Duke's Tenured Vigilantes (DukeLax)

Duke's Tenured Vigilantes The scandalous rush to judgment in the lacrosse "rape" case. by Charlotte Allen 01/29/2007, Volume 012, Issue 19

The Duke University "lacrosse rape case" is all but over. On Friday, January 12, the prosecutor, Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong, petitioned the North Carolina attorney general's office to be recused from the case, and the office complied, appointing a pair of special prosecutors to take over. Nifong's recusal, it is widely assumed, paves the way for the dismissal of all remaining charges against the three defendants--suspended (but recently reinstated) Duke sophomores and lacrosse team members Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty, and a team co-captain, David Evans, who graduated last year--owing to a complete lack of physical, forensic, and credible testimonial evidence linking the three to any sexual or other violent crimes.

Nifong's resignation from the case followed on the heels of two other events. One was an extended interview with the alleged victim conducted by one of Nifong's investigators on December 21--the first time anyone from the district attorney's office had talked to the accuser since Nifong announced he was personally taking over the case from the Durham police on Monday, March 27, 2006. That was exactly two weeks after the accuser, an African-American woman then 27, first said she had been sexually attacked by white members of the Duke men's lacrosse team at around midnight, the night of March 13-14.

During her December 21 interview with prosecutors, the accuser offered either the seventh or the twelfth (depending on how you count) significantly different version of the story she had been telling medical personnel, police officers, and news reporters about what happened after she, an employee of a Durham escort service, showed up at about 11:30 P.M. on March 13 to do some stripping and exotic dancing for a party at a Durham house rented by Evans and two other Duke lacrosse captains. This time around, the accuser, contradicting all her earlier accounts, said she could not remember whether she had actually been penetrated vaginally by the penis of any of the three lacrosse players whom she had identified as her assailants, which prompted Nifong to drop the rape charges the following day (charges of sexual assault, an equally grave felony, and kidnapping still stand against all three as of this writing). The accuser also altered her story about who had attacked her and when, now maintaining that Seligmann, then age 20, had merely held her leg and looked on while the other two, 19-year-old Finnerty and 23-year-old Evans, attacked her orally, anally, and vaginally in one of the house bathrooms. Earlier she had insisted that all three--or perhaps as many as four, five, or even 20 lacrosse players--had participated in the sexual assault as well as kicking, beating, and attempting to strangle her.

Her descriptions of her assailants' appearances also changed on December 21, apparently so as to accommodate the lanky, six-foot-three Finnerty; she had earlier described all three as chubby or heavyset and of medium height. Finally, she moved the time of the alleged assault a half-hour backwards, to around 11:30 on the night of March 13, which could get around Seligmann's airtight alibi of cell-phone, taxicab, and ATM records indicating he had left the house before the midnight hour at which she had previously maintained that the gang rape occurred.

The other event that undoubtedly inspired Nifong to withdraw from the case was a mid-December revelation under oath by Brian Meehan, head of a private testing laboratory under contract with the Durham district attorney's office. Meehan revealed that DNA samples from at least five different unidentified men had been collected from the underwear, pubic hair, and private parts of the accuser during a medical examination at Duke University's hospital shortly after the alleged gang assault, and that none of that DNA matched Seligmann, Finnerty, Evans, or any other previously tested member of the lacrosse team. Meehan testified--and also told 60 Minutes for their January 14 broadcast--that he, with some input from Nifong, had deliberately left these results out of a lab report issued on May 12, three and a half weeks after the April 17 indictment of Seligmann and Finnerty (Evans was indicted on May 15, the day after he graduated). A prosecutor's deliberate withholding of exculpatory evidence from a criminal defendant (in this case, evidence that would account for the mild swelling around her vagina that a nurse at the Duke hospital had reported, and would also impeach her statement that she had not had sexual relations for at least a week before the alleged assault) violates Durham and North Carolina procedural rules and possibly the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of due process in criminal cases.

Nifong may also face sanctions from the North Carolina State Bar for other ethically debatable conduct: obtaining a court order for all 46 white members of the 47-man Duke lacrosse team on March 23 to submit to DNA testing, even though he knew by then that the accuser had not been able to identify a single one of them as a suspect in two separate police photo lineups (the DNA tests exonerated all 46); for ordering a third photo lineup on April 4 after the first two had failed, which the accuser was told consisted only of pictures of lacrosse players (it was from this lineup that she picked out Seligmann, Finnerty, and Evans); and for publicly denouncing members of the lacrosse team as "hooligans," insisting--without bothering to interview his star witness--that "gang-like rape activity" had occurred, and urging those who had attended the party to "come forward" and break the "stone wall of silence" with which they were supposedly covering up a gross crime. Nifong seemed not to have read his own police reports, in which Kim Roberts, a second woman hired from the escort service that night (and who also changed her story several times), called the accuser's rape allegations "a crock."

Nifong, courting Durham's substantial black vote in a May 2 Democratic primary for reelection as district attorney (a primary that he won handily, as well as the election itself), also played the race card, pointing out that "racial slurs and general racial hostility" had accompanied the alleged attack. Indeed, there had been two racial epithets let loose that night, as the accuser and Roberts left the party after dancing for only a few minutes (according to Roberts) because the accuser, paid $400 in advance, declined to perform, whether because she was insulted by crude remarks made by the partygoers, because she was too drunk to dance when she got there, or because she had combined alcohol with a prescription muscle relaxant she had taken earlier in the day. As the two women departed, one lacrosse player shouted the n-word at Roberts and another yelled, "Hey, bitch, thank your grandpa for my nice cotton shirt!"--a riff on a Chris Rock routine that the shouter undoubtedly thought was funny. Everyone would agree that both remarks were unacceptable, but there is no evidence that either Finnerty or Evans made either of them, and Seligmann was already elsewhere, as electronic records showed.

Mike Nifong's handling of the case was clearly outrageous. But he would probably not have gone so far, indeed would not have dared to go so far, had he not been egged on by two other groups that rushed just as quickly to judge the three accused young men guilty of gross and racially motivated carnal violence. Despite the repeated attempts by the three to clear themselves, a substantial and vocal percentage--about one-fifth--of the Duke University arts and sciences faculty and nearly all of the mainstream print media in America quickly organized themselves into a hanging party. Throughout the spring of 2006 and indeed well into the late summer, Nifong had the nearly unanimous backing of this country's (and especially Duke's) intellectual elite as he explored his lurid theories of sexual predation and racist stonewalling.

"They fed off each other," said Steven Baldwin, a Duke chemistry professor who finally broke his faculty colleagues' own wall of silence on October 24, publishing a letter in the Duke student newspaper, the Chronicle, denouncing his fellow professors for what he called their "shameful" treatment of Seligmann and Finnerty and rebuking the Duke administration for having "disowned its lacrosse-playing student athletes." In April, Duke president and English professor Richard Brodhead had abruptly suspended not only Seligmann and Finnerty but also the remainder of the Duke lacrosse season, plus a third player, Ryan McFadyen (also recently reinstated), who had nothing to do with the alleged assault but had made the mistake of sending an email to his teammates on the early morning of March 14 describing a plan to "kill" and "skin" some "strippers" in his dorm room (like the "cotton shirt" remark, this was another tasteless joke, parodying Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho). That same day, April 5, Brodhead told the lacrosse team's coach, Michael Pressler, that he had until the end of the day to leave campus for good.

