tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-325422462024-03-08T16:15:46.304-05:00Durham-in-WonderlandComments and analysis about the Duke/Nifong case (2006-2014).kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.comBlogger1652125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-73905589906801451182014-07-18T00:01:00.000-04:002014-12-13T23:11:34.696-05:00Closing Comments<div class="MsoNormal">
When I first started writing about the lacrosse case, at a
joint historians’ blog called Cliopatria, I did so in reaction to the Group of 88 statement. Then (and now) I considered the statement an indefensible
betrayal by professors of their own school’s students, an action that
contradicted many of the basic values on which American higher education rests.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Absent the Group statement, I doubt I would have noticed the
case at all—in spring 2006, I didn’t even know that Duke had a lacrosse team,
much less know any of its members. But as I remained interested in the case, the
editor of Cliopatria suggested I spin off into a focused blog. When I did so,
in August 2006, I envisioned a six-week effort, which would perhaps provide
background for people interested in the case from the <i>60 Minutes </i>broadcast, which I had heard was scheduled for early
October. Instead, a flurry of events—the delay of the broadcast, then the
November 2006 election, the Meehan hearing, the Nifong ethics charges, the
culmination of the criminal case, and the two Nifong hearings—sustained the
blog on a daily basis (the blog had more than 1000 posts during its first 14
months) through September 2007.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I stopped daily posts in fall 2007, and since then have averaged
only about a post a week. I extended the blog to follow the civil cases, which
struck me as likely to establish important precedents. (They did so, though in
ways that trouble me—suggesting that in the 4<sup>th</sup> Circuit colleges
have no obligation to enforce the student bulletin or faculty handbook, at least in cases where disfavored groups of students are targeted by powerful faculty interests on campus; and victims
have no grounds for a federal civil rights lawsuit when prosecutors and police conspire to frame innocent
people, provided the police are internally candid about their lack of evidence
and the prosecutor obtains a grand jury indictment.) The civil cases dragged on
for much longer than I had anticipated, largely due to Durham’s high-risk, but ultimately
high-reward, strategy of filing multiple interlocutory appeals to avoid any
discovery.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This delay, ironically, meant that the blog remained active
during two unanticipated but important events.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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The first came when Duke employed the civil suit discovery
process <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2013/03/duke-confronts-first-amendment.html">to try and obtainmy private correspondence with confidential sources for the book and blog</a>. For
reasons neither the university nor its attorneys ever explained, I was the only
person who covered the case to receive such a subpoena; even <i>UPI </i>co-author Stuart Taylor wasn’t
targeted by Duke. Thanks to excellent representation from my attorney, Patrick
Strawbridge, and assistance from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the
Press, I resisted the subpoena. A limited setback before a Maine magistrate
judge evaporated in the courtroom of Maine district court judge Brock Hornby,
who peppered the Duke attorneys with questions, eliciting the extraordinary
statement that Duke would be happy for its professors to live under the same
standards the university expected of me. (Unsurprisingly, no member of the
Brodhead administration ever informed Duke faculty members of this new policy,
which would decimate the freedom to research controversial topics at Duke.) In
the aftermath of the hearing, and after the <i>Carrington
</i>settlement, Duke withdrew its subpoena before Hornby could render a
decision. The magistrate judge’s decision subsequently was vacated.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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The second significant event occurred with publication of
the <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/search/label/Cohan%20book%3B%20Nifong%20apologists">revisionist
book by William D. Cohan</a>. In his up-is-down opus, Cohan portrayed Mike
Nifong as victim, “crucified” by the efforts of an amorphous conspiracy that
included defense attorneys, the State Bar, some members of the media, Judge Osmond Smith, the
Disciplinary Hearing Commission, families of the lacrosse players, senior
prosecutors in the North Carolina attorney general’s office, and Northeastern lawyers whose identities he declined to reveal. Cohan reached this startling conclusion not by
interviewing any members of the alleged conspiracy, but instead by speaking to
Nifong at length, and then uncritically accepting the version of events offered
by his chief source, a convicted liar. The result: a book praised by many of
the papers who got the story wrong at the start, and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/04/21/the-attempted-rehabilitation-of-mike-nifong/">sharply
criticized by virtually every reviewer who knew anything about what occurred in
Durham</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
With the <i>Carrington </i>and
<i>Evans </i>lawsuits having concluded, and with
the Cohan book consigned (to <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/225260457/1-13-cv-01861-Pennsylvania-Decision">borrow
Judge John E. Jones, III’s recent usage of Ronald Reagan</a><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/225260457/1-13-cv-01861-Pennsylvania-Decision">’</a><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/225260457/1-13-cv-01861-Pennsylvania-Decision">s</a><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/225260457/1-13-cv-01861-Pennsylvania-Decision"> famous line</a>) to the “ash
heap of history,” it seems like an appropriate time to bring the blog to a
close.<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Before doing so, however, allow me to offer three general
reflections:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>The Academy<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Higher education is perhaps the only product in which
Americans spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars without having
any clear sense of what they are purchasing. Few parents, alumni, legislators,
or prospective students spend much (if any) time exploring the scholarship or
syllabi offered by professors at the school of their choice; they devote even less
effort to understanding hiring patterns or pedagogical changes that have driven
the contemporary academy to an ideological extreme on issues of race, class,
and gender. At most, there seems to be a general—incorrect—impression that
while colleges have the occasional “tenured radical” who lacks real influence
on campus, most professors fall well within the ideological mainstream.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But while most outsiders have neither the time nor the
inclination to challenge faculty on scholarly or curricular matters, the
lacrosse case was different. Here, the relevant facts were public knowledge.
