GIST: "An exonerated member of the Central Park Five, Yusef Salaam, is poised to win a Democratic primary race for a New York City Council seat in Harlem.
Salaam declared victory at a campaign event in Harlem Tuesday night, where he thanked the community for giving him a “second chance” after his exoneration and spoke about the adversity he once faced.
“This campaign has been about those who have been counted out,” Salaam said.
“This campaign has been about those who have been forgotten. This campaign has been about our Harlem community who has been pushed into the margins of life and made to believe that they were supposed to be there.”
New York City uses a system known as ranked choice voting in primary and special elections for many local offices, where voters can rank up to five candidates in order of their preferences. A candidate who receives more than 50% of first-choice votes is declared the winner.
If no candidate meets that mark, the candidate with the fewest votes gets eliminated and their ballots get redistributed to voters’ next choice. That process continues until there are only two candidates left and the candidate with the most votes wins.
As of Wednesday morning, Salaam had received 50.1% of the vote. CNN has not yet projected a winner in the race, and mail ballots that were postmarked Tuesday can still be received until July 4, but even if Salaam finishes just under 50%, he’d still easily be the best-positioned candidate to win once votes start getting redistributed.
The winner of the primary is almost certain to win the seat given the heavy Democratic tilt of the district.
Salaam was one of five teenagers accused of raping a jogger and pressured into giving false confessions. They were exonerated in 2002 when DNA evidence linked another person to the crime. The teenagers sued New York City and the case was later settled.
In the wake of the crime in 1989, former President Donald Trump took out full-page newspaper ads that read: “Bring Back The Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!”
The entire story can be read at:
https://ktvz.com/news/2023/06/28/exonerated-central-park-five-member-yusef-salaam-poised-to-win-new-york-city-council-seat/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/47049136857587929
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices.
Lawyer Radha Natarajan;
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater’s attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, “Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.”
https://deadline.com/2021/11/alice-sebold-lucky-rape-conviction-overturned-anthony-broadwater-1234880143/