"The faculty enabled Nifong," Baldwin said in an interview. "He could say, 'Here's a significant portion of the arts and sciences faculty who feel this way, so I can go after these kids because these faculty agree with me.' It was a mutual attitude."

Indeed, it was the Duke faculty that could be said to have cooked up the ambient language that came to clothe virtually all media descriptions of the assault case--that boilerplate about "race, gender, and class" (or maybe "race, gender, sexuality, and class") and "privileged white males" that you could not read a news story about the assault case without encountering, whether in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or Newsweek for example. The journalists channeled the academics.

Although outsiders know Duke mostly as an expensive preppie enclave that fields Division I athletic teams, the university's humanities and social sciences departments--literature, anthropology, and especially women's studies and African-American studies--foster exactly the opposite kind of culture. Those departments (and especially Duke's robustly "postmodern" English department, put in place by postmodernist celebrity Stanley Fish before his departure in 1998) are famous throughout academia as repositories of all that is trendy and hyper-politicized in today's ivy halls: angry feminism, ethnic victimology, dense, jargon-laden analyses of capitalism and "patriarchy," and "new historicism"--a kind of upgraded Marxism that analyzes art and literature in terms of efforts by powerful social elites to brainwash everybody else.

The Duke University Press is the laughingstock of the publishing world, offering such titles as Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures. Phrases such as "race, gender, and class" and "privileged white males" come as second nature to the academics who do this kind of writing, which analyzes nearly all social phenomena in terms of race, gender, class, and white male privilege. A couple of months after the lacrosse party, Karla F.C. Holloway, a professor of English and African-American studies at Duke, published a reflection on the incident titled "Coda: Bodies of Evidence" in an online feminist journal sponsored by Barnard College. "Judgments about the issues of race and gender that the lacrosse team's sleazy conduct exposed cannot be left to the courtroom," Holloway wrote. "Despite the damaging logic that associates the credibility of a socio-cultural context to the outcome of the legal process, we will find that even as the accusations that might be legally processed are confined to a courtroom, the cultural and social issues excavated in this upheaval linger."

There was a fascinating irony in this. Postmodern theorists pride themselves in discerning what they call "metanarratives." They argue that such concepts as, say, Christianity or patriotism or the American legal system are no more than socially constructed tall tales that the postmodernists can then "deconstruct" to unmask the real purpose behind them, which is (say the postmodernists) to prop up societal structures of--yes, you guessed it--race, gender, class, and white male privilege. Nonetheless, in the Duke lacrosse case the theorists manufactured a metanarrative of their own, based upon the fact that Durham, North Carolina, is in the South, and the alleged assailants happened to be white males from families wealthy enough to afford Duke's tuition, while their alleged victim was an impoverished black woman who, as she told the Raleigh News and Observer in a credulous profile of her published on March 25, was stripping only to support her two children and to pay her tuition as a student at North Carolina Central University, a historically black state college in Durham that is considerably less prestigious than Duke. All the symbolic elements of a juicy race/gender/class/white-male-privilege yarn were present. The theorists went to town.

The metanarrative they came up with was three parts Mandingo and one part Josephine Baker: rich white plantation owners and their scions lusting after tawny-skinned beauties and concocting fantasies of their outsize sexual appetites so as to rape, abuse, and prostitute them with impunity. It mattered little that all three accused lacrosse players hailed from the Northeast, or that there have been few, if any, actual incidents of gang rapes of black women by wealthy white men during the last 40 years. Karla Holloway's online essay was replete with imagery derived from this lurid antebellum template. She described the accuser and her fellow stripper as "kneeling" in "service to" white male "presumption of privilege," and as "bodies available for taunt and tirade, whim and whisper" in "the subaltern spaces of university life and culture." On April 13, Wahneema Lubiano, a Duke literature professor, wrote in another online article, "I understand the impulse of those outraged and who see the alleged offenders as the exemplars of the upper end of the class hierarchy, the politically dominant race and ethnicity, the dominant gender, the dominant sexuality, and the dominant social group on campus."

The academic-speak of Lubiano and Holloway was undoubtedly a bit arcane for the average reader, but there were plenty of news reporters and commentators to translate the pair's concepts into plain English. On April 22, Slate legal columnist Dahlia Lithwick penned what read like a pop version of Lubiano: "The Duke lacrosse team's rape scandal cuts too deeply into this country's most tender places: race and class and gender." Lithwick alluded to "[m]ounds and mounds of significant physical evidence" that a rape had occurred (this was after the meager results of the accuser's medical examination had been publicized as well as the negative DNA tests for the lacrosse team) and maintained that anyone who believed the players were innocent had a "creepy closet under the stairs" of his brain. Lithwick's position was that the facts of the case were essentially unknowable, as though this were Rashomon and not a matter of whether a grave felony had occurred that could send three young men to prison.

Following just behind Lithwick was Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post on April 25. "[I]t's impossible to avoid thinking of all the black women who were violated by drunken white men in the American South over the centuries," Robinson wrote. He continued: "The master-slave relationship, the tradition of droit du seigneur, the use of sexual possession as an instrument of domination--all this ugliness floods the mind, unbidden, and refuses to leave." He characterized Duke as a hotbed of "preppy privilege" and referred to the accuser as "the victim," whose main mistake had been choosing outcall stripping as a profession. On May 24, another Washington Post writer, Lynne Duke, weighed in with yet more Robinson-style rhetoric: "In the sordid but contested details of the case, African-American women have heard echoes of a history of some white men sexually abusing black women--and a stereotype of black women as hypersexual beings and thus fair game." Like Lithwick, Lynne Duke placed great stock in the supposed results of the accuser's medical examination, which even then were known to be ambiguous.

This race/gender/class/white-male-privilege scenario that the press so eagerly bought into was supplemented by another animus that plagued several key Duke faculty members: a deep antipathy to the school's athletic programs--especially the lacrosse program, typically peopled by the graduates of exclusive prep schools who exemplify "white privilege" to the program's critics--and to the student-athletes who participate in them. The News & Observer article of March 25 that featured the uncritical interview with the accuser ("Dancer Gives Details of Ordeal") also quoted Paul Haagen, a Duke sports-law professor, stating that athletes who participated in "helmet sports" such as football, hockey, and lacrosse ("sports of violence" was Haagen's other term) were highly prone to violence against women. A Duke English professor, Houston Baker (who has since moved on to Vanderbilt), picked up the theme in a March 29 public letter to Duke's provost, Peter Lange: "How many more people of color must fall victim to violent, white, male, athletic privilege?" Calling for the immediate dismissal from the university of the entire lacrosse team and its coaches, Baker characterized the events of March 13-14 as "abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed amongst us." On March 31, Duke history professor William Chafe wrote an op-ed in the Chronicle declaring that "sex and race have always interacted in a vicious chemistry of power, privilege, and control" and comparing the behavior of the lacrosse team to the 1955 lynching in Mississippi of Emmett Till, a visiting black teenager from Chicago who might have whistled at a white woman.