The event was high-profile, and the more evidence that emerged, the less likely
it appeared that a crime occurred. At the least, it was clear by 1 May 2006 that
at least one innocent Duke student (Reade Seligmann) had been indicted. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And yet for dozens of Duke faculty, this evidence appeared
irrelevant. Eighty-eight of them rushed to judgment, signing a statement (whose
production violated Duke regulations in multiple ways) affirming that something
had “happened” to false accuser Crystal Mangum, and thanking protesters (“for
not waiting”) who had, among other things, urged the <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFukSH0oSWNr2mEzQVAZyt4SdJURt4TG3AU-aOPFK-qGs-K42SiVAckBurIMXnDRNGW03FYUweUYNJV-KCq0uT-Hs5_1wqCIIT24M42Dzl_1ljOnujZr88JiDmZTAD_9ST2HfvnQ/s1600/castrate2pi2.jpg">castration of the lacrosse captains</a> and blanketed the campus with “<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkKYEVDOfTKYb33sB1VU9Oj-MAK8HODpRMY0YagOD8mcQaZ_FUPdLzSeJoybtcJ-sQVbFx0E9Rh9DO29TTKfT-czVg5Y5zBmDx99KsO3_0Xo6UlJHhYo1AK3lfbfizL5JIvcmFZg/s1600/Vigilante_Poster.jpg">wanted” posters</a>. As the case to which
they attached their public reputations imploded, Group members doubled down,
with most issuing a second statement promising they would never apologize for
their actions. (Only three Group members ever said they were sorry for signing the
statement, and two of that number subsequently retracted those apologies.) For months,
the Duke administration was either in agreement with the faculty extremists or
cowed by them—or some combination of both.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The lacrosse case provided a rare opportunity to <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/search/label/Group%20profiles">glimpse inside the mindset of an elite university</a>—and the look was a troubling one. There is no evidence of <i>any </i>accountability
at Duke: the university has the same leadership and the same hiring patterns it
had in 2006. Several members of the Group of 88 have gone on to more
prestigious positions, <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/07/checking-in-with-group-of-88.html">their
efforts to exploit their students’ distress causing them no problem in the
contemporary academy</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>Nifong</u><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In this respect, Duke isn’t exceptional: if the
lacrosse case had occurred at another elite university, something like the
Group of 88 probably would have formed there, as well. (Hypothetical Groups at
other schools might not have been quite as large—the effects of ex-president
Keohane and ex-provost Chafe on maximizing race/class/gender hires did have
some additional effect.) Nifong, on the other hand, <i>was </i>unusual.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Prosecutorial misconduct is a blight on the American justice
system, but few prosecutors violate quite as many ethical rules in a single
case as did the disgraced former DA. Of course, Durham’s particular
circumstances accounted at least to some degree for the extent of Nifong’s
perfidy: he had to violate ethical guidelines to create “evidence” of a “crime”
that never occurred; and then he had to violate more ethical guidelines to
create “evidence” to point to the “perpetrators” of this non-existent crime.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s worth remembering, however: lots of people seemed quite
untroubled with Nifong’s actions. He did, after all, win the primary election—the
day after Durham voters saw on their TV screens a video of Reade Seligmann at an ATM
machine at the time Nifong claimed a rape was occurring. And he did win the general
election—even after Durham voters were exposed to massive evidence of his
ethical improprieties, thanks to reporting from the <i>N&O</i> and <i>60 Minutes</i>. Moreover,
Nifong almost managed to bring the case to trial. The State Bar vote to go
ahead with the prosecution before the end of the case passed only by one vote,
with the chair of the relevant committee casting the tie-breaking ballot. If
not for the brilliant cross-examination from Jim Cooney and Brad Bannon, plus
the inability of Dr. Brian Meehan to carry off the conspiracy, would the Bar
have acted when it did?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Despite his apologists’ best efforts to rehabilitate his
reputation, Nifong’s behavior might have had one salutary effect: he now
personifies the position of rogue prosecutor. Journalists, legal commentators,
and the public at large now have a reference point when they hear defense
attorneys speak of the importance of due process, or caution against
prosecutors violating ethical norms. And DA’s inclined to ignore ethics to
advance their political careers will (hopefully, at least) recall Nifong’s
fate.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>Media</u><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Excellent coverage of this case came from some quarters of the traditional
media—from the 2006-2008 staff of the Duke <i>Chronicle</i>;
from Joe Neff at the <i>N&O</i>; and
nationally from <i>60 Minutes </i>and ABC’s
Law and Justice Unit. But the terrible traditional coverage—from the <i>New York Times</i>, the <i>Herald-Sun</i>, op-ed commentators such as Selena Roberts and Eugene
Robinson, and other outlets in the early stages of the case—was terrible
indeed.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The bad work suffered from two problems that reinforced each other. The first comes from the media’s general ideological biases. While not
