Until Proven Innocent (fantastic book on the Duke lacrosse rape case)

[Broadsword2004]

The full title of the book is Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case

All I can say is with regards to what that prosecutor Nifong tried. This was, according to the book, arguably the greatest case of prosecutorial misconduct in recent times. The lengths he went to to flat-out ignore the evidence and even violate the law is just amazing. He actually withheld the DNA evidence for months when it proved the players innocent and even conspired with the lab guy who performed certain DNA tests to withhold the evidence. He refused to consider any of the evidence offered by the defense lawyers. He violated the legal ethics laws in stirring up racial passions and basically proclaiming the players guilty on television (as this can bias the people who will make up the jury). The way the media and the administration acted was utterly shameful in how they rushed to judgement. The administration really went out of their way to bend over backwards to some really radical professors on the campus too. Also shameful were the Durham Police Department who aided Nifong. The SANE (Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner) turned out to be a radical feminist who went to great lengths not to do her job properly in which case she'd have found that the accuser had likely not been raped. The state's attorney general deserves credit however as he was told he had to dismiss the charges against the three defendents, and it was also recommended he pronounce them innocent. His political advisors were uneasy about that though because they felt it might hurt him among the black vote he needed to win re-election. So the safe route would just be to say that the charges were dismissed because of lack of evidence. However that would then leave the cloud over the players that they might still have done it, but there just wasn't enough evidence. Saying they were actually innocent was a big-deal. In the end, he went and said they were innocent.

What's really scary is that the reason the DA didn't get away with what he did is because of a few things:

1) North Carolina has an "open discovery law" that was passed in 2004 that requires the prosecutor to turn over all of their files to the defense in all felony cases. Most states do not have such a law. DA Nifong went out of his way to skirt the law, but eventually was forced to turn over all his information.

2) The defendents were able to afford good lawyers, who did everything from launch a media counter-offensive to doing things such as perusing the DNA information (the DNA information was a bunch of hard data that no one could understand, so one of the lawyers went so far as to get a textbook and teach himself all about DNA, then perused through the hard data, in which he found that the DNA did not match the players). This also allowed him to cross-examine the lab expert who had performed the tests and get him to admit that he and Nifong had withheld evidence.

Had they been poor guys stuck with public defenders, they might well be spending thirty years in prison right now. Nifong acted the way he did because he wanted to win the election to win the maximum pension and also because if one of his opponents won who didn't like him, she'd have fired him immediately. He had not been known as a good law student when in law school (watching television a lot instead of studying apparently), and that office was the only one that had ever employed him. Also shameful was the actions of the North Carolina NAACP, which pushed hard not to have the case tried (if a trial occurred) in a different county. This deviated from what the NAACP had always pushed for in cases with blacks, where you'd have the case tried in a different county so as not to have a biased jury. In this case, the NAACP wanted these boys tried by a jury of people from the same area the rape was claimed to have occurred, where racial passions had already been stirred up, and where most blacks thought they were guilty. The case was like a reverse version of the Scottsboro Boys trials, except it never came to an actual trial. The book also details about how rape laws (and child abuse laws) have become so skewed against men these days. They used to be very skewed in favor of men and against women, then the feminist movement and civil rights movements happened, and the laws were adjusted, first in reasonable ways, but then radical feminists got them taken too far and now the laws are very skewed against men and in favor of women.

There is more but then I'd be trying to write the whole book here, I very much suggest reading it!

[The Reaper]

Nifong's successor as DA was just fired last week after numerous conflicts with the local judiciary herself.

And the allegedly raped accuser from the lacrosse case is currently being tried for murder for killing her boyfriend.

TR

[PedOncoDoc]

Originally Posted by The Reaper

Nifong's successor as DA was just fired last week after numerous conflicts with the local judiciary herself.

And the allegedly raped accuser from the lacrosse case is currently being tried for murder for killing her boyfriend.

TR

With the uproar against the lacrosse players, how is the follow up on the accuser not in the national news???

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by PedOncoDoc

With the uproar against the lacrosse players, how is the follow up on the accuser not in the national news???

Look up Crystal Mangum, read the stories, and you tell me.

Frankly, she is one long and continuous train wreck.

Nifong was equally complicit in his efforts to prosecute the innocent lacrosse players despite the evidence.

TR

[Dusty]

Originally Posted by The Reaper

Nifong was equally complicit in his efforts to prosecute the innocent lacrosse players despite the evidence.

TR

That's key.

[Broadsword2004]

Originally Posted by PedOncoDoc

With the uproar against the lacrosse players, how is the follow up on the accuser not in the national news???

Probably because it doesn't fit the ultra-PC worldview of the left. There was another report of a rape that occurred in Durham during the whole fiasco, but it was at a party of Phi Beta Sigma, an all-black fraternity. And the accuser was an affluent white female Duke undergraduate student who said a black guy had followed her into the bathroom and raped her. The story did not get much traction at all and the proper procedures were followed by the police (there was no witch-hunt). The radical professors and the administration who had criticized the lacrosse players over their having hired strippers did not criticize the fraternity for its party, which included drugs that were illegal. The reason the Duke case got such news is because it was a dream story for the politically-correct leftwing. White guys attending an elite university (who were thought of and portrayed as rich, white, drunken, entitlement-minded jocks) raping a poor black woman with multiple children who was doing stripping to pay herself through a local black college (that's how she was portrayed).

A story of a rich white woman being raped by a black man, or a black woman being raped by a black man, or a black woman with a history of mental problems and drug abuse (Chrystal Mangum) doesn't fit the left's PC way of seeing things. This is not to say that blacks are no longer victims of bad police and prosecutors, the book details multiple cases of both blacks and whites being abused because of race. But in terms of generating a national media story, affluent white guy raping poor black woman is a lot more favored. For an example of how crazy the PC got, during the height of the story, the New Black Panthers (a very racist and anti-Semitic group) wanted to come onto the campus to "question" lacrosse team members. The administration actually considered letting them do it! The book points out, if it was the reverse, black men accused of raping a white girl, if there was a local Nazi group, wanting to come onto the campus and "question" black men, would the administration have even considered that?