Another Duke historian, Peter Wood, and Orin Starn, a professor of cultural anthropology, began expressing hope that Duke would drop its preppie-ridden lacrosse program permanently and perhaps even withdraw from Division I competition altogether, according to a story by Peter Boyer in the September 4 New Yorker. In a June interview with an alternative newspaper, Wood characterized Duke's lacrosse players as "cynical, arrogant, callous, dismissive--you could almost say openly hostile." According to Boyer, when Wood had received a negative evaluation from a student for a course he taught in 2004, he concluded that it had to have come from one of the ten lacrosse players taking the course. Wood also confided to Boyer salacious details of a booze-fueled and indisputably vulgar campus "hook-up" culture of casual sex and freewheeling parties among Duke's athletes and fraternity jocks that could have been torn from the pages of Tom Wolfe's Duke roman à clef I Am Charlotte Simmons. That novel had been pooh-poohed by most of the intellectual elite as the voyeuristic fantasies of an un-hip old man when it was published in 2004, but by 2006 many members of the Duke faculty, including Wood, were parroting its observations. As in Wolfe's novel, the good-looking Duke co-eds who attached themselves to lacrosse players (their campus nickname was "lacrosstitutes") were at the very apex of the Duke female hierarchy.

Karla Holloway's online article similarly called for unspecified curtailments in the Duke athletic programs. "[S]ports reinforces exactly those behaviors of entitlement which have been and can be so abusive to women and girls and those 'othered' by their sports' history of membership," she wrote. Holloway also scolded the Duke women's lacrosse team for showing solidarity with the accused men by wearing their jersey numbers on their sweatbands during a playoff game.

As might be expected, the press took up the anti-lacrosse meme as well, showering hostile attention on what had been previously regarded as a niche sport. On March 30, Baltimore Sun sports columnist David Steele described lacrosse as "a sport of privilege played by children of privilege and supported by families of privilege" and hinted that the Duke team ought to apologize en masse to the stripper-accuser. In a March 31 piece titled "Bonded in Barbarity," New York Times sports columnist Selena Roberts wrote: "At the intersection of entitlement and enablement, there is Duke University, virtuous on the outside, debauched on the inside. . . . The season is over, but the paradox lives on in Duke's lacrosse team, a group of privileged players of fine pedigree entangled in a night that threatens to belie their social standing as human beings." Roberts accused the team members of maintaining a "code of silence" to cover up the alleged crime.

On April 23, Fox News columnist Susan Estrich, a law professor at the University of Southern California, wrote an article titled "Why Would Accuser in Duke Rape Case Lie?" Seeming to channel Nifong (and also Jesse Jackson, who had entered the fray to offer the accuser a full scholarship to continue her studies at North Carolina Central), Estrich harped on the theme of stonewalling and wondered why no lacrosse parent had said to her son, "you go in there and tell the police the truth about what happened." It is hard to believe that Estrich was not aware by that date of Seligmann's airtight alibi, the procedurally flawed April 4 photo lineup, the negative DNA results for the 46 players (those were released on April 10), and repeated efforts by lawyers for the accused to present Nifong with evidence of their clients' innocence, including an April 18 meeting with Seligmann's attorney that Nifong curtly cut short. Instead, Estrich, taking an odd stance for a professor whose specialty is criminal law, castigated the three young men for having the audacity to "hire . . . lawyers." The purpose of this exercise of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel was "to trash the victim and the prosecutor," she declared.

Newsweek had this to say about the lacrosse team in a May 1 story: "Strutting lacrosse players are a distinctive and familiar breed on elite campuses along the Eastern Seaboard. Because the game until recently was played mostly at prep schools and in upper-middle-class communities on New York's Long Island and outside Baltimore, the players tend to be at once macho and entitled, a sometimes unfortunate combination."

One likely reason for the speed and enthusiasm with which members of the Duke faculty and the media produced their morality play that simultaneously demonized lacrosse, wealth, the white race, the South, and the male sex was that it offered something otherwise missing in Nifong's case: a motive for the players, whose time-dated photographs at the March 13-14 party show them sitting torpidly on couches in the house living room, to rise suddenly in a state of power-drunk frenzy and commit gruesome acts of sexual violence. Means and opportunity were presumably there that night, but why would these "macho and entitled" young athletes who could have any Duke "lacrosstitute" of their choice free of charge, or, given their parents' money, pay for a real prostitute if they wanted to, bother with rape?

The race/gender/class/male privilege scenario also absolved its promulgators of having to consider the fact that the evidence of the players' guilt was flimsy from the outset and grew flimsier as each day passed. Indeed, Lubiano, in her online article, dismissed the whole idea of evidence--and thus legal guilt or innocence--as just another set of socially constructed "narratives" to be deconstructed by her. The accused were apparently guilty by reason of their "dominant" social position, which made them "perfect offenders" in Lubiano's eyes.

Not surprisingly then, some 88 Duke faculty members, including Holloway, Baker, and Chafe, signed a full-page advertisement drafted by Lubiano and published in the Chronicle on April 6. The "listening statement," as they called it, did not exactly endorse Nifong's confident assertions of criminal activity and guilt. What the ad did endorse was a series of campus demonstrations in late March and early April at which Duke students, outside groups such as the New Black Panthers, and (reportedly) some members of the Duke faculty had shouted "rapists" and "time to confess," hurled death threats, banged on pots outside lacrosse players' residences at early-morning hours, and distributed "Wanted" posters bearing the photographs of all 46 white lacrosse players. "To the students speaking individually and to the protestors making collective noise, thank you for not waiting and for making yourselves heard," the ad read. It also stated: "These students are shouting and whispering about what happened to this young woman and to themselves." That suggested the 88 signers believed the accuser's story.

The faculty ad, together with such other faculty phenomena as Baker's letter and Chafe's op-ed, undoubtedly contributed to Duke president Richard Brodhead's impulsive and abrupt treatment of everyone at the university who might have had anything to do with either lacrosse or the March 13-14 party: firing the coach, canceling the season, suspending McFadyen over his vile email, suspending Seligmann and Finnerty after their indictments without meeting with either, and seeming to disbelieve the word of the lacrosse captains (including Evans), who had met with him on March 28 and assured him that they had fully cooperated with the police and that no sexual assault had taken place at the party. As former Harvard president Larry Summers learned to his chagrin in 2005, a college president courts big trouble by trying to buck a radicalized arts and sciences faculty. Furthermore, Brodhead seemed to be rewarding the "Group of 88" for its "thank you" ad in the Chronicle, setting up a "Campus Culture Initiative" to investigate racism and sexism at Duke on May 5 and appointing two of the ad's signers, Karla Holloway and anthropology professor Anne Allison, to chair two of its four committees and Peter Wood to chair a third.