as left-wing as the typical elite school’s faculty, the media obviously leans
left, especially on issues of race and gender; and in spring 2006, the facts
offered by Nifong seemed for too many too good to be false. So rather than challenging
Nifong’s presentation of the case, the <i>Times, </i>the <i>H-S,</i> and politically
correct commentators and authors served as de facto
stenographers for the prosecutor, uncritically passing along whatever version
of events he happened to be offering at the time.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The second general problem exposed by the case was the media’s
poor coverage of procedure and procedural issues. It’s no coincidence that the
best reporter on this case—Neff—was comfortable with procedure, and that the
worst—Duff Wilson and self-described “serious investigative journalist” William D. Cohan—appeared clueless on procedural matters.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For the media as a whole, covering procedure can be
difficult—it’s often technical, and it doesn’t exactly sell newspapers. But as
the lacrosse case demonstrated, explaining the role of procedure in policy and
legal matters is a critical role that journalists play in society. And while
there’s been some progress in this regard (consider, for instance, the <i>Washington Post </i>partnering in its blogs with
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/">Volokh
Conspiracy</a> or <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/pb/radley-balko">Radley
Balko</a>), as a whole, the media tends to do a poor job at illustrating
procedural matters. <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/02/in-honor-of-the-olympics-lets-talk-filibuster/283663/">Jim
Fallows’ laments</a> about the mainstream newspapers’ frequent failures to
explain the Senate’s filibuster process is a good example of the broader
problem.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
-----------------<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
DIW was a blog of a particular time and place. If the
lacrosse case had occurred a few years earlier, the blog likely never could
have been launched. In the initial months, I relied heavily on primary source
material posted by others (the <i>N&O </i>and
WRAL for discovery documents; the State of North Carolina for various ethics
and election items; Duke and electronic resources for academic matters). As recently
as the late 1990s, this type of material often was not available online, so initially covering
the case from New York or Maine (as I did, most of the time) would not have
been possible<o:p></o:p>—meaning that I never would have developed the local sources whose willingness to answer questions from me (and not infrequently provide me with tips) helped the blog to break stories.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If the lacrosse case occurred today, on the other hand, the
blog’s reach almost certainly would have diminished; the blog’s biggest
readership days (over 100,000 each day) occurred during the live-blogs of the
Nifong ethics proceedings; most of that information would now be communicated
via twitter, not through live-blogs, which have become passé.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It might well be—as any <a href="http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/12/the-blog-is-dead/">number</a> of <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113053/new-york-times-buzzfeed-andrew-sullivan-herald-death-blog">commentators</a>
have <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/2013-the-year-the-stream-crested/282202/">contended</a>—that
blogs, at least of this type, will be much less common in the future. (I’ll
still be writing on higher-ed matters, at the Manhattan Institute’s <i><a href="http://www.mindingthecampus.com/">Minding the Campus</a></i>, and readers can <a href="https://twitter.com/kcjohnson9">follow me on twitter</a>; obviously my academic work is still on <a href="http://kc-johnson.com/">my homepage</a>.) That said, many
of the strengths of a blog—namely, the sense of community from readers and
commenters—aren’t easily replicable on twitter or in other forms. Moreover, the
structure of the blog certainly aided me; over the course of the case, I learned
a lot about criminal procedure, legal ethics, the nature of journalism, and North Carolina issues, courtesy of exchanges with readers, commenters, and other bloggers.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
To DIW’s readers and commenters, my thanks.<o:p></o:p></div>
kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com105tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-18001669724031163402014-07-13T13:06:00.005-04:002014-07-13T13:06:55.959-04:00The Group of 88 & WikipediaSome interesting comments in a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cathy_Davidson#Conflict_of_interest_violations">Wikipedia discussion thread</a> regarding efforts to remove mention of their membership in the Group from Wikipedia bios of Group of 88 members. The evidence regarding Cathy Davidson, author of the infamous <i>N&O</i> <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/01/apologia-for-disaster.html">apologia for the Group</a>, is particularly troubling, in that the editor/whitewasher was traced to a CUNY IP on the same day that Davidson began her CUNY service.<br />
<br />
