Trump doesn't apologize for his Central Park Five ads

President Donald Trump responded to a question about the Central Park Five during his appearance before reporters on Tuesday, once again declining to apologize for his actions following the incident.

When asked by a reporter if he would apologize for his actions surrounding the case -- he took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty that read: "Bring Back The Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!" -- Trump instead asked why the topic was relevant.

"Why do you bring that question up now? It's an interesting time to bring it up. You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt," he said.

The five teenagers who were accused of raping a jogger were pressured into giving false confessions. They were later exonerated when DNA evidence linked another person to the crime. The teenagers sued the city and the case was settled.

"They think the city should never have settled that case. We'll leave it at that," Trump said.

In an interview with Larry King in 1989 unearthed from CNN's archives, Trump laid out his position, telling King, "Maybe hate is what we need if we're gonna get something done."

"I don't see anything inciteful, I am strongly in favor of the death penalty," Trump told King. "I am also in favor bringing back police forces that can do something instead of turning their back because every quality lawyer that represents people that are trouble, the first thing they do is start shouting police brutality, etc."

The five teenagers who were accused of raping a jogger were pressured into giving false confessions. They were later exonerated when DNA evidence linked another person to the crime.

So it's Trump's fault they confessed? And how did the DNA evidence "exonerate" the suspects? "At 9 p.m. on the night of April 19, 1989, a group of more than 30 teenagers who lived in East Harlem entered Manhattan's Central Park at an entrance in Harlem, near Central Park North.[3] Some of the group committed several attacks, assaults, and a robbery against persons walking, biking, or jogging in the northernmost part of the park and near the reservoir, and victims began to report the incidents to police.[4] The teenagers were traveling on the park's East Drive and the 97th Street transverse, between 9 pm and 10 pm.[3] Within the North Woods, between 102nd and 105th streets, they were reported as attacking several bicyclists, hurling rocks at a cab, and attacking a pedestrian, whom they robbed and left unconscious.[3][5] Four men were attacked, including John Loughlin, a 40-year-old schoolteacher out for a run, who was severely beaten and kicked between 9:40 and 9:50.[3] He was hit in the back of the head with a pipe and stick, knocking him briefly unconscious.[3][6][5] At a pre-trial hearing in October 1989, a police officer testified that when Loughlin was found, he was bleeding so badly that he "looked like he was dunked in a bucket of blood".[7] It was not until 1:30 a.m. that night that a female jogger was found in the North Woods area of the park. She had been pulled off the path known as the 102nd Street Crossing and brutally beaten, suffering major blood loss and skull fractures; she was later revealed to have been raped. . .On April 21, senior police investigators held a press conference to announce having apprehended about 20 suspects in the attacks of a total of nine people in Central Park two nights before, and began to offer their theory of the attack and rape of the female jogger. Her name was withheld as a victim of a sex crime. The police said up to 12 youths were believed to have attacked the jogger.[35] The main suspects were gangs within the more than 30 teenagers who had assaulted strangers in the park as part of an activity that the police said the teenagers referred to as "wilding". New York City detectives said the term was used by the suspects when describing their actions to police.[35] The police described the attacks as "random" and "motiveless", saying they had "terrorized" people in the park. . ."Unlike the accurate accounts they gave to police of those events, their confessions to the assault on the jogger were wrong about where, when and how it happened."[47] Each of them had made different errors in time and place in their confessions. None of the five said that he had raped the jogger, but each confessed to having been an accomplice to the rape.[5] Each youth said that he had only helped restrain the jogger, or touched her, while one or more others had raped her. Their confessions varied as to who they identified as having participated in the rape, including naming several youths who were never charged.[5] Antron McCray said that a "Puerto Rican kid with a hoodie" had been the one who had raped the jogger. . .Michael Briscoe, 18, made a plea deal on May 31, 1990. Prosecutors had concluded no evidence tied him to the rape case. He pleaded guilty to the assault of David Lewis, a banker, in an earlier incident in the park. He was not required to cooperate with police in the rape case. He was immediately sentenced to a year in jail on this charge and for the unrelated sale of a drug to an undercover police officer, and credited with time served. . .Four of the five youths appealed their convictions in the rape case the following year, but Santana did not appeal. Each of the convictions was upheld. . .Defendant Santana remained in jail to complete a different sentence, having been convicted of an unrelated later crime. But his attorney said that his sentence had been greater in that case because of his earlier conviction in the Meili attack. . .": Central Park jogger case What were the suspects doing in the park? Why did some of them present false ID to the police? Why should we believe their retractions of their confessions any more than previous versions of their stories? How does the later "confession" of one suspect to the rape account for the evidence that the victim was assaulted by 12 attackers? What about the other crimes they confessed to?

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