"There just wasn't anything clear in Brodhead's statements that we were going to believe our own students," said Michael Gustafson, a Duke engineering professor who has criticized the university's handling of the March 13-14 incident. "There was obviously conduct with which Duke did not agree--parties with underage consumption of alcohol, hiring strippers, and if that was the whole story, then Brodhead was absolutely right to condemn it. The problem comes into play when there's a rape allegation. There was never a clear distinction drawn between those incidents and rape, so there was never a clear sense that the students were innocent until proven guilty."

As the summer progressed, evidence of that innocence mounted: Witnesses attested to the accuser's erratic behavior before and after the alleged crime, and her history of never-proven accusations of violence and gang rape. In June a faculty committee commissioned by Brodhead to investigate the lacrosse team and headed by Duke law professor James Coleman issued its report. The 25-page document found no evidence of racism or sexism on the part of team members and found both their academic performance and their off-campus behavior to be generally exemplary (Wood turned out to be the only one of ten surveyed pro fessors who had a problem with lacrosse players). "By all accounts, the lacrosse players are a cohesive, hard working, disciplined, and respectful athletic team," the report stated. What problems there were that had resulted in disciplinary citations by Duke centered around alcohol: underage drinking, booze in dorm rooms, noise, public urination, and on one occasion, stealing a pizza--but in that respect, the report found that lacrosse players were indistinguishable from the Duke undergraduate population in general. On June 13, Coleman, a criminal-law specialist, called for a special prosecutor to replace Nifong on the case. "It's unusual [for a prosecutor early in an investigation] to state that a crime occurred and that a group of people was responsible for it," Coleman told me. "That led to the assumption by a lot of people that a rape had occurred and that the accused were not cooperating with the police. That's why I was so outraged."

Nonetheless, news articles and columns continued to flow from the mainstream media dissecting the accused players' "privileged" backgrounds and the lush green lawns in front of their parents' suburban houses. Finnerty and two former prep-school classmates had previously been arrested for simple assault in a November 5, 2005, brawl outside a Washington, D.C., bar. It was the kind of first-time offense that usually results in a quick guilty plea plus community service (that was how his friends' cases were resolved), but because of his indictment in North Carolina, Finnerty was obliged to stand trial in order to be convicted (and placed on supervised probation). In a July 13 column, the Washington Post's Marc Fisher mocked the "battalions of lawyers" hired by Finnerty's family and the "upstanding young gentlemen in their blue blazers and pressed khakis" who stood as character witnesses for him. Fisher suggested that the bar fight "does open a window onto a larger truth" about Finnerty's propensity to "find fun in tormenting the innocent." (In a telephone interview, Fisher denied that he had been referring to the Duke sexual assault case.)

On June 27, washingtonpost.com law columnist Andrew Cohen excoriated some of his fellow journalists for reporting criticisms of Nifong's handling of the case (Newsweek by then had done an about-face and was openly skeptical of the rape charges). "I suspect race and money and access to the media have a lot to do with it," Cohen wrote. As late as August 25, the New York Times carried a front-page story parroting an ex post facto memorandum prepared by a Durham police officer at Nifong's request that detailed numerous injuries allegedly inflicted on the accuser that contradicted the contemporaneous reports of medical personnel and other police. That story was ripped to shreds a few days later in Slate by Stuart Taylor Jr. of the National Journal. Taylor, along with Rush Limbaugh and a handful of bloggers--notably Brooklyn College history professor KC Johnson and La Shawn Barber, an African-American woman--were nearly the only members of the media to express skepticism about the accuser's story from the outset.

Eventually, and especially after an October 15 episode of 60 Minutes showed a video of the accuser pole-dancing at a club a week after her supposed trauma, a handful of news commentators admitted they had rushed to judgment. On December 18, after Nifong dismissed the rape charges, Susan Estrich reversed herself and called for his removal from the case. Suddenly, it would seem, Estrich had discovered that the April 4 photo lineup procedures had been "unduly suggestive" and that the decision to indict the three players had been made before the results of the DNA tests on the victim's person were in. In an email, Estrich blamed Nifong for misleading outsiders and taking advantage of a disturbed woman who, "liar though she may be, is also a victim."

Lacrosse is now back at Duke, a group of Duke economics professors have signed a statement supporting Brodhead's decision to rescind the suspensions of Finnerty and Seligmann (the university had quietly changed those suspensions to less opprobrious administrative leaves at the end of the summer), and a D.C. judge vacated Finnerty's assault conviction right after Nifong dropped the rape charges. Neither Finnerty nor Seligmann is back on campus, however, and one very large issue still lurks: an angry and unrepentant Group of 88 on the Duke arts and sciences faculty.

Karla Holloway resigned her position as chairman of the Campus Culture Initiative's race committee to protest the re-admission of the two players. One of the signers, Duke English professor Cathy N. Davidson, published an op-ed in the News & Observer on January 5 that was sharply critical of that convenient scapegoat, Mike Nifong, but she mostly blamed "right-wing 'blog hooligans'" for trying to make her and the other signers look as though they had prejudged the lacrosse players. Tossing in a few red herrings, Davidson complained that the real "social disaster" in the Duke case was that "18 percent of the American population lives below the poverty line" and "women's salaries for similar jobs are substantially less than men's." Plus, we don't have "national health care or affordable childcare," Davidson wrote.

Other signers of the ad may be more worried. One of them, political science visiting professor Kim Curtis, has been sued by Kyle Dowd, a 2006 Duke graduate who alleges he got an F in her class after she discovered he was a lacrosse player (the university later upped the grade to a D, claiming a calculation error; Curtis did not respond to an email requesting a comment). Another signer, Duke philosophy professor Alex Rosenberg, explained in news interviews that he had signed the ad only to protest underage drinking at Duke and the hiring of strippers by students "when they could get as much hookup as they wanted from rich and attractive Duke coeds." Yet on January 17, several members of the Group of 88 published an open letter on the Internet, a defiant je ne regrette rien: "There have been public calls to the authors to retract the ad or apologize for it, as well as calls for action against them and attacks on their character. We reject all of these."

The week before, Brodhead had issued a "letter to the Duke community" that seemed to attempt to mollify the university's critics (including many alumni) who had criticized his peremptory actions against Finnerty and Seligmann. He described suspension as "not a disciplinary measure." Yet the letter seemed even more intent on placating the arts and sciences faculty, whom he described as victims of "blogs and emails" that attacked them "in highly repugnant and vicious terms." Brodhead described the sexual-assault allegations as having raised "troubling questions about sexual violence and racial subjugation." It was back to business as usual at Duke, back to the business of metanarratives.

Must read ping.

http://z9.invisionfree.com/LieStoppers_Board/index.php?showtopic=1773&st=0&#entry7595650
7:42 PM, January 22, 2007, joan collins said...
Profiles in Courage
The Other Duke Lacrosse Moms

“Men are what their mothers made them,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Mothers and sons have a unique bond. Ask any mother. Ask any son. A mother is the first woman to love him unconditionally. As he grows into the man you hope he will one day become, no matter how tall he grows, or old he becomes, you are still his mother and he will always be your child.

