Bill Perkins, who for 24 years as a legislator from Harlem championed his community — by, among other things, challenging Donald J. Trump’s aggressive demand for the death penalty when five teenagers, who were later exonerated, were arrested in connection with a rape in Central Park in 1989 — died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. His death was announced by his wife, Pamela Green Perkins. She did not give a cause, but Mr. Perkins had undergone treatment for colon cancer and, according to Richard Fife, a family spokesman, had developed dementia. In 1989, when five Black and Hispanic teenagers were charged with the rape of a white jogger in Central Park, Mr. Perkins was among the first Black civic leaders to publicly raise questions about the evidence and to suggest that there had been a rush to judgment. At the time he was president of the tenants’ association of Schomburg Plaza, the Manhattan apartment complex where several of the defendants lived.

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