After Raymond Santana and the rest of the young men in the Central Park jogger rape case were exonerated of all charges in 2002, he knew that he wanted to start reclaiming the life that was stolen from him.

He was one of the five Black and Latino teens who were falsely accused and convicted of attacking and raping the jogger in 1989. Santana, Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, and Yusef Salaam each spent a range of five to 11 years in prison for a crime they did not commit. The group had become known as the Central Park Five, but have since adopted the name, the Exonerated Five.

“When the incarceration happened, it was me losing something,” Santana, who was 14 at the time of his arrest, told NBC News last week. When a friend asked him what he wanted to do with the rest of his life after he was released, Santana said one thing he wanted to focus on was encouraging young people to become civically engaged.
The right to vote was one Santana gained for the first time after his exoneration at the age of 27 and is one he does not take lightly. “For me, exercising my political voice, my political power — that was part of the healing process,” he said. “It was being a part of something and saying ‘I can vote now. I can make change. I can make decisions.’”
While Santana, 45, has been voting regularly since the early 2000s, experiencing the 2016 election was uniquely personal to him. That is because the story of the five teens and the rise of Donald Trump as a political figure have been tied together from the beginning.
placed in four newspapers, that called for the restoration of the death penalty in New York while also bemoaning the state of public safety and the lack of policing.

While the advertisement did not directly call for the execution of the teenagers, the text did make clear that Trump was voicing his opinion because of the attack on the jogger. Surveying the demise of “law and order” in New York City, Trump wrote, "At what point did we cross the line from the fine and noble pursuit of genuine civil liberties to the reckless and dangerously permissive atmosphere which allows criminals of every age to beat and rape a helpless woman and then laugh at her family's anguish?”

“We weren't even convicted yet,” when the advertisement was published, Santana recalled. He views the ad and its invocation of the death penalty as the moment that ratcheted public opinion into a frenzy against the wrongfully accused teens. It also opened the door for others to join the outrage, by strengthening punishments for juveniles in several states, as well as the passage of several tough-on-crime bills in the 1990s, he recalled.

When asked if he would apologize to the five for the advertisement and his remarks in the 90s, Trump told reporters last year that “You have people on both sides of that … They admitted their guilt.”

Read more at https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.yahoo.com/amphtml/raymond-santana-1989-central-park-122927081.html

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