Captain's Quarters -

They should have brought in the cast from CSI, they would have had this solved in 45 minutes, excluding commercial breaks.

Seriously, there's a real disconnect between how the Amercian public is perceiving police procedures and behaviors on television, and how it actually happens in the real world. DNA is not produced in minutes, hair samples are not absolute, and police closure rates on serious crime is not 100%. Indeed, where I live (SF Bay Area) the closure rate on homicide in SF is less than 20%, and then the conviction rate falls from there.

What happened in Durham is shocking and as a result there should be a range of people losing their jobs, civil lawsuits, and most importantly, a serious rethinking about how the police do their work for maximum effectiveness and public protection.

The question everyone should be asking is how often this sort of behavior is occurring in prosecutor's offices and police departments across the nation.

It's one thing to support police but do we want to give them a blank check?

Personally, I think there are more people in our jails who were railroaded than any of us would want to admit. Certainly there is no incentive for cops or DAs to look for their own mistakes.

Consider the recent shooting of Kathryn Johnston by police during a no-knock search warrant, and the fact that two months prior the same department nearly shot another elderly woman - Frances Thompson. No major policy changes occurred at the department after the first incident, and I suspect that if the public wasn't paying attention, the department wouldn't be considering any changes now and the police would have gotten off with framing a dead woman as an associate of drug dealers.

Republicans used to mistrust government. Perhaps it would help them if they gave serious thought to how to insure that there are checks on government abuse of power, regardless of which party is in control.

The best example I can think of for policy guided by politics but with a measure of separation is the Base Realignment and Closure process.

I wonder how to structure accountability in a similar way.

This is what happens when authorities put either politics or social justice ahead of justice. Justice is part of the reason we have a government and if it doesn't put justice ahead of almost all other considerations it fails as a government. Also individual justice is the foundation of social justice, a fact that certain left-wing race-mongers wish would just go away.

The police photo lineup gave the 'victim' a multiple-choice exam with no wrong answers. And that was just one of a long string of malfeasances by the Durham Police Department. Between the DPD and Nifong, there was a months-long string of meetings and events where no notes were taken, or the notes were written months after the fact 'straight from memory'.

Nifong and his private DNA lab agreed to withhold from the defense the fact that the 'victim' did test positive for DNA from about five different males in her underwear and various orifices - not one of them a lacrosse player, and no attempt was made to identify any of them.

This yarn goes on and on. See KC Johnson's blog 'Durham In Wonderland' for a superb study of a year of day-by-day lynch mob behavior joined by Nifong, the DPD, local and national media, 88 Duke professors and the Duke administration, all in hopes of a politically correct epiphany of priveleged-white-males-violate-working-mom-of-color-and-someone's-gonna-hang-for-this.

Sorry, Mr. Nifong, it looks like it might be you. But for aiding and abetting his legal fakery, all those accomplices named above might well suffer a bit too. Watch 'em run and hide.

The root at the base of the Durham scandal is a delusion on the part of the prosecutors office and the police that they were representing the alleged victim and not their true client - the people.

As IAmFree accurately points out, the pursuit of justice was lost in the race to indict. Nifong and the police thought this was a boilerplate case of putting as much pressure as possible on three defendants to force a plea bargain, in which case the prosecutor and the police come out smelling great irrespective of whether or not a crime actually occurred and the three suspects they pursued were involved.

While I am shocked at the details emerging about how little work the police and prosecutors actually did, and how negligent they were in the things they did do, I am not shocked to think that this has, is, and will repeat itself with but with no television coverage.

I wouldn't give anyone involved in this fiasco as much credit as to say they did anything out of malice, for that would require a degree of moral autonomy I suspect they no longer possess.

No, if evidence was fixed, and prosecution spun, it was due to something far worse than malice.

Rush Limbaugh puts it so well. These are days when you have to show you are "down with the struggle." Everyone's terrified to be seen as not "down with the struggle." It's increasingly big trouble for you if you're not. And you can't buy "sensitivity offsets," at least not yet.

Like Stalin said, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette. To the new coercive utopians, it means you have to destroy a few personal lives to stick it to the man.

Only problem is, as Orwell asked, where's the omelette?

IAmFree wrote (May 6, 2007 11:11 AM):

This is what happens when authorities put either politics or social justice ahead of justice. Justice is part of the reason we have a government and if it doesn't put justice ahead of almost all other considerations it fails as a government. Also individual justice is the foundation of social justice, a fact that certain left-wing race-mongers wish would just go away.

Exactly.

The police, public prosecutors, and courts exist to investigate, prosecute and punish violations of th criminal code. They DON'T exist to make the world a nicer place, or go about "righting wrongs". They CERTAINLY don't exist to aid a hack politician in his bid for reelection.

