Yusef Salaam Elected to Municipal Board in New York in Symbolic Victory of Overcoming Injustice

Yusef Salaam, one of five African-American and Hispanic teenagers wrongly convicted of raping a jogger in Central Park in 1989, one of the most famous miscarriages of justice in the United States, was elected to the board Tuesday evening municipal of New York.

The very symbolic victory was celebrated in Harlem, a sign of the mark that the “Central Park affair” left on the lives of the inhabitants of this district of the city. Yusef Salaam, now in his fifties, recalled that he had been “a teenager sitting in a cell, forgotten by everyone”. “Tonight, it is me who has the opportunity to free ourselves from oblivion and discrimination,” he assured, his wife, his children and his mother by his side. The Central Park affair, at the center of Ava DuVernay’s series When They See Us on Netflix in 2019, has remained an emblematic case of racism in American society. Yusef Salaam was fifteen years old when he was arrested with three other black teenagers and a Hispanic, after a night of unrest in Central Park on April 19, 1989, marked by the violent assault and rape of a young white jogger, left for died in the woods of the famous Manhattan park.

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Interrogated at length separately in police custody, without lawyers, the five boys, aged 14 to 16, were charged solely on the basis of confessions in which they accused each other. They later recanted, claiming to have been trapped and coerced by the New York police, but all were convicted and sent to prison.

The brutality of the attack shocked public opinion and Donald Trump, then a real estate tycoon, took out several pages of newspaper advertising to demand the return of the death penalty.

Yusef Salaam served almost seven years in detention. After his release, the confession of another man, whose DNA had been found on the victim, relaunched the case and “the Central Park five” were exonerated.

Since then, Yusef Salaam has campaigned for reforms to the judicial system, but this is the first time he has obtained a political mandate. After his victory in a Democratic primary this summer, he was assured of winning on Tuesday.

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2023-11-08 18:49:00
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