I welcome insights from any Wikipedia editors in the comment thread.kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com33tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-67966637777101391992014-07-11T14:48:00.001-04:002014-07-11T14:48:18.526-04:00Howard UpdateAnne Blythe <a href="http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/07/11/3999355/durham-judge-calls-prosecution.html?sp=/99/100/&ihp=1">reports in the </a><i><a href="http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/07/11/3999355/durham-judge-calls-prosecution.html?sp=/99/100/&ihp=1">N&O</a> </i>that Judge Hudson has said he wants to grant bail to Darryl Howard, whose prosecution, writes Blythe, the judge described “as one of the most 'horrendous' prosecutions he had seen in his 34 years on the bench.” The prosecutor in the case was, of course, disgraced ex-DA Mike Nifong.<br />
<br />
As he has deemed Nifong as honorable and quite credible, author William D. Cohan has yet to comment once on the Howard case.kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-23588195372891250752014-07-07T15:54:00.002-04:002014-07-07T15:55:15.523-04:00Gottlieb NewsWRAL's Julia Sims is reporting that <a href="http://www.wral.com/former-detective-in-duke-lacrosse-rape-case-commits-suicide-in-georgia/13792143/">former Sgt. Mark Gottlieb died on Saturday</a>, apparently of suicide. He had, according to WRAL, been living in DeKalb County, Georgia, where he had worked as a paramedic after leaving the Durham Police. I will post more information if and when it becomes available.kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com58tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-18519479099393166382014-07-07T00:01:00.000-04:002014-07-07T00:01:00.563-04:00Checking in with the Group of 88<div class="MsoNormal">
As I wind down the blog after the resolution of the <i>Evans </i>and <i>Carrington </i>lawsuits (I’ll have a closing post next Monday), I thought
it might be useful to check in on some members of the Group of 88. An utter lack of accountability within the academy for those faculty members who abandoned due process (and, in some cases, appeared to violate Duke regulations) was apparent almost from the start in the case, and remains so today.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
No fewer than nine Group members were hired away from Duke,
often for more prestigious positions, despite (because of?) their activism in
the Group. Cathy Davidson—<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/01/apologia-for-disaster.html">author of the Group apologia that invented a spring 2006 that never existed</a>—was the latest, having just joined the faculty at the
CUNY Graduate Center. She joins Grant Farred (Cornell, <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2010/04/karma-and-grant-farred.html">which got a taste of the contempt for students he had demonstrated at Duke</a>); Houston Baker
(Vanderbilt); Charles Payne (University of Chicago); and Rom Coles (Northern
Arizona, endowed chair) in moving onto greener pastures. Meanwhile, three signatories
who were members of the University Writing Program received full-time,
tenure-track positions—Jason Mahn at Augustana, Matthew Brim at the College of
Staten Island, and Christine Beaule at the University of Hawai’i—while a fourth
(Caroline Light) was appointed to an administrative-teaching position at
Harvard’s women’s studies program.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Several other Group signatories advanced at Duke. <span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Srinivas Aravamudan</span>
currently serves as Duke’s dean of the humanities. Lee Baker is dean of
academic affairs at Trinity College. And Paula McClain is dean of the graduate
school, and vice provost for graduate education. Clearly the role of their
behavior in causing a multi-million dollar settlement was no barrier in the
Group members’ standing at Duke.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Imagine if the lacrosse case had featured a race-baiting DA, on behalf of a white false accuser, going after African-American students to advance his political career. Does <i>anyone </i>believe that professors who
abandoned due process to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the DA, affirming that
something “happened” to the false accuser, would not have faced professional
repercussions in the contemporary academy?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And then there’s the principal author of the Group
statement, Wahneema Lubiano. Those waiting for her <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2006/12/wahneemas-world.html">perpetually
“forthcoming” books</a> (<i><span style="background: white;">Like Being Mugged by
a Metaphor: “Deep Cover” and Other “Black” Fictions; </span></i><span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">and</span> <i><span style="background: white;">Messing with the Machine: Politics, Form, and
African-American Fiction</span></i>) continue to wait; 15 years after Lubiano
advertised their coming appearances, the books remain nowhere to be found.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Lubiano, befitting someone who believes that she
participates in what she calls “public intellectualism,” has sporadically <a href="https://twitter.com/wahneema">shared her insights via twitter</a>. In February,
for instance, <a href="https://twitter.com/wahneema/status/435120786207014914">she
revealed</a> that she has spent her “entire adult life addressing the US public’s
murderous imagination when it comes to the lives of black Americans.” As always,
temperate analysis from the tenured professor.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Lubiano hasn’t tweeted in a few months. She doesn’t appear
to be academically active, either. According to her <a href="http://aaas.duke.edu/people?Gurl=/aas/AAAS&Uil=wah&subpage=profile">departmental
CV at Duke</a>, the Group of 88 leader has a grand total of . . . one . . .
