Posted on 04/25/2007 9:39:17 AM PDT by freespirited
DURHAM, NC. Now that all charges in the infamous Duke alleged rape case have been dropped, and state officials have deemed the allegations by accuser Crystal Gail Mangum to be false, should she be prosecuted?
Diehard supporters of the three former Duke lacrosse players, who were cleared last week of first-degree sexual assault and kidnapping charges, say absolutely.
“Ms. Mangum may or may not be deluded. She surely filed a false rape report,” conservative columnist Michael Gaynor wrote this week.
“Ignoring it would be wrong.”
“Well, we have considered that,” NC Attorney General Roy Cooper told reporters April 11 when he officially announced the end of the case, and unexpectedly declared the defendants “innocent.”
“Our investigators who talked with her, and the attorneys who talked with her over a period of time think that she may actually believe the many different stories that she has been telling.”
Ms. Mangum, 28, reportedly has a long history of mental and emotional illness, detailed in documents that are being kept under seal by the court now that the case is over.
However her older cousin and spokesperson, Jakki, told the syndicated television news magazine “Inside Edition” that Mangum is not mentally unstable.
“Someone with mental problems couldn’t have gotten through the kind of scrutiny she went through,” Jakki is quoted as saying.
Cooper told CBS News “60 Minutes” Sunday that his investigators believe that Mangum’s condition is what contributed to her multiple versions of an alleged attack there is no evidence of.
The program reported that records show Mangum had “a long psychological history’ and has taken anti-psychotic medications like Depakote and Seroquel.”
“It was amazing how she could continue to tell different stories. And she actually believed the many stories that she told,” Cooper told CBS. “The people who talked with her, and these are trained investigators who have been around for a long time, a number of them said to me, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this.”
That’s why on April 11, the state attorney general told reporters, “We believe it’s in the best interest of justice not to bring charges, and we have made that decision...”
That’s not sitting well with those who hold Mangum, and Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong, responsible for the ordeal they say Collin Finnerty, 21; Reade Seligmann, 21; and Dave Evans, 24 endured since they were wrongly indicted for raping her during a drunken off-campus lacrosse party in March of last year.
From letters to various newspapers to radio talk shows; cable news programs to internet blogsites, Duke Three supporters all agree that while DA Nifong, charged with serious ethics violations by the NC State Bar, is allegedly the primary architect of the false prosecution, it wouldn’t have happened if Mangum didn’t initially charge that she was raped, sodomized, kicked, strangled, beaten and robbed (Newsweek Magazine this week confirmed a story this paper reported last February that a player at the March 13, 2006 lacrosse party went into Ms. Mangum’s belongings in the bathroom to recover some of the $800.00 she and another dancer were paid to perform).
“Please Durham, explain to us citizens how no charges will be filed against the Duke lacrosse accuser, whom as we now know is a total liar,” wrote Mike Day of Durham in the Durham Herald-Sun Newspaper’s “Letters to the Editor” section. “Or is it since the racially sensitive issue is being caused by someone from the black community, we within the white community will be asked to look the other way and forget it ever happened?”
Fox News analyst attorney Jonna Spilbor agrees, saying in a Findlaw op-ed that letting Mangum off the hook is setting a bad precedent.
“It’s not just about punishing one person for a very serious misdeed - though that is surely important, given the devastating impact on the three defendant’s lives. It’s also about the way her lies will wrongly be used by some to question the veracity of genuine victims of rape,” Spilbor writes. “Protecting Crystal Mangum isn’t protecting a victim; it’s making every future victim more vulnerable, in the prosecutor’s office and in the courtroom, to being wrongly disbelieved.”
Despite the criticisms, the parents and attorneys of the former defendants, who are definitely expected to sue DA Nifong in any way they can, have expressed no desire to haul the accuser into court.
“I really don’t feel in my gut any need to go charge Crystal Mangum,” Wade Smith, defense attorney for Collin Finnerty, told WRAL-TV. “I understand the philosophy that people shouldn’t be able to just do this and get away with it. On the other hand, I’m not sure that it enhances our society any, our civilization any, to now bring the power down upon her.”
The youngest of three children, Crystal Mangum, formerly a second-year North Carolina Central University honor student, and now mother of three children, was always “very quiet, very sweet, and very goal-oriented, “her cousin Jakki told The Carolinian/Wilmington Journal newspapers last June.
