Donald Trump lambasted the guilty verdict of his hush money trial this week from the same Manhattan courthouse that was the site of one of the most notorious examples of injustice in recent New York history that he had a part in.

As Donald Trump lambasted the guilty verdict of his hush money trial this week, he stood inside a Manhattan courthouse that was the site of one of the most notorious 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 34 years ago in the beating and rape of a white female jogger. The former president famously took out a newspaper ad in New York City in the aftermath of the 1989 attack calling for the execution of the accused in a case that roiled racial tensions locally and that many point to as evidence of a criminal justice system prejudiced against defendants of color.

But on Friday, a day after making history as the first U.S. president convicted of felony crimes in a court of law, Trump blasted that same criminal justice system as corrupt and rigged against him.

Some Black Americans found irony in Trump railing against the injustice of his own conviction, in a courthouse where five Black and Latino teenagers were wrongly convicted in a case Trump supported so vociferously. The Central Park Five case was Trump’s first foray into tough-on-crime politics that preluded his full-throated populist political persona. To many, Trump employed dog whistles as well as overtly racist rhetoric in both chapters of his public life.

  • QuarterSwede@lemmy.world
    57·
    1 month ago

    Salaam, who won a seat on the New York City Council last year, said he didn’t take pleasure in 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 vacated in 2002 after evidence linked another person to the crime. Trump in 2019 refused to apologize to the 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 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.

    He’s a better man than I.

    • Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world
      25·
      1 month ago

      Agreed. I’m proud and humbled by his measured response, I don’t think I could do the same in his shoes.