How Long Were The Central Park Five In Prison

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 offset 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 v to 11 years in prison for a crime they did not commit. The group had become known as the Central Park 5, simply accept since adopted the proper name, the Exonerated V.

"When the incarceration happened, it was me losing something," Santana, who was xiv at the time of his abort, told NBC News final calendar week. When a friend asked him what he wanted to do with the residual 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 later on his exoneration at the historic period of 27 and is one he does not take lightly. "For me, exercising my political vocalization, my political power — that was role of the healing procedure," he said. "It was being a office of something and saying 'I can vote now. I can make change. I tin can make decisions.'"

While Santana, 45, has been voting regularly since the early 2000s, experiencing the 2016 ballot was uniquely personal to him. That is because the story of the five teens and the rising of Donald Trump as a political figure accept been tied together from the beginning.

Before long after their arrest, Trump, and so a New York City real estate magnate, spent thousands on a total page advertizement placed in iv newspapers, that chosen for the restoration of the decease penalty in New York while also bemoaning the country of public prophylactic and the lack of policing.

While the advertisement did not directly phone call for the execution of the teenagers, the text did make clear that Trump was voicing his opinion because of the set on on the jogger. Surveying the demise of "law and order" in New York Urban center, 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 historic period to crush and rape a helpless woman and and so laugh at her family'southward anguish?"

"We weren't even bedevilled all the same," when the ad was published, Santana recalled. He views the ad and its invocation of the capital punishment every bit the moment that ratcheted public opinion into a frenzy against the wrongfully defendant teens. It also opened the door for others to join the outrage, by strengthening punishments for juveniles in several states, equally 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 advertizement and his remarks in the 90s, Trump told reporters last year that "Yous have people on both sides of that … They admitted their guilt."

Raymond Santana in a shirt by Park Madison NYC, a clothing company he's partnering with to promote voter engagement in 2020. Park Madison NYC

That 1989 advert is incorporated into the design of one of the T-shirts in a new sheathing line that was recently unveiled by Park Madison NYC, a design brand Santana and his friend Rasheed Immature founded in 2018. The new line focuses on getting Blackness and Latino communities out to the polls in November.

Going into mode was Santana'south way of pursuing a childhood dream. "I loved to sketch and do fine art. Only, y'all know, going through this whole ordeal with this case, it destroyed my drive, information technology killed information technology," he said. "It started with wanting to reclaim something that I lost as a fourteen-twelvemonth-old kid."

Santana says the line specifically focuses on voting because it can exist a relatively easy way to become immature people engaged in civics. "We don't expect y'all to just jump out and be in the front line of a rally and a protest. You start with just going to the polls."

One of the T-shirts in Santana's new line specifically invokes Trump's 1989 advertising and its "Bring Dorsum The Death penalty" headline. "We have to do our part in spreading the awareness of how he played a function in our lives and let people see that example," he said.

Santana lives in Georgia with his wife, Chandra Davis, known for her run on the testify "Flavor of Dear" as Deelishis. In add-on to designing, he often speaks at schools about his experiences with incarceration and the criminal justice system. A new generation of Americans besides learned the details of his story last twelvemonth with the release of the Netflix miniseries "When They See U.s.a.."

It was a tweet that he sent to Ava DuVernay that get-go got the acclaimed director interested in adapting the story of the Central Park rape instance for the screen. The success of "When They Run across Us" "was a sign of vindication," Santana said. "Information technology was a platform for the whole earth to see what happened to the five of us."

Santana said he ultimately hopes that other people who have survived traumas of any kind are encouraged to use their voices to create a better world.

He speaks to a lot of kids who want to work in social justice or criminal justice, and others who fifty-fifty desire to exist prosecutors and police officers. While many have told him they are surprised he encourages young people to pursue the latter two fields, Santana says they shouldn't be.

"If you want to brand change, you don't run from those positions. Y'all enter into those positions. You want to exist a prosecutor, be a prosecutor," he said. "But when yous occupy those spaces, you lot take a duty to the community to do that job effectively."

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CORRECTION (Oct. 21, 2020, 12:xi p.m. ET) A previous version of this commodity misstated how much time the five men in the Cardinal Park jogger case served in prison. Santana spent five years in prison house, but the others served different amounts, ranging from 5 to 12 years, according to the Innocence Project. They did not all serve five years.