Yusef Salaam, who as a child was part of a group of teenagers wrongly accused, convicted and imprisoned for the rape of
a woman jogging in New York’s Central Park, has declared victory in a Democratic primary for a city council seat in New York – giving him a very good chance of representing a Harlem district as an elected official.
Salaam faced two veteran politicians, New York state assembly members Al Taylor, 65, and Inez Dickens, 73, in the race for a seat representing part of the majority-Black uptown Manhattan neighborhood. The incumbent, democratic socialist Kristin Richard Jordan, dropped out of the race in May but remained on the ballot.
The contest was taking place more than two decades after Salaam and four other men – then known as the Central Park Five, now often called the Exonerated Five – were cleared of the crime using DNA evidence.
It was one of the city’s most notorious and racially fraught crimes, inflamed when Donald Trump, then best known as a flamboyant real estate mogul in the city and later to become US president, took out newspaper ads calling for the death penalty for the five.
The Associated Press has not declared a winner in the primary race and the election’s outcome might not be certain for days because of New York’s ranked-choice voting rules. That system kicks in if no candidate claims more than 50% of the total vote.
Full article: Central Park Five’s Yusef Salaam declares victory in city council p...
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