She joined the US Navy almost immediately after graduating high school in the late 1990’s because she wanted to gain more life experience, and have the military pay for her higher education in hopes that one day, she would become an attorney.
“Very driven at an early age, 18, 19 years old. Jakki said. “Even I wasn’t that driven at that age.”
But, there were also serious mistakes, and struggles.
Mangum was married when she entered the Navy (she taught her husband how to read), but while there, eventually had an affair with another sailor, the father of two her of children. She eventually left the service, and divorced, struggling to make ends meet by working in a nursing home and a factory assembly line, among other low-paying jobs.
There was that embarrassing 2002 incident involving a stolen taxi and police chase, yielding serious felony charges, including trying to run over a law enforcement officer. But because she had a spotless criminal record and truthfully confessed to her crimes, the court agreed to knock Mangum’s four felony charges down to misdemeanors – in addition to sentencing her to six days in jail and paying a $4,000 fine – so that she could rebuild her life and have a future.
She served every minute, paid every penny, went on to technical college, and then to NCCU where she’s made the Dean’s List with a 3.0 grade point average. The escort service she worked for allowed her to make several hundred dollars a night, along with dancing at the Platinum Club in Hillsborough.
In those years since leaving the Navy, life was very much a struggle – there were bouts with depression, hospitalization, and trouble with bills.
A 1993 alleged kidnapping and rape by three Black men in nearby Creedmoor at 14, which was never investigated because Mangum did not followup with investigators, still haunted her.
By the time of the March 13, 2006 Duke lacrosse party, where she was hired to perform an exotic strip, Mangum’s alleged problems with alcohol, drug abuse and promiscuous behavior were turning her world upside down.
After her rape allegations became public, many in the Black community, especially churchgoers, did not agree with Mangum choice of making a living for herself and her children.
Even militant Black leaders said that Mangum could do better than to sell her body.
“She was stripping because she was stripped of the knowledge of herself, her culture and spiritual values,” Malik Zulu Shabazz, head of the New Black Panther Party, told a rally in Durham last May.
“God has chosen you for a reason,” his message was to Mangum. “Sin no more.”
When AG Cooper, who reinvestgated the case after DA Nifong recused himself last January, dropped the charges April 11, he told reporters that the case, as mishandled by DA Nifong, was “the result of a tragic rush to accuse and a failure to verify serious allegations,” and that “we have no credible evidence that an attack occurred in that house that night.”
Published reports now allege that Nifong, a 27-year veteran Durham prosecutor at the time Gov. Mike Easley appointed him as interim district attorney over a year ago, used Ms. Mangum’s rape allegations to mount a vigorous election campaign for one purpose – he needed three years and seven months to add another $15,000 to his retirement pension, a sum he would be entitled to if he retired as district attorney.
Nifong, who has stopped talking to the press since being charged by the NC State Bar with serious ethics violations, has not responded to the allegation.
Cooper went so far as to call Nifong a “rogue prosecutor” who never challenged or investigated Ms. Mangum’s version of events.
“There were many points in the case where caution would have served justice better than bravado,” AG Cooper told reporters. “And in the rush to condemn, a community and a state lost the ability to see clearly. Regardless of the reasons this case was pushed forward, the result was wrong.”
“This case shows the enormous consequences of overreaching by a prosecutor.”
Most moderate Black leaders, like NC NAACP President Rev. William Barber, North Carolina Central University Chancellor James Ammons and NCCU Law Prof. Irving Joyner, have cautiously accepted the state Attorney General’s decision.
“If his office believes the State lacks sufficient evidence to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that all the elements of each crime took place, then it is the State’s constitutional duty to dismiss the charges,” NC NAACP’s Rev. Barber said. “We trust that the SBI has left no stone unturned in the investigation of this case.”
Even the Rev. Al Sharpton, who defended Ms. Mangum early in the case when she came under vicious racist attacks, acknowledged AG Cooper’s decision, and DA Nifong’s alleged manipulations for personal gain.
“Not only did he apparently lie, according to what we’re told, he apparently used these three young men and this whole allegation from this young lady who [reportedly] has mental challenges with reality, to get votes,” Sharpton told The Carolinian /Wilmington Journal newspapers during his nationally syndicated radio talk show, “Keepin’ it Real” last week.
