The central park 5 case Elected last December to New York City Council, Yusef Salaam, 49, took up his new office on Tuesday as a new representative of the District of Harlem, 34 years after being wrongly convicted of the rape of a jugger in the “The central park 5 case”. Back to his extraordinary journey.
Yusef Salaam, Wrongly Convicted in Central Park 5 Case, Takes Office in Harlem
He was sworn in on the Koran, which accompanied him during all his years of detention. Wronged for a rape in 1990 in the “The central park 5 case” case, Yusef Salaam officially took office on Tuesday, January 2 at New York City Council, as a representative of the Harlem District. “The loop is closed,” the New York Times (NYT) was quoted as saying by mistake in the same case, The New York Times (NYT) and Raymond Santana, who was also mistakenly convicted in the same case.
The central park 5 case In the Democratic primaries last summer, the father of six children beat the two outgoing members of the council, including the candidate supported by the Mayor of New York, and won the district councillor headquarters in last November’s general election.
An extraordinary trajectory for this neophyte in politics. “I’m not part of this world,” said the 49-year-old writer and lecturer who wants to focus on the quality of public schools, access to housing and security. ‘Most people might think I’m ‘de-fund’, but the truth is that we need it,’ he said.
According to the NYT, it was New York County Democratic leader Keith Wright who convinced him to stand in the summer elections in the summer of 2022. Since his release from prison, Yusef Salaam had moved from New York City to settle near Atlanta, thanks to the seven million dollars granted by the United States federal justice system in 2014 to compensate for the seven years behind bar associations.
“The Crime of the Century”
The “The central park 5 case“, which has since been the subject of a series broadcast on Netflix, dates back to April 19, 1989. That evening, Patricia “Trisha” Meili, a 29-year-old white icer, is snagging in the large Manhattan Park when she is violently assaulted and raped. Overthrew at 80% of her blood, the young woman is close to death when she is discovered by workers in a ditch. Intubated, suffering from 21 fractures, she will spend seven weeks in hospital.
In 1989, New York City faced an unprecedented wave of crime: crack cocaine was spreading on the streets and more than 3,200 rapes were recorded in the city. The police officers are on their teeth and must quickly find the culprit. On the same evening, five African-American and Spanish-American teenagers were arrested in New York as part of a series of attacks on joggers. Despite testimonies that do not coincide with the crime scene in which Patricia “Trisha” Meili’s dead man, the absence of DNA and eyewitnesses, the police manage to make them confess to the rape. Often questioned in the absence of a lawyer, four of the five youngsters sign a detailed confession of the attack they have never committed. Yusef Salaam, then 15 years old, narrowly evaded it thanks to his mother’s intervention.
The central park 5 case Immediately, the press and politicians are unleashed and evoke the “wilding” of New York by gangs of young people. The New York Daily News headlined: “The prey of the pack of wolves: a jugger nears death after being savagely assaulted by a stray gang.” A few weeks later, Donald Trump, at the time, built a long podium with populist accents, where he attacked the city’s Democratic mayor, Ed Koch, by name: “Give us the death penalty. Give us our police.”
Pressed at a few months from the municipal elections, the mayor will later admit in a documentary: “It was for everyone, not just for me, the crime of the century.”
No bitterness
On 18 August 1990, the “The central park 5 case” was sentenced to five to ten years’imprisonment. Korey Wise, the oldest, is the only one to integrate an adult prison, the other four are sent to a juvenile correctional centre. The case rebounded 12 years later when Matias Reyes, confused by his DNA and already in prison for four rapes and the murder of a pregnant woman, confessed to being solely responsible for the rape of The central park 5 case. It was not until 2014 that the justice system awarded the five convicted prisoners compensation had been awarded to 41 million dollars.
The central park 5 case, Yusef Salaam has been involved in the Innocence Project, an American NGO fighting miscarriages of justice since 1992, and of which he has become a member of the board of directors. In 2016, President Barack Obama presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
“I’m glad I’ve had very, very close the pain, and now that I have a voice, I know exactly what people are talking about,” he told New York TV, after his election. As a sign that he had evacuated all resentment despite his personal drama, his memoirs (published in 2021) were entitled: “Better, Not Bitter”.
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