When the Rev. Al Sharpton took the stage to introduce members of the Exonerated Five on the last night of the Democratic National Convention, it was, for the briefest moment, a nod toward a reality that the DNC had otherwise aggressively avoided: the myriad injustices of our criminal legal system.
“Thirty-five years ago my friends and I were in prison for crimes we didn’t commit,” Korey Wise said. As teenagers, Wise, Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, and Antron McCray were wrongly arrested, interrogated, and imprisoned for the brutal rape of a jogger in Central Park. Donald Trump notoriously spent tens of thousands of dollars on full-page ads in the New York Times calling to bring back the death penalty. “Our youth was stolen from us,” Wise said. “Every day as we walked into courtroom, people screamed at us, threatened us because of Donald Trump.”
“He wanted us dead,” Salaam, now a New York City Council member, said. Now in their late 40s and early 50s, the men once known as the Central Park Five stood as a living testament both to Trump’s cruelty and the futures he sought to crush.
The moment was powerful. But it also exposed a tension that had been present throughout the entire convention. All week, the criminal justice system — and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s role in it — had been cast as a force for good: a source of protection and justice for society’s vulnerable. Harris was praised by a parade of sheriffs, state attorneys general, and members of the U.S. security state as the leader who will keep Americans safe. “Crime will keep going down when we put a prosecutor in the White House instead of a convicted felon,” President Joe Biden said in his speech on Monday.
Hellbound and Down 