New York City will name an entrance to Central Park the “Gate of the Exonerated” in honor of five black and Latino teenagers wrongfully convicted of a sexual assault that happened in the park in 1989, The Hill reported on Monday, December 12, 2022 (read story here).
The city has already paid the five youths a total of $41 million settlements, who got another $3.9 million from the state. They were conclusively exonerated by DNA testing, along with other evidence corroborating the real perpetrator’s confession given years later (see details here).
The case became a poster example of racial profiling and discrimination. As a Harlem pastor said at the time, “The first thing you do in the United States of America when a white woman is raped is round up a bunch of black youths, and I think that’s what happened here.”
It also exposed Donald Trump as a racist bully with no respect for due process or rights of the accused. Even before the youths were indicted, much less found guilty, he ran full-page ads in all four of New York’s major newspapers demanding the death penalty. (None of the five would be death-penalty eligible today, even if guilty, because they were underage.) See details here.
That wasn’t the end of Trump’s meddling. He criticized the settlements, continuing to call the men guilty after they were exonerated, which later factored into John McCain’s refusal to endorse him (details here).
If naming a park gate in tribute to these innocent victims of lynch-mob racism sticks in Trump’s craw, let him choke on it. Maybe at this point he might want to preserve the presumption of innocence in our legal system. He might need it himself.