12 Feb 2018 5:38 pm
No due process for the Central Park Five.
A man who was jailed for five and a half years for an attack on a jogger of which he was later acquitted has branded President Donald Trump a hypocrite for calling for "due process" over domestic abuse allegations against a White House staffer.
Yusef Salaam, a member of the so-called Central Park Five, was one of five black and Latino teenagers jailed for the 1989 attack on jogger Trisha Meili. His conviction was quashed in 2002.
Salaam said that Trump had little concern for due process when, in 1989, he took out a full-page newspaper advertisement ahead of their trial, calling for Salaam and four other teenagers accused of the attack to be executed.
"Here you had Donald Trump taking out a full-page ad, two weeks in, rushing to judgement. Finding out 13 years later after he did all that that we were not the real culprits," he said.
“The Central Park Five, their families,” Salaam said. “We were not able to move on with our lives. Our lives were completely destroyed and devastated.”
“Any kind of dream or idea or goal that we had in life was quickly erased by this accusation,” he said.
On Saturday, another member of the five, Raymond Santana, also criticized Trump for his hypocrisy. “You should have spoke like that back in 1989,” Santana wrote of Trump's tweet.
http://www.newsweek.com/central-park-fi ... nts-802964