdict.
“Instead, celebrate by voting for leaders who support democracy, not those who need to end it. “