Equal Justice, Even for Donald Trump and Other Suspects
Yusef Salaam, whom you may remember as one of the exonerated Central Park Five, had only one word to tweet to those who wanted to know his feelings about the indictment of Donald Trump:
“Karma,” he offered.
Karma? I’ve heard about it.
Drawn from concepts of rebirth in Indian religions, I’ve been advised to think of karma as a form of cosmic justice: Good deeds and intent lead to good karma and happier rebirths while bad karma may lead to times that are not so jolly.
Salaam was one of five Black and Hispanic teenagers wrongfully imprisoned for the 1989 rape of a white woman in New York’s Central Park, a case that later was explored in a 2019 Netflix series “When They See Us” and a PBS documentary “The Central Park Five.”
In 1989, before any of the five teens had been tried, Trump, then a major Manhattan real estate developer with a bottomless appetite for self-promotion, took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty to be reinstated in New York.
Adding kerosene to public anger at the time, the ads were reported to have played a major role in securing a conviction. So did false confessions, it turned out, since no DNA linked them to the crime scene and their descriptions of the victim didn’t match.
Salaam served nearly seven years in prison before he and the other wrongfully accused teens — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise — were exonerated in 2002. Serial rapist Matias Reyes, already in prison, confessed to the assault and DNA confirmed his admission.
Ah, how the mighty have fallen. The presumption of innocence until proved guilty seemed almost nowhere to be seen in Trump’s world when the Central Park Five case raged across the headlines and boiled over into a national media frenzy.
Yet, as Salaam mentions in his tweet, Trump — for whom “apologetic” is not part of his brand — never has apologized. Still, he seeks the presumption of innocence he has denied to others. So be it. Let’s see how well his innocence claims hold up.
...continued
(c) 2023 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