academic publication in the past <i>six years</i>,
an article entitled, “<a href="http://aaas.duke.edu/uploads/media_items/lubiano.original.pdf">Affect and
Rearticulating the Racial ‘Un-sayables</a>.’” The four-page essay appeared in
the journal <i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Cultural Anthropology</span></i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; padding: 0in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; padding: 0in;">(Lubiano appears to be comfortable with
this length; her previous publication, subtitled “An Interview with Wahneema
Lubiano,” also spanned four pages.)</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the event, Lubiano’s recent publication builds off her
work in <a href="http://trinity.duke.edu/undergraduate/first-year-seminars/spring-2013-seminars">teaching a first-year seminar at Duke</a>, “Prison, the U.S., and the
Citizen.” The course, according to the Group leader, explores “the inability of
general public discussion—what my students are aware of in abundance but which
they understand as ‘natural’—to accommodate elaborated and unelaborated
discourses for cathected critical engagement, e.g., white supremacy and its
connection to prison.” Lubiano lamented that, in the class, she often ran “up
against the difficulty of moving our students from that hegemonic subjectivity to
something more specifically critical.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Duke professor expressed her concern that “what I have
in the classroom” could “best be described as a fierce (albeit inarticulate)
obedient state subject who resists a critique of the state and of prison, <i>a resistance that might be described as
white supremacist common sense</i>.” [emphasis added] Lubiano further contended
that “because of [her students’] resistance to the basics of empathy with
regard to mass incarceration, they’ve taken up the position of aestheticized
white supremacist subject instead.” In other words: parents can spend $50,000 a
year to have Duke faculty suggest that their son or daughter exhibits “white
supremacist common sense.” You’d almost think that Lubiano is a fiction,
invented by David Horowitz or another right-wing critic of the academy to discredit the entire higher-ed enterprise.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As a reminder: Lubiano was hired by Duke on the basis of two
“forthcoming” books that, to date, have never appeared.<o:p></o:p></div>
kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-67986395521095884462014-07-01T00:01:00.000-04:002014-07-01T00:01:00.467-04:00Cohan's Trials<div class="MsoNormal">
Now that his publicity tour appears to have ended, I thought
it might be worthwhile to have two short concluding comments on the work of
William D. Cohan. (You can <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/search/label/Cohan%20book%3B%20Nifong%20apologists">read
all of my Cohan-related posts here</a>.)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
First: a mantra of Cohan’s tour was the author’s purported
intention to have the book function as a trial in the case. He described the
book in this odd manner on <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/hard-hitting-journalism-from-morning-joe.html">Morning
Joe</a>, <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/05/counselor-cohan-on-law-proces.html">WNYC</a>,
<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohan-i-certainly-feel-sorry-for-mike_28.html">WAMC</a>,
<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohan-does-c-span.html">C-SPAN</a>,
the <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohan-why-why-why.html">Michael
Smerconish Show</a>, and the <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/fisking-cohan-on-rehm.html">Diane
Rehm Show</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Leave aside, for a moment, the obvious: in the United
States, political trials of the type that Cohan seems to have wanted don’t
occur. Instead, when prosecutors (in the lacrosse case, Jim Coman and Mary
Winstead, and through them Attorney General Roy Cooper) believe that the
defendants are actually innocent, the prosecutors have an ethical obligation to
dismiss charges.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
But, again, leave aside basic rules of legal ethics. In a
sexual assault trial, at a bare minimum four people speak: the judge, the
prosecutor, the accuser, and the defense attorney. (Obviously in most cases,
more people than four speak.) The defendant might or might not take the stand;
in many cases, for various reasons, the defendant doesn’t testify.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
In Cohan’s model of the book-as-trial, author Cohan
functioned as the judge, and he certainly spoke (as, for instance, when he
praised Nifong’s defense, which the State Bar wholly rejected, as “cogent”).
Accuser Crystal Mangum was given the opportunity to speak, in a jailhouse
interview in which she told still more tall tales (that medical staff had to
pull wooden shards from her, that one of the students she falsely accused
carried her to the car). And Nifong was allowed to speak. And speak. And speak.
