If it were up to former President Donald Trump 35 years ago, five Black and brown teenagers from New York City would have been put to death after a jury convicted them in 1990 of the rape and assault of a white woman jogging in Central Park.
The charges against the five young men would not have legally warranted the death penalty — but weeks after the April 1989 attack that left the woman in a coma, Trump paid for advertisements advocating for the death penalty for the group. Trump placed ads in four major New York City newspapers, including The New York Times.
“Our youth was stolen from us,” Korey Wise recalled on the final night of the Democratic National Convention. “Every day as we walked into the courtroom, people scream at us, threaten us, because of Donald Trump.”
Wise was 16, the oldest of the wrongfully convicted who were infamously dubbed the “Central Park Five” and the first of two to give a speech Thursday – he was joined by Yusef Salaam, now a New York City Council member.
In the decades since DNA evidence, and a confession from the actual perpetrator, proved the five were innocent, Trump has not apologized. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office recommended in December 2002 to overturn all of their convictions that were based on coerced confessions from the teens.
The National Registry of Exonerations reports that since 1989, of the 3,582 exonerations it has recorded, 452 had false confessions and 601 had DNA evidence that proved the person was wrongly convicted. In both of those categories, more than half were Black exonerees.
Over 30 years later, the public’s perception about the death penalty has significantly shifted. Conservative authors of Project 2025 have called to restart executions to kill the 40 remaining people on federal death row, and to enforce the practice for other violent offenses, including crimes against children.
The Harris-Walz ticket has not campaigned on abolishing the federal death penalty.
This story has been updated.