We can't even write this off with a "mistakes were made". This appears to be the result of an absolute witchhunt.

If Roy Cooper (our Attorney General) has a shred of professional integrity, he'll be investigating this f*** up and prosecuting those who so blatantly violated the public's trust.

My sister and brother in law lived in Durham, and had a serious case of police and prosecutorial misconduct in 1998.

I and my family are African American. My brother in law was beaten in a market parking lot in Durham. He had broken teeth and ribs and got a couple of dozen stitches in his face and scalp. He filed a complaint and thought that the video from the store cameras would help identify the 2 men, who he thought were Hispanic, that beat him.

2 days later he was arrested and charged with multiple felonies, including assault with a deadly weapon, robbery. The two white men claimed he'd had a baseball bat and they were defending themselves. The tape from the store was "mysteriously" erased. When my BIL wouldn't plead to misdemeanor assault, my sister in law was stopped for a "broken tail light" (broken by the cops night stick) then arrested for assaulting a police officer, and bail set at $100,000.

They were told that unless my BIL plead that day, social services would take their kids, and they'd spend years in jail.

He plead, spent 2 months in jail and 4 years on probation. As soon as his probation was over they moved out of the state.

The problem isn't that the DA went after rich white boys. They were able to defend themselves. The problem is all the innocent black men that have sat in NC jails because the entire system is crooked.

It's an old cliche that every single person in jail says they're innocent. I asked my BIL how many in NC jails he thought had been framed. He says about 30%.

"The problem isn't that the DA went after rich white boys. They were able to defend themselves. The problem is all the innocent black men that have sat in NC jails because the entire system is crooked. "

Right. This isn't the problem at all. You know. Cause they were white. Privileged and all that. They just can't be "victims" because they're not black.

Please. What tripe.

In all fairness to Waltler, there has been another high-profile case here in No. Carolina recently where a "guilty" man was proved innocent. Darryl Hunt, a black man, was convicted of the 1984 rape / murder of (white) Deborah Sykes in Winston-Salem. Recently, DNA evidence exonerated him.*

I don't say that the entire justice system in No. Carolina is corrupt or clueless, but I do say that it is imperfect and it is VERY likely that a number of people in prison are innocent. Had the Duke players not come from wealthy families, it's likely that they would have gone to prison as well.

--------------

(*) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darryl_Hunt

I correspond with somebody by e-mail. Who went to Duke Law. And, right along he said that Nifong "really got Mangum." He didn't care about what the school would do; because he knew he wanted to get re-elected. And, SHE was really the target of his hate.

You don't see it, because her story "lasted as long as it did."

But if you look, again; you'll see that the one on Nifong's fishing line, was a mentally ill black woman.

Most people wouldn't dream of putting her through this. What did she do to him? But that's the SIZE of his hatred.

And, you bet. He should be without a job. And, the Durham police? That crappy police work galavants around this country!

Interesting, too, that Nifong is exposed. But how deep will people dig on this terrible system?

The old south, sadly, still lives. For Durham, ahead? Nothing will clean this up.

For Brodhead? Well, he'll land at another school. Phony piece of crap that he is. (He's the prez of Duke.)

Right. This isn't the problem at all. You know. Cause they were white. Privileged and all that. They just can't be "victims" because they're not black.

No. They were rich. They were able to defend themselves. They had to spend money, but they didn't spend years in jail.

They shouldn't have had to spend money. Nifong, Gottlieb, Himan and the rest are bad people and they should be punished. The City of Durham, Duke, DUMC, the HS, and the rest should be liable for damages.

But spending money isn't the same as going to jail. Innocen poor people in Durham, most *though not all* black, are spending years in jail because they couldn't defend themselves. Compared to them, the problem of this one case is insignificant.

Nifong tried to steal the lives of these boys. He failed. He's stolen the lives of hundreds of other people. He succeeded. It's the difference between attemted murder and murder.

Carol Herman,
Are you suggesting that Mangum is the victim here? Not of rape but of prosecutorial misconduct? That's a pretty far reach IMO. Mentally ill or not, her conduct should not be excused.

I served on a capital murder case a few years ago in Arizona. The police forensics were laughable, the testimony the police gave was frequently off the top of their heads, without notes, and some of them were clearly lying.

We of the jury agreed between ourselves, that if we'd had to rely on forensic evidence and the testimony of the police there was no way we could have been certain that the accused had committed the crime.

There was, however, a pesky eyewitness who survived the attack on her and her boyfriend that was very convincing.

Only in the penalty phase of the trial did we of the jury learn that there weren't as many eyewitnesses as there had been, because the defendent had been hiring people to rub them out, and had succeeded in one case and come close in another. Our legal system has reached the point where those attempts on others (subject of other trials) weren't admissable.

