60 Minutes Story on Duke Lacrosse

Mike Nifong should do one decent thing and drop the charges against these young men. He abused the power he held as D.A. and used this case to win votes from his black constituents with no regard for the law, or the lives affected by his need for power. He blatantly ignored evidence that would have exhonerated at least 1 defendent, and also rigged the photo lineup by only including pictures of members of the lacrosse team. Any first year law student would know that only is grounds for a case to be dismissed, and yet he was willing to do this for re-election.

What other laws would he be willing to break?

 

I agree, 60 minutes made Nifong look like a crooked douchebag. Which he might be.

 

I'm kind of wishing Nifong would drop the charges now. These spoiled assbags don't need more sympathy than they're getting already. I have trouble believing they're having problems getting jobs or getting laid.

 

Nifong had a good reputation prior to this based on a New Yorker article on event a few months ago. This case is sounding like the Tawana Brawley more and more. The only thing missing is Al Sharpton.

One thing it has done is pull the curtain down to reveal the ugly side of Duke that CBS does not give you during the NCAA's

ESPN Mag has pretty good article last month on topic. Here was most interesting part:

Wahneema Lubiano leaned forward in her office chair and pored over the copy for the full-page ad one more time. What Does a Social Disaster Sound Like? the headline read.

It was just minutes before the copy deadline for the April 6 issue of The Chronicle, Duke's daily student newspaper. Lubiano had taught literature and African and African-American studies for 10 years, and her campus activism on race and gender issues cast her in a comforting light for many of her students. She'd heard them describe a campus culture dominated by a small but powerful class of rich, white students who led a privileged life many white kids at Duke took for granted. She'd heard accounts of a few brutal rapes on campus and about the far more pervasive trend of date rape.

As March turned to April, Lubiano felt her students' frustration rising again, fueled by the feeling that in the wake of the scandal, no one was listening to them. The head of her department had charged her with giving African-American students a voice. Theirs were the dozen quotes that appeared on the page she was getting ready to submit.

"We want the absence of terror. But we don't really know what that means … That's why we're so silent."

"I was talking to a white woman student who was asking me, 'Why do people' -- and she meant black people -- 'make race such a big issue?' … They just don't see it."




Mike Krzyzewski is "just a coach," yet is one of the most recognizable faces at Duke.Lubiano thought back to the last week of March, to the night she'd first heard those words. About 75 students had crowded into a second-floor conference room at the John Hope Franklin Center, named for one of the most prominent African-American professors in school history. They were there for a forum on black masculinity, but the focus had changed to reflect the sordid drama playing out on campus. Tensions were high as the space filled. There were two white women in the room, Lubiano remembered, a few Latino and Asian students and a couple of white faculty members. Everyone else was black.

One professor thundered about having no confidence in an administration that considered canceling games a proper response to sexual assault and racial slurs. He called for the players to be expelled and the program to be shut down. Lubiano was taken aback by the level of her colleague's anger, which put him out of step with the rest of her peers. Yes, the lacrosse team had sparked the crisis. But there was more to it, much more. One by one, the students spoke of their unhappiness with their life at Duke.

"This is not a different experience for us here at Duke University. We go to class with racist classmates, we go to gym with people who are racists … It's part of the experience."

Devon Sherwood, the lone African-American on the lacrosse team, was in attendance, completing a class assignment. So, too, were a handful of black football players. They sat quietly, though one did say that the situation would be playing out differently if the accused were black and the accuser white. He spoke not with anger but resignation -- and some confusion. As on every college campus, Duke athletes belonged to the dominant social class. But now, being a black athlete meant juggling competing allegiances.

Like many of the black faculty, Lubiano had heard for years about the poor reputation of the lacrosse team, heard some of her students call them racists. A Facebook photo of a male student in blackface, believed to be a lacrosse player, had been e-mailed around before and after the alleged rape. Two weeks after the incident, Lubiano had attended a meeting of about 200 agitated faculty members. A senior professor stood and berated the team, saying the school needed to flush it down the drain and start over.

Lubiano knew what it was like to be verbally attacked. Just before the lacrosse case exploded on campus, conservative commentator David Horowitz had spoken there. He told students that some of their departments and professors did not belong at the elite college, mentioning Lubiano, among others, by name. Duke administrators responded with silence then, and Lubiano believed they were far too quiet about the lacrosse incident as well. So she read for one final time the words she wrote to express what her students, and the 88 Duke professors who'd signed the ad, wanted to say.

The students know this disaster didn't begin on March 13 and won't end with what the police say or the court decides. Like all disasters, this one has a history. And what lies beneath what we're hearing from our students are questions about the future.

Lubiano knew some would see the ad as a stake through the collective heart of the lacrosse team. But if the black faculty couldn't speak for black students now, could it ever?

 

Also Interesting story in The New Yorker that makes Duke dean look like Dean Wormer.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060904fa_fact

 

From The New Yorker Article, quoting the report prepared by a Duke Faculty Committee investigating the Lacrosse Program

Apparently those who wish to trash the players, team & program as racist, mysogonistic drunakrds, are guilty of Rush-To-Judgement in the 1st degree.

 

True but how accurate and fair is that report.Same article has some pretty juicy quotes from other faculty members that portray another side:

Much of the bitterest vitriol came from members of the Duke faculty. In overheated faculty meetings, in furious e-mail exchanges, in protest rallies, and in comments to the press, many at Duke seemed willing to assume not only the players’ guilt but the university’s. At a session of the Academic Council, the faculty governance body, Brodhead was roundly assailed for not taking decisive action against the team, and one professor stood and urged him to confess publicly that Duke was a racist and misogynist institution. Houston A. Baker, an English professor who has since left Duke for Vanderbilt, asserted in a letter (which he subsequently made public) to Peter Lange, the provost, that at Duke white male athletes were “veritably given license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech,” and excoriated the university for its complicity in the “sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed amongst us.”

 

This kids are rich pukes who were drunk, dumb and stupid that night -- as they probably were most nights. But there's no case. As I stated before, if I were one of their parents, I'd be screaming at the defense lawyers and asking why the charges haven't been already dropped. And if they do get convicted, it will overturned in due haste.

 

Sounds like Prof Baker has an axe to grind and deems the facts of the case and academic and social history, as determined by a faculty committee, of the team to be irrelevant.
And if someone is going to paste the kids as rich, dumb drunken pukes, how about a little equal time for some drugged up drunken whore shoving dildos in herself and her friend for a few sheckels while some unknown family member looks after her baby

 

And in conjunction with the prior post, we have this:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/LegalCenter/story?id=2571253&page=1

When the family member was asked why this chick was pole-dancing two weeks after she alleged three guys raped her orally, anally and vaginally, the relative replied: "She's got to live ... she has a kid."

I got slammed for this a few months ago, but I'll say it again: don't they have Wal-Marts in the Durham-Chapel Hill-Raleigh area?

 

None that pay $800 for less than an hour of work.