And speak some more, virtually always without challenge—even though in a real
trial, a prosecutor who bore false witness would be silenced by the judge.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
But in William D. Cohan’s “trial,” Judge Cohan never asked the
defense attorneys to speak. He solicited no interviews from Brad Bannon, Jim
Cooney, Joe Cheshire, Wade Smith, or Doug Kingsbery. Nor, when Nifong became the defendant, did Cohan seek to interview the men and women who prosecuted him, either before the State Bar or in the contempt trial. The author never explained this
curious editorial decision, either in the book itself or in his myriad post-publication
interviews. Indeed, to the best of my knowledge, he never was asked, in any
interview, why he deliberately did not solicit interviews from such key figures
in the case.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
In this manner, Cohan imitated the conduct of his book’s
protagonist, when Nifong notoriously refused to speak with multiple groups of
defense attorneys before the indictments. This approach was one of the many
ways in which the line between Cohan and the disgraced prosecutor blurred to such
an extent as to be almost invisible.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Second: consider one element from Cohan’s presentation of the
ethics hearing, courtesy of the “honorable” and “quite credible” Mike Nifong. Discussing
Reade Seligmann’s testimony during the proceedings, Cohan wrote the following,
mostly consisting of quotes from his interviews with Nifong (p. 554):<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
“‘They [the State Bar prosecutors] were very surprised to
find that Reade Seligmann came across very well, even though some of what he
said might not have been true. And actually, he did come across very well . . .
. [<i>ellipsis in original</i>] Not
everything he said was true, but he did come across very well.’ Nifong was
reluctant to specify what exactly Seligmann had said in his testimony that wasn’t
true. ‘Some of the things that he said about the party, we had other things to
show otherwise,’ [Nifong] continued. ‘There’s no point in getting into any of
that. I’ve already talked to you [Cohan] about how his actions after the party
indicated that in leaving he showed that he knew that there was something about
that that he had to distance himself from. There were some other things that I pointed
out that he said, about [how] [<i>brackets in
original</i>] he was going to get married, which, of course, is exactly what Crystal
Mangum said about the person she identified as Seligmann.’”<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
In the critiques of Cohan book, this passage hasn’t received
much attention, presumably because the allegations are bizarre even for
the reality-challenged Nifong. But the passage is revealing about the deeply
troubling editorial standards that Cohan employed in his book, which Scribner’s
editorial and legal staff tolerated.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
In this passage, Cohan allows Nifong, unchallenged, to make
three points:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
(1) The State Bar prosecutors were “very surprised to find
that Reade Seligmann came across very well”;<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
(2) Seligmann committed perjury on the stand during the
proceedings, regarding “some of the things that he said about the party”;<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
(3) At some point in the case, Seligmann “said” something “about
[how] he was going to get married.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
The first claim is based on Cohan’s inexplicable strategy of
attempting to glean the State Bar prosecutors’ legal strategy not by
interviewing them, or by interviewing their witnesses, but instead by
interviewing the defendant in the case, Mike Nifong.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
State Bar prosecutor Doug Brocker (to whom Cohan did not
speak) confirmed to me that the Bar prosecution team was not in any way surprised by
Seligmann coming across well. No sentient person could have been “surprised”
that Seligmann came across well—his coming across well had been a major theme
of the case by this time.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
It remains unclear why Cohan printed something that he must
have known was untrue. It also remains unclear why Cohan apparently made no
attempt to verify Nifong’s counterintuitive assertion with the Bar prosecutors before
including it, unchallenged, in what Scribner’s has termed the “definitive”
account of the book.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
The second item in the passage raises even more serious concerns
about Cohan’s integrity. Could it possibly be that Nifong and his attorneys
knew that a powerful witness against them had lied on the stand, and yet
elected not to confront him with this information at the hearing? What possible
rationale could they have had for such a course?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
They had, naturally, no such rationale, because Seligmann
didn’t lie on the stand. Indeed, on the stand, his only discussion regarding “things . . .