We don't have a legal system any more, we have a bunch of lawyers in a debating society working to score points to advance their careers and who could care less about justice or their fellow citizens.

Don't forget about the cab driver they arrested on a trumped-up shoplifting charge (later dismissed) in order to keep him from alibi'ing reade seligman!

If someone had written this story as a fictional farce, no one would laugh because even farce has to have elements of believability to be funny. No one would find any of this believable.

Several years ago one of my daughters was a graduate student at the University of Virginia. One day she was strongly requested to appear at the Charlottesville police station. She spent an hour in the office of a police lieutenant who berated her for littering. It seems someone with the same first and last names had dumped some freshman English papers behind a store rather than putting them in a garbage can. This mistaken identity could have been cleared up in about two minutes had Laura been allowed to make a phone call to the physics department. I tried to consol Laura by suggesting the bright side of the story was that the lieutenant was not investigating a murder or a rape while he was conducting his vendetta against Laura. No one would want this guy investigating a serious crime. Little did I know that people of his abilities and motivations seem to be common in college towns, at least ACC towns.

Mangum is NO victim; this is the second time she's used the "I was raped" ploy!!

Nifong jumped on this because he was behind in the race for DA; once he jumped on Mangum's bandwagon Durham's black community rallied to Nifong's side.

As KC Johnson has illustrated, another crime was committed......by 88 members of the Duke faculty. The "gang of 88" organized rallies; signs were posted saying the 3 laX players should be castrated.....where was "innocent until proven guilty". Nah, the gang of 88 couldn't wait for that....here was a scenario out of their wildest dreams.

Professor Johnson started Durham-in-Wonderland because he couldn't believe that faculty members would fail their students so badly.

If someone had written this story as a fictional farce, no one would laugh because even farce has to have elements of believability to be funny. No one would find any of this believable.

Several years ago one of my daughters was a graduate student at the University of Virginia. One day she was strongly requested to appear at the Charlottesville police station. She spent an hour in the office of a police lieutenant who berated her for littering. It seems someone with the same first and last names had dumped some freshman English papers behind a store rather than putting them in a garbage can. This mistaken identity could have been cleared up in about two minutes had Laura been allowed to make a phone call to the physics department. I tried to consol Laura by suggesting the bright side of the story was that the lieutenant was not investigating a murder or a rape while he was conducting his vendetta against Laura. No one would want this guy investigating a serious crime. Little did I know that people of his abilities and motivations seem to be common in college towns, at least ACC towns.

Where the hell is the Justice Department? We have Federal laws to protect against local prosecutors and police who go off the reservation. Laws largely motivated by abuses by Southern prosecutors and police departments in cases of interracial rape allegations, so they certainly are appropriate for this case.

This kind of police corruption was rampant during alcohol prohibition.

I wonder if that is a clue?

I wonder how many here are familiar with the word "testilying"? Or why it was invented?

Surprisingly all these issues came up during the OJ case where it was obvious the police were used to "improving the evidence".

Or the LAPD Rampart scandal. Where police were killing and planting evidence as part of normal proceedure.

Or the Siler case of police torture.

Tulia.

Usually the police usually stick to doing this to the "usual suspects". When they get ouside of those boundaries they get into trouble.

We have a culture of informers and snitches (the Atlanta police shooting) that "help" the police.

All this merrily rolls along with the occasional bad case roiling the surface.

For the most part as long as the police stick it to the "usual suspects" the American people are not interested in the way things work.

Dan Baum's "Smoke and Mirrors" is excellent in running down how the system works when no one important is watching.Oh, yeah. It is an anti-prohibitionist screed. You have been warned.

I think some poetry is in order:

Prohibition is an awful flop.
We like it.
It can't stop what it's meant to stop.
We like it.
It's left a trail of graft and slime,
It won't prohibit worth a dime,
It's filled our land with vice and crime.
Nevertheless, we're for it.

Franklin P. Adams, 1931

As a current Duke student, I have been appalled at the misconduct of the Durham PD and Nifong. In my few years at Duke, there have been many other instances where Duke students have been specifically targeted by Durham PD. This has created an "us vs. them" community feeling on campus. I believe it is not simply about class (the lacrosse players are not as affluent as has been reported) and race, but more an insider/outsider mentality. Most Duke students, myself included, come to Durham for a few years and then leave. Very few eventually stay in Durham post graduation and consequently Duke ties to the community are rather superficial and we do not have the heart of the community as UNC has.

I think Waltler has a good point, just not quite the one he makes. That is how badly the NAACP and its ilk failed in their mission on this case. They could have supported the accused players in order to reveal the corruption and malfeasance of the Durham police department, thereby helping all of the African-Americans who had been abused by the DPD. Instead, they went for cheap political thrills and racist revenge. Better to trash three white boys than save any of those they putatively are defending apparently.