BRIANNA KEILAR (HOST): Donald Trump says he wants to restore law and order to the country, but he's under fire for his response to a notorious 1989 rape case. He took out full page ads calling for the death penalty to be reinstated. Five young men were convicted, and then they were later exonerated. But Donald Trump refuses to admit they're innocent. The story from CNN's Miguel Marquez.

REPORTER: A gang of violent teens terrorized New York.

MIGUEL MARQUEZ: The crime enflamed the city and the nation.

ROBERT COLANGELO (CHIEF OF DETECTIVES, NYPD): They beat her with their fists, I believe a rock and a metal pipe. She was raped by four of these youths.

MARQUEZ: Arrested within hours of the attack, five teens -- four black, one Latino -- all charged with the brutal rape of a 28-year-old jogger in New York’s Central Park.

YUSUF SALAAM: It was the scariest, scariest time in my life.

MARQUEZ: Yusuf Salaam was one of the so-called Central Park Five, just 15 years old, paraded in front of cameras.

SALAAM: Had this been the 1950s, I would have had the same fate as Emmet Till.

MARQUEZ: You would've been hung?

SALAAM: I would have been hung.

MARQUEZ: Two weeks after their high-profile arrest Donald Trump took out full-page ads in four major newspapers calling for the death penalty to be reinstated. Trump wrote, “Criminals must be told that their civil liberties end when an attack on our safety begins.”

SALAAM: He was literally like the fire starter, he lit the match.

MARQUEZ: Salaam served his full sentence, nearly seven years in prison, as did all the Central Park Five, but none of them were guilty.

WOLF BLITZER: Men cleared after spending years in prison for a crime they did not commit.

MARQUEZ: In 2002, serial rapist Matias Reyes came forward claiming he was solely responsible. His DNA and description of the crime matched. With no DNA evidence linking the Central Park Five to the crime, their sentences were reversed.

SALAAM: When we heard that the verdicts were being vacated, it felt -- it was like the best feeling in the world. And that feeling quickly came and went.

PROTESTERS: Donald Trump! You can't hide!

MARQUEZ: The Central Park Five, their families and supporters wanted an apology from Donald Trump. The billionaire refused, telling The New York Times: “They confessed, now they say they didn't do it? Who am I supposed to believe?” Those confessions, parents and lawyers said, were coerced.

UNIDENTIFIED: They didn't give them no food, they didn't give them no sleep for 43 hours. And that's how they did it.

MARQUEZ: The five sued New York City and settled for $41 million dollars in 2014. Trump, incensed, calling the settlement a “disgrace” in an opinion column, saying, “settling doesn't mean innocence, but it indicates incompetence on several level… It is politics at its lowest and worst form.”

MICHAEL D'ANTONIO: I spoke to Donald shortly after the city made a settlement with these men and he was outraged.

MARQUEZ: Michael D'Antonio's The Truth About Trump follows the billionaire's rise to the top of the GOP ticket.

D'ANTONIO: He's not a person who takes in new information and then adjusts and accepts reality. The only reality that matters to him is his judgment, which was rendered many years prior.

MARQUEZ: No matter how total the vindication for the Central Park Five, there is still one thing they'd like to see.

SALAAM: I keep saying to myself, one day Donald Trump is going to perhaps take a full-page ad out and apologize to the Central Park Five. You know, that would be tremendous. That might make the -- this is funny.

MARQUEZ: Do you really think that's going to happen?

SALAAM: I doubt that's going to happen.

MARQUEZ: In a statement to CNN, Trump not only didn't apologize but said: “They admitted they were guilty. The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that the case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous.” Yusuf Salaam denies any wrongdoing that night. And as for the actual rapist, Matias Reyes, he is currently serving 33 years to life for a series of rapes but interestingly not for this one. By the time admitted to the crime, the statute of limitations had already run out.

Related:

Washington Post: I’m One Of The Central Park Five. Donald Trump Won’t Leave Me Alone.

Previously:

Trump Says A Misleading Breitbart News Article Vindicates His Claim That Thousands Of Muslim Americans Celebrated After 9/11

Black CNN Panelists Walk Trump Supporter Through His Long History Of Racism And Discrimination

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