Saturday - January 13, 2007

Disorder In The Court

It’s about time for this case to just go away. District Attorney Mike Nifong needs to do the same. In fact he needs to be frog-marched out of his office and into jail himself. Now he’s trying to slip away in the dark of night while no one is looking. The case is falling apart and his conduct in prosecuting it has been abominable, if not criminal.

As hard as it has been for me to work up sympathy for a bunch of rich, white jocks who were stupid enough to thow a drunken frat party and hire a stripper, I have to admit these boys have been screwed by a system of justice that is often prosecuted in the media and all too often shows a racist bias from the git-go.

What happened to “innocent until proven guilty”? How can a DA get away with suppressing evidence? Why does every case involving whites and blacks have to devolve instantly into charges of racism? Too many questions ... not enough answers ...

Nifong Asks To Be Replaced
D.A. seeks special prosecutor to take over Duke lacrosse case; delay likely
_{DURHAM (CHARLOTTE OBSERVER) - January 13, 2007}

District Attorney Mike Nifong asked to withdraw from the Duke lacrosse case Friday after hiring a lawyer to defend him against misconduct charges and meeting with the woman who had accused three players of raping her.

Nifong asked N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper to assign a special prosecutor, a spokeswoman for Cooper said late Friday. David Freedman, the Winston-Salem lawyer representing Nifong, said the request did not come easily.

“He deeply regrets having to get out of this case,” said Freedman. “He felt his presence would only take away from the story the prosecuting witness has to tell.” If Cooper accepts, it could be weeks before his office decides whether to proceed or drop charges against David Evans, 23, Collin Finnerty, 20, and Reade Seligmann, 20.

“From day one we’ve wanted a prosecutor who would follow the evidence and then make his decision, instead of letting his decision direct the evidence,” said Brad Bannon, defense attorney for Evans. “We are absolutely confident in the ability of the Special Prosecution office to review the evidence objectively and competently.” Efforts to reach Cooper were unsuccessful.

The three former players face charges of kidnapping and first-degree sexual offense after a 28-year-old student at N.C. Central University—hired to perform as a stripper—said she was gang-raped and beaten at a March 13 party thrown by Duke’s lacrosse team. The players say the accusations are lies.

The case has gained nationwide attention and created a maelstrom of anger in Durham and across the nation. First, it was directed against the players, who were seen as emblems of privilege in a working-class city. Then, it was directed against Nifong and the accuser.Nifong began the case in spring with a flurry of interviews during which he insisted that three lacrosse players committed a racially motivated gang-rape of the woman. The accuser is black; the players white.

On Friday, Nifong brushed off reporters’ questions. “I’m not sure where y’all are getting this stuff,” Nifong said in a curt telephone interview after the news broke. “I’m not commenting.”

There are several clues to Nifong’s timing: He recently hired Freedman, the defense lawyer, and the accuser visited his office Thursday, where she received a subpoena to testify at a Feb. 5 hearing.

Though Nifong hopes to be relieved as prosecutor in the case, it likely will dog him. He faces a hearing before the N.C. State Bar. The families of the accused have indicated they plan to sue him in civil court.

- More ...

Stripper Lied ... White Boys Fried
-- by Ann Coulter

About a month after members of the Duke lacrosse team were falsely accused of raping a stripper last year, 88 members of the Duke faculty fanned the flames of hysteria by signing a letter announcing that they were “listening” to students “who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism.”

Maybe they should have been listening to the accused, several of whom had iron-clad alibis. Now the professors are going to need a new example of “racism and sexism” at Duke since their case in chief has turned out to be a fraud.

In lieu of a gang rape perpetrated by high-stepping white male athletes against a poor black woman, the Duke lacrosse case has turned out to be another in a long string of hoax hate crimes in which whites are falsely accused. The lacrosse players denied that any rape had occurred and immediately submitted their DNA to the state, confident that the DNA would prove them innocent. It did: Not a trace of DNA from any of the lacrosse players was found on the accuser, though this girl had more DNA in her than a refrigerator at a fertility clinic.

She had DNA from five other men, which ought to have raised suspicions about her story that she had not had sex with anyone for the week before the alleged gang rape. Well, that was one of the several versions of events the accuser has offered police to date, although my personal favorite was the one in which Elvis came back from the dead and sexually assaulted her. (I think that was version No. 3—I’d have to check my notes.)

This is the second time this woman has accused a group of men of gang-raping her. One more time and it’s officially considered a hobby. And yet despite the vast privilege, untold wealth and bright shiny whiteness of the defendants, they are still under criminal indictment in this case. Three of the players face up to 30 years in prison for a crime every sane person knows they did not commit. Ah, the life of the privileged!

Duke English professor Cathy N. Davidson recently wrote an opinion piece defending her signing of the “listening” letter, noting that it was “not addressed to the police investigation,” but rather “focused on racial and gender attitudes all too evident” after the alleged rape. She explained that the letter had merely “decried prejudice and inequality in the society at large.”

This would be like defending a letter written during the Dreyfus affair on the grounds that the letter did not explicitly accuse Alfred Dreyfus of treason against France, but simply took the occasion of his arrest to decry the treasonable attitudes of the Jews in society at large. If poor black women are constantly being raped by rich white men, then how about they produce one case?

Professor Davidson’s column—written when it was clear to everyone except Nancy Grace that three innocent men were facing 30 years in prison for a rape they did not commit—notes that she remains “dismayed by the glaring social disparities implicit in what we know happened on March 13” and says the incident “underscores the appalling power dynamics of the situation.”

OK, this one they made up, but the case still illustrates a larger truth! If anything, our awareness of the “power dynamics of the situation” is too high. What we need is a little of that skepticism liberals bring to every single criminal case that is not a white-on-black crime or a rape case involving Bill Clinton.

The truth, as opposed to the larger truth, is that the allegedly powerful white males are at risk of losing their freedom at the hands of a lunatic accuser and a power-mad prosecutor. Meanwhile the allegedly powerless poor black woman has destroyed people’s lives with her false accusations, for which she will walk away scot-free.

Don’t liberals ever have to pony up at least one example of a powerful privileged white male trampling on the rights of a powerless black woman in order to keep droning on about powerful privileged white males? Every real-life example invariably turns out to be a hoax, among the most spectacular the Tawana Brawley case and now the Duke lacrosse case.

According to the Los Angeles Times—in an article about another hoax “hate crime” on a college campus—false reports of racist hate crimes on college campuses have averaged about one a year for 20 years.

Liberal professors believe that crying wolf is valuable for calling attention to the societal problem of wolves, even though there’s never a wolf in any particular case. Evidently, awareness of an alleged societal ill—of which we have no actual examples—is worth ruining the lives of three innocent people. After all, they’re just powerful white men.

At the next White Males of Privilege meeting, someone ought to bring up how they can use their vast power to win the right not to be put on trial for crimes they didn’t commit.

Posted by The Skipper     on 01/13/2007 at 10:29 AM   
Filed Under: • Crime • Judges-Courts-Lawyers • Racism and race relations •  
• Comments (8) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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