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Saturday, August 13, 2016

Donald Trump Is Rallying A Lynch Mob. He's Done It Before With "The Central Park Five"

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Trump's 1989 ad calling for executing the Central Park Five

From Politico: “Trump's long dalliance with violent rhetoric — Beyond his own incendiary comments, he's done little to mute loose talk of killing Clinton and Obama”
And refrains of “hang the bitch” and “kill the bitch” have grown increasingly common at Trump rallies. [...]
Calls for violence against Clinton are not hard to detect at Trump events. At an event in Ashburn, Virginia, last week, a pre-teen boy in the press area shouted “take the bitch down!” with his nearby mother’s approval. On Tuesday, a reporter at a Trump rally in North Carolina tweeted that someone had shouted, “Kill her! Kill her!” — a refrain that has been heard at more than one Trump campaign events in recent weeks, along with calls for Clinton’s hanging.
New Yorkers remember another time Donald Trump was mouthing off about “law and order”. In 1989 he advocated executing five black and brown boys (14-16 years old) who had been accused of a crime they didn't commit. Donald Trump has decades of experience stoking crowds till they are baying for blood.
Just two weeks after the Central Park attack, before any of the boys had faced trial and while Meili remained critically ill in a coma, Donald Trump, whose office on Fifth Avenue commanded an exquisite view of the park’s opulent southern frontier, intervened.
He paid a reported $85,000 to take out advertising space in four of the city’s newspapers, including the New York Times. Under the headline “Bring Back The Death Penalty. Bring Back The Police!” and above his signature, Trump wrote: “I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence.”
The Central Park Five, were innocent of course. NYPD officers had rounded them up and coerced confessions (in the absence of lawyers or family) in an effort to demonstrate swift resolution of the case. The five boys (they were 14 to 16 at the time) were convicted by a jury relying almost exclusively on the forced confessions. They all pled not-guilty at the trial and there was no physical evidence tying them to the crime. They each spent years in prison for a crime they didn't commit. They were exonerated in a 2002 investigation. The city eventually settled with them for tens of millions. 
Yusuf Salaam, fifteen years old at the time, was one of the boys:
“He was the fire starter,” Salaam said of Trump, in his first extended interview since Trump announced his run for the White House. “Common citizens were being manipulated and swayed into believing that we were guilty.” [...]
All five minors had already been paraded in front of the cameras and had their names and addresses published, but Salaam said he and his family received more death threats after the papers ran Trump’s full-page screed. On a daytime TV show two days later, a female audience member called for the boys to be castrated and echoed the calls for the death penalty if Meili died. Pat Buchanan, the former Republican White House aide, called for the oldest of the group, Wise, to be “tried, convicted and hanged in Central Park by June 1”.

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