When the hoax was born, the “eclipse of justice” cast a wide shadow enveloping all the families of the 47 players of the Men’s 2006 Duke Lacrosse Team. People deal with difficult situations very differently, some privately and others more publicly. Whatever way they choose to deal with their pain should be respected. This article is based on conversations with five courageous mothers willing to share how the hoax has affected them and their families. At the onset, all made it very clear that their pain pales in comparison to that which the Finnerty, Seligmann and Evans families have experienced and continue to endure. None of them were looking for attention. Quite the opposite, they want their private lives back. However, all thought it important for people to recognize that so many families have been devastated by the hoax. The five resolute mothers are Gale Catalino, Barbara Loftus, Sherri McFadyen, Susan Wolcott and Nina Zash. Here is a sample of their stories.

The “Other Duke Lacrosse Moms” hail from Texas, New Jersey and New York. The common thread is that they are the mothers of sons who went to Duke University and played on the Mens 2006 Duke Lacrosse Team; some have since graduated, while others continue their education at Duke.

One of the major events in a young man’s life is going off to college. The mothers reminisced about happier times, when they first learned their sons had been accepted at Duke. It was a time filled with great excitement and pride. It represented the culmination of years of hard work as both gifted students and talented athletes.

Mrs. Zash, spoke about her son, Matt, who was a senior and a 2-year Captain. Matt had grown up in a middle class community in NY, a town known as a nice place to raise a family. It is the same town his parents, high school sweethearts, had grown up in. The local public schools have a reputation for being fierce competitors on the athletic field. Matt attended these schools and was an icon in his hometown. Matt was accepted to Duke as early decision candidate. He was All American 2004 and 2005.

Mrs. Catalino’s son, Michael, was a freshman. Michael is the product of upstate New York public schools and currently hopes to become a doctor one day. Michael was recruited by most Division I schools, and turned down Ivy League schools, to attend Duke. “At Duke, my son’s education was valued and prioritized above athletics. He went to Duke first for its education and secondly to play lacrosse and Coach Pressler “was sensitive to that. We felt comfortable that Duke’s staff were as concerned with Mike’s well being as we were”, said Mrs. Catalino.

Mrs. McFadyen’s son, Ryan, was a sophomore. Ryan heard of his acceptance to Duke in September of his senior year of high school. It was such a proud moment. Mrs. McFadyen and her husband celebrated by buying balloons and a CD of the 1960’s popular song “Devil in a Blue Dress.”

Mrs. Loftus had two sons on the Duke Lacrosse team. Their elder son, Danny, was a junior and goalie for the team. Chris was a sophomore. Her husband is a retired Captain in New York City Fire Department. The Loftus brothers were products of New York public schools. When Mrs. Loftus and her husband first heard their elder son Danny was accepted at Duke they were “ecstatic”. Then when Chris was accepted they thought what could be better. “Getting accepted to Duke was a badge of honor. What more could a parent want”, said Mrs. Loftus.

Mrs. Wolcott, a proud Texan, vividly recalled the day her son, William, was accepted at Duke. Her son knew Coach Pressler from attending Duke Summer lacrosse camp. Mike Pressler called to offer the invitation while they were with his high lacrosse school team at a Spring Break Tournament. Mrs. Wolcott remembered, “We were in a restaurant and William went out to take the call. The whole team knew what was up and cheered loudly when William returned with a huge grin on his face. It was very exciting as William would have the honor of being the first Texan recruited to play at Duke.”

After the party of March 13 and 14, when the hoax was born, several of the team mothers almost immediately predicted this would become Tawana Brawley II. A large shadow was cast on the Men’s Duke Lacrosse Team that would change the lives of many people.

All the members of the lacrosse team, except for one, (African American goalie, Devon Sherwood), were immediately under a cloud of suspicion. Without their parents knowledge they submitted DNA. One young man called his mother the next day and started the conversation with “I need to talk to you about something”, words that cause great concern for most parents. Photographs of the players were plastered on wanted posters on Duke’s campus. There were protestors and marches. The New Black Panthers visited Durham. Threats were made. The major news media was relentless. These were very difficult times for the mothers and fathers, the sons and their families. Some of the phrases used to describe their feelings were frightening, roller coaster and constant dismay at the justice system.

The mothers were asked to reflect over the past ten months and identify an event or moment that touched them personally. Here are their poignant responses.

As team captain, Matt was living in the house at 610 N. Buchanan. With angry protestors surrounding the house, the media in frenzy, and the New Black Panthers in town, Matt was forced to leave the house. With no safe haven to go, at one point, he was living out of his car. His parents visited each weekend, just to see him and make sure he was safe. “My husband and I went down to visit him. This kid had tried to walk the straight and narrow everyday and set an example and he was searching for a shirt in the trunk of his car. We watched him change his clothes in the parking lot. I thought I would die of a broken heart that day”, said Mrs. Zash.

For Mrs. Loftus, the most memorable moment was “stopping at a gas station on the way to work, I saw Collin Finnerty’s face on the front page of Newsday. I thought to myself “how did the world come to this?”

Mrs. McFayden described “the feeling of helplessness of watching Ryan weep uncontrollably on his father’s shoulder as he heard that his friends and teammates, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann, had been indicted and being unable to console him.”

The Catalino’s attorney called in April to tell them there would be indictments and “It’s not who you think it is”. Up to this point, the media seemed to be targeting the players who lived in the N. Buchanan house. “This revelation put us all on edge, as we knew that any one of our son’s could have been indicted that morning. The best analogy would be similar to a firing squad with 46 players, not knowing who the targets were. “We picked up our son and drove to Greensboro to spend the night prior to the indictments. We didn’t want him to be in Durham not knowing what to expect.” Unable to eat as they sat down at breakfast with their son, they asked him “Do you understand that could be you?” That morning they told their son that if he was “picked” they did not have the funds to provide bail. “I felt like I couldn’t protect my children from the media and the assault on our family, and knowing that the accusations weren’t true offered little comfort”, said Mrs. Catalino.

A dedicated student, Mrs. Catalino’s son decided the best way for him to support his team was to continue his studies and prepare for exams. With the New Black Panthers in town, at Mrs. Catalino’s request, Michael’s father and uncle flew to Durham to accompany his freshman son around campus and to his chemistry exam. “At that time the Duke campus was perceived by us as a campus whose security was being compromised by outside forces with no reassurance that our son’s safety was protected”.

Mrs. Wolcott reflected on the senior dinner on Saturday before the graduation ceremonies. “Dave Evans spoke as Team Captain, Senior, and a young man facing indictment within 48 hours about his confidence his family would see him through what was ahead,” said Mrs. Wolcott.

Time did not stop for the hoax. These are busy women. Some work outside the home. They are the mothers’ of 18 children, many with other active children to care for. They had no choice but to carry on.

Mrs. Zash’s only daughter became engaged Christmas 2005, a special time in the life of a young woman, and they had just started making wedding plans. She and her husband would fly down to Durham on Saturday and return on Sunday. “We would literally walk in the door on Sundays and my daughter and I would take off to look at wedding halls, wedding gowns or flowers. I had to try and shift gears and turn into a normal mom so my daughter and I would not be deprived of one of the most special times in both of our lives,” said Mrs. Zash. Her newlywed elder son was spending 3 to 4 nights a week at their home comforting his parents and siblings.

