Here is one thing that bothers me about the whole thing. These families had money to hire great lawyers and their was big time media attention paid to this case. How many average Joe’s with a public defender and no national scrutiny to you think Nifong railroaded in his career?
Duke trio learned justice is not blind
Plain Dealer, The (Cleveland, OH)
June 22, 2007
Author: Connie Schultz; Plain Dealer Columnist
The lives of three privileged young white men were almost destroyed by false testimony, a ruthless prosecutor and a rabid public fueled by the media.
Emphasis on almost.
For Dave Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann, justice prevailed. The former Duke lacrosse players were cleared of rape charges. Their accuser, Crystal Gail Mangum, was outed as a liar. And the public outcry on their behalf led to North Carolina disbarring District Attorney Mike Nifong.
These young men are a year older but decades wiser.
They now know that at least 203 other wrongly accused men never had their swing at justice because they had no family members with the means to wage the costly fight for their freedom.
They know that prosecutors are seldom punished for misconduct.
They know this means something is very wrong with our system of justice.
They could have closed the book on this horrific chapter in their lives but chose instead to meet some of the men whose stories mirror theirs in ways they could never have imagined a year ago.
There was scant media coverage of this encounter because the Duke players insisted they weren’t the point. I only found out after calling Eric Ferrero at the Innocence Project, which works to free the wrongly incarcerated through post-conviction DNA testing.
“You know, they came to our benefit,” he said. “We invited them, and we knew they bought tickets, but we didn’t know if they would attend.”
The first-ever fund-raiser was in New York on April 24. Before the event, Ferrero stood next to the project’s co-founder, lawyer Barry Scheck, who was holding a news conference outside. That’s when Ferrero spotted the lacrosse players.
They started to walk toward the entrance, then darted out of view when they saw the cameras. Ferrero quietly escorted them to their table.
They didn’t want to talk to reporters, Ferrero said. “We had about 20 exonerees at the dinner, and they [the former Duke students] kept saying the focus should be on those men. They kept mentioning how they would have gone to prison if they hadn’t had the money to fight. We were all impressed that they could acknowledge that.”
(snip)
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