Justice versus conscience

In première gegaan op 17 sep. 2020

Dr. Yusef Salaam was just 15-year-old when he and four other Harlem teens were wrongly convinced of the rape and murder of a young white woman in New York City’s Central Park in 1989. Known as the Central Park Five, the young men spent years behind bars before a court finally overturned their sentences in 2002. A convicted murderer and rapist serving a life sentence confessed to the crime, and his DNA matched a sample found at the scene.

Dr. Salaam is now known as one of the Exonerated Five. In 2014, the men received a $41 million settlement from New York City. Since his release more than 20 years ago, Dr. Salaam has become a family man, a father, a poet, an activist, and an inspirational speaker, advocating for criminal justice reform.

Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised in New York City, Ibi Zoboi is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich, Pride, and American Street, which was a National Book Award finalist and a New York Times notable book. She is also the editor of Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America.

In 2020, Zoboi and Dr. Salaam collaborated on Punching the Air, a novel about a 16-year-old artist who is arrested and wrongfully convicted of a crime.

In this episode of Equity Talks, Malika Saada Saar, Google’s Senior Counsel on Civil and Human Rights, sits down with Zoboi and Dr. Salaam to discuss the criminal justice system and the power of storytelling.

The Equity Talks series is a global forum offering an in-depth study of justice through forthright discussion. By amplifying some of the most important voices of our time, our goal is to encourage introspection, conversation, and personal growth.