btt
At 10:23 AM, September 20, 2006, Anonymous said... -excerpt from FODU site.
"The real issues here are:
1) a troubled woman with a difficult past who couldn't face the increasingly swift downward trajectory her life was taking and chose to accuse three innocent people of a heinous crime rather than looking at her own drinking, drug use and unfortunate choice of sexual lifestyle as the real crisis in her life;
2) institutional irresponsibility on the part of Duke University, in particular by its colossally unimpressive current president, Richard Brodhead, for ignoring discontent within the Durham community caused by its pushing 25% of its students off-campus to fend for themselves with local law enforcement; and, last but certainly not least,
3) local political corruption on a spectacular, theatrical scale unmatched by anything I can recall seeing in the last 40 years. This is truly the big story to come out of this whole debacle, and will be the fodder of debate, articles, books and movies for years to come. The actions of DA Nifong, of certain members of the judiciary in their failure to hold the DA and his investigators and their own court staff accountable to the rule of law, of certain members of the Durham Police Department, like Gottlieb, Chalmers and company, who utterly failed to comply with recognized police procedures in a criminal investigation, but instead affirmatively obstructed them, and of local government officials like Messrs. Bell and Baker, to name a few, who have been complicit in the police misconduct in this case, all under the watchful eye of a local media that seems not to have a clear idea of their mandate to provide a consistent, objective account of what has been going on in the case, taken together represent for me, an attorney of 25 years' standing, a pathetic low in the annals of American jurisprudence."
http://friendsofdukeuniversity.blogspot.com/2006/05/general-topics-open.html
* Nice summation of the affair courtesy of the FODU site. Durhamites have wallowed in the cesspool for so long, they have lost the smell of Right. The stench now permeates the Gothic walls of Duke. The city should be declared an environmental disaster area.