During Tuesday’s presidential debate, Donald Trump appeared to defend his decades-long calls to reinstate the death penalty after five black and Hispanic teenagers known as the Central Park Five were wrongly convicted of rape in New York.

When moderators asked the former president and Kamala Harris to speak on the topic of race in America, Trump struggled to explain his previous comments questioning Harris’ racial identity — and to deal with his fraught history on the issue.

“I don’t care what she is. I don’t care,” Trump said. “If you make a big deal out of something, I don’t care, whatever she wants to be is fine with me.”

In her response, Harris called it “a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president, but who over the course of his career has consistently tried to use race to divide the American people,” and reminded viewers that Trump had called for the reinstatement of the death penalty after five young men of color were wrongly convicted of raping a woman in 1989.

Harris was referring to an ad Trump bought in the New York Times after a brutal attack on a woman in Central Park, calling on New York state to bring back the death penalty. Police pulled five black and Latino teenagers from the park and interrogated them, eliciting confessions they later said were obtained under duress.

In 2002, a convicted serial rapist named Matias Reyes confessed to his crime from prison. DNA testing confirmed he was the perpetrator.

Still, Trump braced himself on the debate stage, more than two decades after the teens’ acquittals.

“They pled guilty,” said Trump, who also claimed that former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg “agreed” with him on the subject. “They ended up killing someone,” Trump said.

Yusef Salaam, one of the five acquitted men who is now a member of the New York City Council, watched the debate live in Philadelphia. Salaam appeared in the Spin Room after the debate, where he told the Washington Post in an interview: “Here we are, a full-circle moment, where we can be participants in this great democracy at the point of everything that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz really strongly support. I’m ready for it.”

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