about the party” involved material related to his alibi, as previously presented both in a defense motion and then to the special prosecutors, and verified through electronic evidence along with the statements of two other people. As
with the first false statement in this passage, I confirmed with Doug Brocker
that the Seligmann testimony contained nothing untruthful. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
In this instance, however, Cohan wouldn’t have needed to
have interviewed Brocker to have discovered that Nifong was lying. While Cohan didn’t
attend Nifong’s disciplinary hearing, on page 619 of the book, he did imply that
he watched the video of it: “There is also a treasure-trove of contemporaneous video
recordings—from WRAL-TV in Raleigh—of events and press conferences as they
unfolded.” At the least, he was aware that a video of Seligmann’s testimony
existed. That video is embedded below.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="310" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/RuQT8SZth9w" width="554"></iframe>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Given the video’s contents, there are only two explanations
for the second element of the passage above:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
(1) Cohan unknowingly printed Nifong’s false allegation that
Seligmann hadn’t told the truth on the stand. Cohan did so because he elected not to take one hour to investigate Nifong’s claim—even though he
understood that his book’s chief source (Nifong) is a convicted liar.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
(2) Cohan had, in fact, viewed the video of Seligmann’s
testimony, and therefore knew that Nifong’s assertion was false. But—blinded by
his partisanship for Nifong, his disdain for the falsely accused students, or
some combination of the two sentiments—he printed the allegation anyway.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Either explanation would—at the very least—demand that
Scribner’s issue a public retraction of this section of the Cohan book.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
And then there’s the third section of the passage, in which Nifong
reminisces that Seligmann had said “he was going to get married, which, of
course, is exactly what Crystal Mangum said about the person she identified as
Seligmann.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
The inclusion of this item, unchallenged, is nothing short of extraordinary. At no point in the case
did Seligmann ever say something to the effect that “he was going to get
married”—because, of course, in 2006 he wasn’t “going to get married.” He didn’t
say anything to this effect in the Bar testimony, as Cohan could have confirmed
if he had looked at the video of Seligmann’s testimony. Seligmann also didn’t
say anything to this effect in any interview he gave on the case, or in any
available document from the discovery file (which Cohan, despite his
self-described credentials as an “investigative reporter,” seems not to have
obtained).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Why, then, did Cohan print Nifong’s false assertion without
any challenge or factual context?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
(1) Cohan didn’t know the allegation was false, because he elected not to take one hour to confirm the veracity of Nifong’s claim, and
because the book’s reporting limitations had denied him access to case-related
documents that likewise had no substantiation for Nifong’s assertion.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
(2) Cohan, in fact, knew that Nifong’s assertion that
Seligmann said something about getting married was false. But—blinded by his
partisanship for Nifong or his disdain for the falsely accused students or some
combination of the two sentiments—he printed the allegation anyway.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Either explanation would—at the very least—demand that
Scribner’s issue a public retraction of this section of the Cohan book.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Cohan’s willingness to publish serious allegations that he
either knew were false or would have recognized as false with a minimum of
reporting speaks volumes as to his goals in producing the allegedly “definitive”
account of the case.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Hat tip: K.</div>
kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com39tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-72565562896750634442014-06-16T15:05:00.000-04:002014-06-16T18:54:22.221-04:00Credibility & Commentary<div class="MsoNormal">
I have a <a href="http://www.mindingthecampus.com/forum/2014/06/credibility_and_campus_comment.html">piece
over at Minding the Campus</a> on the issue of accountability, in this instance regarding the approach of the
commentariat to the current war on campus due process.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of the people I looked at was retired Penn anthropology
professor (specialist in Women's Studies, Southeast
Asia, Anthropology of Gender, Multiculturalism, Sexual Culture, Public Interest
Ethnography/Anthropology) Peggy Reeves Sanday, whose final book,
published in 2007, was an updated version of her earlier <i>Fraternity Gang Rape</i>. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">NYU
Press </span><a href="http://nyupress.org/books/book-details.aspx?bookId=820#.U53yMfldWSo"><span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">blurbed the book in the
following manner</span></a><span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">: “</span>Sanday
updates the incidences of fraternity gang rape on college campuses today,
highlighting such recent cases as that of Duke University and others in the
headlines.” Of course, there was no “gang rape” in the lacrosse case, and the
lacrosse players weren’t part of a fraternity. Otherwise, Sanday seemed right
on target.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As part
of a Cohan-esque book tour, Sanday defended her work with a March 2007 column
placing the “Duke case in perspective”—in which <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/03/sandays-structure.html">she
proclaimed</a> that she would not address “whether a sexual
assault took place at the party” or “whether the district attorney botched the
investigation.” Nonetheless, she deemed it “<span style="background: white;">noteworthy that the sexual offense and kidnapping counts have not yet
been dropped.” Of course, one month later, the charges were not only dropped
but the falsely accused were declared innocent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">In the book itself, Reeves
Sanday <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=oDuBvb3oT6wC&pg=PA202&lpg=PA202&dq=peggy+sanday+duke+lacrosse&source=bl&ots=dUt-sz0-0Q&sig=YzkLcQsv7rdqYY-ro_Hvra65sEQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=G_KeU4PbCsqjyATTm4HoBw&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=peggy%20sanday%20duke%20lacrosse&f=false">offered
the following</a> . . . analysis . . . of the case: “one can only imagine” that
the goal of the lacrosse players’ party was to create an event that “actively
promotes if not abets non-consensual sexual behavior.” (p. 202) It’s not clear
why Reeves Sanday based an item in what was an academic publication on her
imagination.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">Why bring these items up now?