Mrs. Catalino experienced another tragedy immediately prior to the hoax. Her father passed away in February 2006, just weeks before the hoax. Coach Pressler, whom the Catalino family refer to as “Pastor Pressler” helped to ensure that Michael joined the rest of his family in being with his grandmother later that evening. Mrs. Catalino stayed with her mother for several weeks until shortly before the hoax began. She still has not yet had time to grieve her father’s death.

Mrs. Wolcott’s middle daughter got “lost” in the hyper focus on her older brother, until her parents realized she needed love and attention. She was kept home from college this fall, but thankfully is doing better and will be spending next semester abroad.

Mrs. Loftus described a very busy, hectic family schedule. Her daughter, a junior in high school was preparing for her SAT’s. Another lacrosse mother volunteered to tutor her daughter in physics.

Mrs. McFadyen’s son, Ryan, wrote the “infamous email” that went around the world. Her emotions have changed from disbelief and embarrassment to anger. While she does not condone the language of the email, it was a private email taken out of context. Only after a few weeks was it reported that it was based on “American Psycho”, a novel by Bret Easton Ellis taught in three courses offered at Duke and made into a popular movie starring Christian Bale. Mrs. McFadyen’s daughters and their classmates, who had seen the film, recognized it immediately. Ryan was suspended for a time. His father flew to Durham. Another player went to her son’s room, threw a few of Ryan’s things in a bag and brought it to him. Ryan and his father drove home to New Jersey in Ryan’s car that night. The media was relentless, calling and filming her house. Her husband could not face people for months. Even through the most difficult moments, Mrs. McFadyen knew she was blessed because she and Ryan were so close, and this travesty further strengthened their relationship. Mrs. McFadyen expressed gratitude for the kindness and support her family received during these difficult times from members of her community, church and the team.

The mothers and families of the teams have tried to provide support systems for each other. Their faith has helped them to get through these difficult times. Mrs. Catalino, said she did not know how she got through that Monday morning the first indictments were handed down, until she realized she had lived the words of the famous poem “Footprints in the Sand”:

The Lord replied,
The times when you have seen only one set of footprints in the sand,
Is when I carried you

Rather than pitying themselves, the mothers have tried to channel their energies to positive things. Mrs. Wolcott formed the Concerned Mothers for Duke Students. She said one of the most reassuring things she did was going to Durham for the December 15 hearing and experiencing the courage of the families of the indicted players. She and her son work on fundraising for the Legal Defense Fund. Mrs. Zash continues to work on communications for the “Devil’s Advocate”, a lacrosse booster club.

When some of the teachers at their public school began asking her children who do you think did it, Mrs. Catalino decided to empower her children. It was her daughters who suggested the idea of the Duke Lacrosse wristbands, which then became a fundraiser. Individuals and families in 48 states and 5 countries have distributed over 30,000 wristbands. The bands are not for sale but are offered by donation with all proceeds going to the Association for Truth and Fairness to help defray the costs of legal fees and to insure that truthful information is communicated to the general public. One daughter produced a film “We’re Back”. Another daughter provides monthly current event updates on the case to her class.

Mrs. McFadyen spends two to three hours daily on the Internet, searching for someone to finally see the light and dismiss this “hoax” of a case.

When I asked the mothers what messages they would like others to know they said the following:

Nina Zash: “Perhaps someday, someone will gain something from the collective suffering of 46 families. I’d give anything if my son, those three wrongly accused young men, the coach and the rest of the team could have been spared this ordeal. I look to the future with the hope that I will be shown some reason, somehow for all our pain.”

Sherri McFadyen: “This lacrosse team is the most respectful, polite, kind, helpful group of guys that anyone would be so proud to know. Words cannot begin to express how I feel towards them all. It is a travesty how they have been portrayed. Nothing could be further from the truth. We want justice which has been completely lost in this entire case from day one.”

Barbara Loftus: “If this case had not gotten national attention and public outcry, I don’t know what would have happened.”

Susan Wolcott: “Every mother who has a son should be invested in this travesty of justice. There should be no racial lines drawn. Not only is my son always in my prayers, but also three outstanding young men named Collin, Reade and David. To Mary Ellen, Kathy and Rae, we love you dearly and we will fight with all the strength and resources we have until your sons are freed from this horrible hoax. We will now always be a family in the greater sense.”

Gale Catalino: “I realized very early that we all needed to do whatever we could to fight for Dave, Reade and Collin and for justice in this case. It had to be done. Whether it was a letter, or a donation, whatever was within our means.”

The mothers spoke with great respect of Coach Pressler and said the season should never have been cancelled. Pressler took care of their sons as he promised he would. He took pride that his team has the highest average ACC team G.P.A. average. Those mothers whose sons are currently at Duke said the one thing Duke did right was hiring John Danowski as coach. Though they miss Mike Pressler and regret what he has gone through, they are grateful their sons are in Coach Danowski’s capable hands. As a father of one of the Duke Lacrosse players himself, he understands and has been a coach, father figure, and friend and is helping to heal their sons.

Not having their son picked as one of the three indicted boys brought relief, but then outrage. One mother described “steeling” herself prior to that awful Monday with the thought that she and her family were strong. “My son was not guilty of any crime, nor is anyone else. That is what makes this all so maddening. We learned early that Monday in April that our son would not be indicted. It was a relief that was followed by shock that Reade and Collin had been falsely accused,” said Mrs. Wolcott. Along with the outrage, there was great sadness knowing what the Finnerty, Seligmann and Evans family would have to face.

Mrs. Loftus’ husband, Brian, was a Captain in the NYC Fire Department on September 11, 2001. He responded to the call, watched World Trade Tower #7 go down and was involved in recovery operations. Although the two events are obviously very different, I asked Mrs. Loftus if she thought there were any similarities in the emotions she felt. She spoke of going to so many funerals for the victims of 9/11 and seeing so much pain on peoples’ faces. She thought of the pain of knowing someone’s kids could go to jail when “nothing happened”. “What could be worse than kids could go to jail for nothing?” asked Mrs. Loftus.

The hoax has caused so much pain for all the families of the 47 players. At the same time, the mothers described even stronger bonds with their husbands and children. The moms look at their sons with pride and admiration as they try to carry on with their lives. This is the resilience of youth. They know the truth is that nothing happened that night. The mothers stand in unity with the Finnerty, Seligmann and Evans families that Collin, Reade and Dave were wrongly indicted on charges for which they are absolutely innocent. Only when this “eclipse of justice” finally ends can peace return to these mothers’ hearts.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson167.html

The Cost of the Lie: Duke, the Courts, and Hoaxes

by William L. Anderson

I recently received an email from someone who was a member of last year’s lacrosse team at Duke University, a young man who has had to watch the travesty suck three of his teammates and friends into North Carolina’s maw of injustice. What he said in the email made my jaw drop, and this is a case which has hardened my jaw line more than any other.

