Yusef Salaam of the Central Park Five wins the New York primary to represent Harlem
Yusef Salaam, who seven years in prison for a crime he did not commit, declared himself the winner of the New York City primary to represent Harlem in the city council.
As of Wednesday, Salaam won 50.1 percent of the vote, although mail-end ballots remain to be counted.
New York has a ranked voting system, and the candidate who receives 50 percent of the vote is declared the winner, and the last-place candidate is counted out.
Salaam thanked voters in Harlem for giving him a second chance.
Police rounded up Salaam, then 15, Kevin Richardson, 14, Raymond Santana, 14, Antron McCray, 15, and 16-year-old Korey Wise for beating and raping, Trisha Meili, a young woman jogging through Central Park. The boys, now men, were cleared of the crime when Matias Reyes admitted to beating and raping Meili.
Salaam is now 49.
President Donald Trump didn’t like Reyes’s confession. He took out full-page ads in the city newspapers declaring that New York needs to bring back the death penalty.
Now Trump may go to prison for keeping classified documents in his home.
Salaam likened his imprisonment to being “kidnapped,” but he also called his nearly seven years in prison a gift that allowed him to see a racially unjust criminal justice system from the “belly of the beast.”