“The only motivation I can think of is if [Nifong] was doing this to get [elected], and he used the outrage of our community to do that because all of us wanted to see a fair prosecution based on what he said.”
Sharpton added, “Certainly those young men have a lawsuit beyond measure…” Critics, however, have chastised Black leaders for not embracing AG Cooper’s contention that not only is there insufficient evidence to take to trial, but that the three former Duke lacrosse players are “innocent.”
Several Durham grassroots activists are outraged that Cooper went that far.
At a community meeting at Durham’s Know Book Store Monday night, activists, who not only believe that Ms. Magnum was the alleged target of vile racist slurs during the lacrosse team party she performed at, but also was the victim of some sort of assault that players won’t admit to, felt that a trial jury, not the state attorney general, should have the final word.
“What happened to the judicial system we have in this country where the jury is the only one who can say if someone is innocent?” activist Victoria Peterson is quoted in press reports as telling the group. “If he thought there wasn’t enough evidence, he could dismiss the charges, but [Cooper] took it a step further, he said ‘We believe these three are innocent.’ “
AG Cooper said Ms. Mangum, when informed of his decision to drop the case, was not pleased. She wanted to go forward, running the risk of her fragile credibility and multiple versions of her allegations being ripped apart by defense attorneys.
Her cousin Jakki told “Inside Edition” that Mangum was “devastated” by Cooper decision.
What she’ll do now is not clear.
Sources confirm that Mangum has legal counsel, lending to speculation that she may file a civil suit in the matter.
At one point, Cousin Jakki did exclusively indicate to The Carolinian/Wilmington Journal newspapers that Mangum was interested in telling her side of the story in a book, but so far, there is no indication of any deals having been made.
Critics raise the question that if Mangum is not sane enough to be held responsible for filing serious false charges, then why is she considered stable enough to raise three young children under ten – the youngest literally just months old – without supervision or a steady source of income?
And now that the media are plastering her name and picture on television and in newspapers, how will Ms. Magnum be able to cope under the pressure of being easily identified?
The answers to those questions are why, in the minds of many observers, the final chapter in the Duke lacrosse case is far from being written.
Perhaps a disbarred Nifong will find a role here. Paralegal, maybe?
Who is this Cash Michaels person? Where has he been through all of this? Seems he was out banging on the pots early on.
No bias shown there is there?
How about: "Fair minded people"? or
People who rely on evidence?
AFAIK, he is an apologist for Crystal and her supporters who tries to spin the whole bunch of them as respectable.
Otherwise, do like all other cases like this: Indict and let a court-ordered psychiatrist check her out.
Apparently, this was not relevant information a year ago..... /sarcasm
I like the “served every minute, paid every penny” line. Brings tears to your eyes, doesn’t it?
I just want to HUG her. The poor, misunderstood, fragile darling.
Let me elaborate. Notice how he says she “left the service.”
Actually, she was kicked out of the Navy. Nice spin, doncha think?
Also, he reports Cousin Jakki saying she’s “devastated” by the decision to drop the charges. Sounds like spin to set up a lawsuit. An honest reporter would point out that Jakki had claimed on previous occasions that Crystal wanted it to be over and had even asked Nifong to end the case.
People with mental and emotional problems commit crimes every day and those who are caught are arrested and face punishment for those crimes. I do not feel that anyone should give this woman a free pass. Actions have consequences, and it’s time she got hers.
It’s obvious that nothing is going to happen to the lying false accuser or to the prosecutor who used the full power of the law, armed police, and the judicial system to harass innocent men for his own political gain.
Good point. Mangum should pay a price for her lies, but the real culprits are Nifong and his flying monkeys who used her bogus story (which they had to know was bogus from the word go) for their own ends. Nifong and Gang are the ones who should be nailed to the wall.
“....a 3.0 grade point average....”
That’s not an honor student.
Who gives a rats behind! I don't think she cared about the young men she fingered being "easily identified". Sue the (insert Imus slander) for all the dollar bills and lap dances she is worth.
They need to put her lying “I’m gonna get paid off by some white boys” ass on the stand.
Sorry, but I can’t get nearly as excited about the prosecution of this person who by all accounts appears to be quite mentally disturbed. I want to go after the BIG dogs— Nifong, Duke, Durham, liberal professors & reporters...
I wonder how Rush got away with calling her a (Imus slander).
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