His email said that so far, the estimated cost of defense to the three families is exceeding five million dollars. That is correct. Three families are having to shell out five million dollars in total to deal with the lies perpetuated by the State of North Carolina.

No doubt, many readers will not care at all. Two of the three families are wealthy, and the other is well-off, although the third family is having some difficulty paying the legal bills, from what I hear. I already have heard a number of black commentators and assorted leftists declaring that they see nothing wrong in having to force wealthy whites to pay millions of dollars to protect their sons against wrongful prosecutions.

Yes, I am glad that the families have had the resources to pay for the excellent legal representation that they have received, but that does not mean that what the State of North Carolina is doing is justified. Furthermore, I would argue that the state is paying millions of dollars in order to promote this particular hoax, and it would be quite interesting to see, when this case finally is dismissed, just what the total legal costs have been.

There are other costs as well. I have argued elsewhere that the outright lies and fraud have been exposed only because of the rise of the blogosphere. Professor K.C. Johnson of Brooklyn College has exposed official lie after official lie in his Durham-in-Wonderland blog, while other bloggers, such as the crews at Liestoppers, Crystal Mess, John-in-Carolina, La Shawn Barber, Michael Gaynor, Friends of Duke University, and Johnsville News. (I have been in personal touch with all of the bloggers except for Johnsville News, and I have no idea of who the mystery man is with that blog, although he has posted my articles, and for that I am grateful.)

Each of these blogs is operated by individuals who are not mainstream journalists, but rather people who have other jobs. Johnson, as pointed out, is a history professor with a full-time teaching load. Gaynor is an attorney, as are the people who run Friends and Crystal Mess. The Liestoppers crew consists of many people with full-time jobs elsewhere, but who have become so outraged by the crimes being committed by the State of North Carolina that they have jumped into the fray.

While he is working on a book (with Stuart Taylor of the National Journal) that I hope will make him millions of dollars, Johnson has had to put many of his other projects on hold. At least one blogger is having the face the reality that his own business is suffering greatly because of the work he has thrown into this project. Others in the blogosphere are having to re-work their work and family lives because of what they are doing.

When one begins to add the numbers of lost productivity and the giving up of other activities, it is not hard to see many more lost millions of dollars. Yes, people have voluntarily given up that money and absorbed those costs, but nonetheless they could have been spent elsewhere, which means there are others who are losing money that would have been spent on their endeavors.

In the mid-1990s, the costliest case in North Carolina history, the Little Rascals case, was also a hoax. Like the Duke Non-Rape, Non-Kidnapping, and Non-Sexual Assault case, the entire case was a lie. There was not one real incident of child molestation, but the State of North Carolina chose to promote the lie and real people spent many years in prison before the appellate courts finally did what others should have done and overturned the convictions.

(Two other people, after serving many years in prison because they could not pay the $1 million bond, pleaded nolo contendere while maintaining their innocence simply because they lost all confidence in the State of North Carolina to do what was right. To put it another way, they agreed to submit to more prison time – another year – because they knew that the deck was stacked against them. I suppose that is what people mean when they declare "the system works." Yes, it "works" in the promotion of state power, period.)

However, some people might say that because the original prosecutor in the Duke case, Michael B. Nifong, has turned it over to the state attorney general’s office, that this somehow gives a measure of justice to this fiasco. Nothing could be more untrue. While Nifong no longer is directing this pack of lies, all that means is that another prosecutor – James Coman – is the new enabler of the Big Lie. Even if Coman chooses not to take this thing to trial – the only honest choice he faces – he still has his name on a series of false charges.

Moreover, once he inevitably drops the case (as to bring it to trial would be to knowingly suborn perjury and could create some legal and ethical problems for him – although law and ethics are foreign terms to prosecutors), he will say something like, "We don’t have enough evidence to gain a conviction." He will not say, "These charges were a criminal fraud in themselves, and the State of North Carolina apologizes to the defendants, their families, and all who were affected by this hoax." No, the state never engages in hoaxes. Just ask the Little Rascals defendants, whose lives were ruined by the Lies of the State of North Carolina.

The question one asks is this: Why does the State of North Carolina continue to impose huge costs on everyone when we know this case is a fraud? The simplest answer is this: They do it because they can do it. Furthermore, they do it because the benefits to those who promote hoaxes far outweigh any costs that generally are imposed upon them.

One of the unusual things about this case is that the original prosecutor, Michael B. Nifong, faces charges from the North Carolina Bar Association. It is very unusual that prosecutors ever face any kinds of charges, let alone facing dangers that might result in their disbarment. A reason for Nifong’s confidence as he broke the law and lied to judges and others is that the prosecutors in the infamous Alan Gell case, who withheld exculpatory evidence that resulted in a death sentence (not carried out) against Gell were only reprimanded. In other words, as one attorney put it, David Hoke and Debra Graves received a slap on the wrist for what some might call attempted murder. (That is, using the state to impose, what columnist Barry Sanders calls, the "state-sponsored dirt nap," for someone who did not commit murder.)

Given that Nifong’s open statements about guilt, his questionable and dishonest tactics, and his public lies were the main reason that he won the Durham County elections to his present office, one can say that his tactics might have been worth it. He faces some legal fees for his own representation before the bar, but they are minimal to the $5 million that the families of Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans have shelled out.

In other words, the present setup in the criminal "justice" (sic) system is one in which prosecutors can impose huge costs on other people and upon taxpayers, but rarely face any costs themselves. Nifong is a huge exception, but I still have doubts that the North Carolina Bar Association will do anything more than reprimand him, which will permit him to keep his job and to pursue other wrongful convictions.

Ultimately, the State of North Carolina can do this because it falls into the category of what Murray Rothbard once called an "armed gang." Those employed by the "justice" (sic) system of North Carolina are free to rampage, impose unjustified costs on others, kill people, and ruin lives without the threat of any sanctions, and if anyone tries to stop him by force, that person can be kidnapped and even killed.

I still predict that the remaining charges against the young men will be dropped, but in the meantime, we still see the state authorities behaving as we would expect members of a violent, criminal gang to act. They do what they want, they strut about like owners and overseers of a plantation, and they expect the rest of us to bow down to them. These are people who impose huge costs upon others and receive nothing but benefits to themselves. As long as that kind of arrangement remains in place, expect the Michael B. Nifongs of the "justice" (sic) system to go on plundering and pillaging, all in the name of the law.

What began as a lie in a medical facility told so that a woman would not be involuntarily committed to a detox center ultimately blew up into the Duke Non-Rape, Non-Kidnapping, and Non-Sexual Assault case. The consequences have been horrendous, for the young men, their families, their friends, Duke University, and for justice itself. But we always must remember that in the world of private markets and exchange – that world detested by the faux academics at Duke University who helped enable Nifong – a lie cannot go very far.

The reason that this lie has done so much damage is not so much the lie itself, but rather that the state could take it and spin it and manufacture a bogus criminal case from it. And only the government ultimately benefited from that lie; everyone else bore the costs.

