Trump Takes Out Full-Page Ads Calling for Death Penalty in Central Park Five Case

The Ads

On May 1, 1989, Donald Trump placed full-page advertisements in four New York City newspapers: The New York Times, the Daily News, the New York Post, and New York Newsday. The ads bore the headline “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” and were a direct response to the Central Park jogger case, in which a 28-year-old white woman had been brutally assaulted and raped while jogging in Central Park on April 19, 1989. Five Black and Latino teenagers, aged 14 to 16, had been arrested and charged in connection with the attack.

The ads cost Trump an estimated $85,000 and were written in his characteristically blunt style. “I want to hate these muggers and murderers,” Trump wrote. “They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.” Though the ads did not name the teenagers directly, the timing and context left no ambiguity about whom they targeted. The five accused had not yet been tried.

The Wrongful Convictions

The five teenagers, Korey Wise, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, and Yusef Salaam, were convicted in 1990 based largely on confessions that they and their families said had been coerced during lengthy interrogations conducted without parents or attorneys present. The physical evidence, including DNA from the crime scene, did not match any of the five defendants. Nevertheless, they were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 5 to 15 years.

In 2002, Matias Reyes, a convicted serial rapist and murderer already in prison, confessed to committing the Central Park assault alone. DNA evidence confirmed his confession. That same year, the convictions of all five men were vacated. In 2014, the City of New York settled a civil rights lawsuit with the five men for approximately $41 million, roughly $1 million for each year of prison time served.

Trump’s Refusal to Apologize

Despite the exonerations, Trump has never apologized for the ads. In 2013, after the settlement was announced, he called it “a disgrace” and said the men’s guilt was “still being questioned.” During his 2016 presidential campaign, he told CNN that the Central Park Five were guilty, pointing to the original confessions and ignoring the DNA evidence and the actual perpetrator’s confession. In 2019, when asked again, he said he would not apologize.

The Central Park Five case, now more commonly referred to as the Exonerated Five, became a defining example of the intersection of racial prejudice and criminal injustice in America. Trump’s role in stoking public fury against the wrongly accused teenagers, and his subsequent refusal to acknowledge the miscarriage of justice, has been cited by civil rights leaders as evidence of a deep-seated pattern of racial hostility.