January 23, 2007

http://www.heraldsun.com/opinion/hsletters/

Paper helped Nifong

How ironic that the editors quote approvingly those from the CNN forum who want to "move on" in the Duke lacrosse case. Mike Nifong, acting almost single-handedly, created this embarrassment for Durham, and The Herald-Sun became his co-conspirator, fanning the flames of the current unpleasantness.

By supporting him while he moved forward with these baseless charges, The Herald-Sun not only abdicated the duty of the press to speak truth to power, it helped Nifong give Durham its current reputation. Are you suggesting you are actually surprised that Durham now finds itself where it is? Will you make this mistake again?

DOUGLAS L. BROOKS
Atlanta
January 23, 2007

DA election plan?

North Carolinians, Durhamites, wake up! The Republican Party recently took a big hit nationally and perhaps deservedly so. On our watch we got involved in a troublesome war and were beset with scandals. We lost credibility and many people lost faith.

This is exactly how we Republicans feel about what the Democrats are doing in North Carolina and in particular, Durham. There has been scandal after scandal, our finances are in an abysmal state and our taxes are pathetically high. We in Durham continue to shake our heads in bewilderment at the level of service that we receive from our government.

The district attorney debacle further evidences this complete lack of accountability. Why wouldn't the Democratic DA believe they were untouchable in Durham? These problems occurred while the Democrats were in contol. I ran for DA against Mike Nifong because I believed it was the only way to wrest away the corrupting power of the absolute power-hold that Democrats have in our community.

A Democratic political appointee would not do that. The Democrats were scared of losing power to a "clean-house" Republican and so the power-hungry Democrats came up with a plan to ensure that a Republican would not serve. Ironically, it appears now that Nifong's victory at the polls may, in fact, be his undoing.

We need a change. Just think before you pull that straight Democratic lever next time.

The writer is chair of the Durham County Republican Party.

STEVE MONKS
Durham
January 23, 2007

Kudos to K.C. Johnson

I'm afraid Orrin Starn [Forum, Jan. 17] picked on the wrong blogger when he showed us one of "many" gaffes the bad K.C. Johnson supposedly published. The African-American Studies Web site lists 14 professors, assistant professors and associate professors. Let's get Starn to list a few more of Johnson's mistakes and one-sided "stories." Starn's example was silly and irrelevant. Loved the KC and the Sunshine Band reference, though.

Johnson has apparently exposed too many weaknesses involving the non-rape case. His common sense is a little too extaordinary for the Group of 88 to stomach as well. It is only natural that Starn would try to discredit Johnson. Starn should try separating the wheat from the chaff. I can do it with a high school education. But since you want to play silly with us, Johnson is the wheat. The chaff are the uneducated racists who email Group of 88 members with the uncalled-for or ugly diatribes. Or the almost-but-not-quite racist Group of 88.

CRAIG HUNTER
Greensboro
January 23, 2007

The sensitive professor

How sad that Professor Orin Starn has been subjected to name-calling on the Internet [Herald-Sun, Forum, Jan. 17]. One blogger even referred to him as a terminal part of the anatomy. Ouch. Professor Starn is equally sensitive to others involved in the Duke lacrosse case who have been called names. The accuser, who was found to have the semen of four different men in her bodily cavities, was actually said to be a "whore" by one blogger.

Of course, it would be easier to engender Starn-style sympathy for the accuser if she had not tried to destroy the lives of three men she falsely accused of rape, kidnapping, and sodomy. Nor would bloggers and others who have followed this case be so inclined to denigrate Starn and his colleagues had they not so publicly assumed their own students to be guilty of a crime which anyone with a grade school education could tell never happened.

GRAHAM HAYES MARLETTE
Durham
January 23, 2007

Could this be a sign additional charges were filed last week?

http://www.heraldsun.com/durham/4-811825.cfm

"State Bar grants Nifong extension to respond

By John Stevenson : The Herald-Sun
jstevenson@heraldsun.com
Jan 22, 2007 : 11:59 pm ET

DURHAM -- District Attorney Mike Nifong has obtained a reprieve on filing a response to N.C. State Bar allegations that he violated four ethical rules in his handling of the Duke lacrosse sex-offense case, including a rule that prohibits "dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation" by lawyers.

Nifong originally was required to answer the complaint within 20 days of the date it was served, Jan. 3.

But his response apparently won't be submitted today.

David Freedman of Winston-Salem, Nifong's lawyer, said Monday an extension of time has been granted. He said he didn't have the new deadline at his fingertips.

In addition, Freedman cautioned observers not to read too much into Nifong's recent withdrawal from the lacrosse case, which was handed off to two special prosecutors from the state Attorney General's Office.

"He regretted having to leave the case," said Freedman. "It was no indication of his views on the strength or weakness of the case. It was in no way a concession to the allegations against him."

Rather, the ethics charges against Nifong created a conflict of interest that forced him to step aside, according to Freedman.

Meanwhile, a conference is slated for Wednesday at State Bar headquarters in Raleigh, during which administrative details will be ironed out for a May hearing against Nifong. The hearing could result in anything from exoneration to a warning letter to disbarment for Durham's chief prosecutor.

State Bar executive director L. Thomas Lunsford II said Monday that Nifong did not have to attend the conference.

"He's certainly welcome, but it's not a command performance," said Lunsford. "It would be very surprising if anything dramatic occurred. I do not believe anything of substance will be discussed in reference to the allegations [against Nifong]."

Lunsford had no comment on widespread speculation that the State Bar might bring yet another charge against Nifong before May: an allegation that he colluded with a private laboratory director to withhold DNA results favorable to three indicted defendants in the Duke case.

Those results indicated the accuser, then an exotic dancer, had DNA on her from several other men, but none from any lacrosse players.

Defense lawyers didn't learn that information until late last year, even though the pertinent tests were conducted months earlier.

Nifong said he would not discuss the State Bar action or anything else involving the lacrosse case.

In fact, a plethora of media statements about the case last spring is what got Nifong into legal hot water in the first place. Among other things, he characterized some Duke lacrosse players as "hooligans" whose alleged sexual assault was racially motivated.

In its complaint against him, the State Bar alleged that such statements violated important ethical rules, including:

-- A rule that prohibits lawyers from making out-of-court statements that might be disseminated by the media and prejudice a case.

-- A rule forbidding prosecutors from uttering "extrajudicial comments that have a substantial likelihood of heightening public condemnation of the accused."

-- A rule prohibiting conduct that involves "dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation."

-- A rule banning behavior that is "prejudicial to the administration of justice."

Nifong has long since said he would shun the national media if he could start the case over again. Law school gave him no training in dealing with reporters, he conceded. The lacrosse case arose after an exotic dancer claimed she was sexually attacked during an off-campus party at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. in mid-March 2006.

Nifong soon got three Duke students indicted: Collin Finnerty, Reade Seligmann and David Evans.

The three originally were charged with kidnapping the woman by restraining her in a bathroom, raping her and committing another first-degree sex-offense against her.

Nifong dismissed the rape allegations last month when the accuser changed her story, but the other felony charges are still pending.

Evans graduated from Duke in May 2006. Finnerty and Seligmann were sophomores at the time of their indictment and were put on administrative leave from the university. They recently were invited to return in good standing. "

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