As many DIW readers know, we’re in the midst of a high-profile public debate
about whether due process for students accused of sexual assault should be
eroded. (To my dismay, the Obama administration and a coalition of “activists” have pushed
strongly for weakening due process protections.) The move has also attracted support
from politically correct journalists, such as </span>NPR blogger Barbara King. In
a <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/06/12/321384593/to-fight-campus-rape-culture-must-change?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=socia">post</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"> </span>celebrating a California bill requiring students to
obtain (and, presumably, find a way to record) “affirmative consent” any
intercourse, King cited—of all people—Sanday. The Duke “expert” affirmed rejoiced
that the California bill <span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">would help “to make campus sexual cultures more equitable and
by so doing change the broader understanding of the meaning of sexual equality.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">The
politically correct don’t need to worry about false predictions costing credibility.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">On
the issue of what it takes to lose credibility when the thesis is a politically
correct one: consider the latest (perhaps the last?) review of the Cohan book,
coming from Matt Storin, the (well-respected) former editor of the <i>Boston Globe</i>. Storin <a href="http://news.nd.edu/news/31309-notre-dame-names-chief-communications-executive/">went
on to work in the Notre Dame Communications Office</a>, and his review was <a href="http://magazine.nd.edu/news/48747-what-i-m-reading-the-price-of-silence-william-d-cohan/">published
in <i>Notre Dame Magazine</i></a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Continuing
the pattern of praising a book that doesn’t exist (seen in <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/new-evidence-from-karen-r-long.html">the
<i>Economist </i>and <i>Newsday </i>reviews, in particular</a>), Storin gushes that Cohan “</span>interviewed
so many of the key people, and so well, that it is mostly captivating.”
Among the “key people” that Cohan didn’t <i>try
</i>to interview: the major defense attorneys; the State Bar prosecutors;
Nifong’s primary campaign manager; the judge; the
DHC chairman and panel; the special prosecutors in the criminal contempt trial;
and the senior prosecutors in the AG’s office who oversaw the office’s investigation.
Indeed, as I’ve noted previously, Cohan appears to have interviewed only five
people (Mike Nifong, Nifong’s attorney, Crystal Mangum, Bob Steel, and Ryan
McFadyen) for the book.<br />
<br />
Why Storin considers this meager list to constitute
interviewing “so many of the key people” in the case he doesn’t say. Nor does
he reveal why he considers Cohan’s penchant for <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohan-lax-on-prosecutorial-ethics.html">virtually
never challenging Nifong’s assertions</a> to exemplify a reporter interviewing “so
well.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I grew up reading the <i>Globe</i>;
I don’t recall the paper<i> </i>regularly
covering criminal justice issues through its reporters not even <i>trying </i>to interview the defense attorneys, as Cohan did in the
sections of the book dealing with the criminal case in 2006, or the prosecutors,
as occurred in the book’s coverage of Nifong’s ethics and criminal contempt
proceedings. Storin doesn’t explain in his review why he held Cohan to a lower
standard than that expected from first-year <i>Globe
</i>reporters.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Storin also came away from the book concluding that “you
probably have to give a nod to the defense attorneys.” Those would the
same defense attorneys who Cohan didn’t try to interview and who he recently
claimed (without presenting any substantiation) want to see Nifong “<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/06/cohan-defense-attorneys-want-nifong.html">literally
dead in the ground</a>.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Storin praises Cohan (who, again, didn’t try to speak to
more than a dozen “key” players who tangled with book protagonist Nifong in the
courtroom) for reporting “meticulously and fairly about the whole sorry episode.”
That would be the same Cohan whose “something happened” thesis depends on
police <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/06/cohan-side-by-side.html">investigator
Ben Himan lying about the AG’s evidence</a>, coupled with a <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/05/counselor-cohan-on-law-proces.html">wide-ranging
conspiracy</a> of the defense attorneys, the Bar, the AG’s office, and
unidentified Northeastern money to prevent the truth from coming out. And, of course, the same Cohan whose . . . <o:p></o:p>meticulous . . . research uncovered no new evidence about the criminal case, other than Mangum’s false assertions about wooden shards and who carried her to the car.</div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the end, Storin rejects the book’s basic thesis when he
describes the lacrosse players as “falsely accused.” He doesn’t say if he agrees
with Cohan that Nifong, a “<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohan-i-certainly-feel-sorry-for-mike_28.html">quite
credible</a>” and “<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohan-i-certainly-feel-sorry-for-mike_28.html">honorable</a>”
man, was “<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohan-i-certainly-feel-sorry-for-mike_28.html">crucified</a>.”
Perhaps that’s the type of meticulous analysis that Storin found so appealing.<span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-79566394026858155362014-06-09T00:01:00.000-04:002014-12-13T22:26:07.494-05:00Cohan: "Defense Attorneys" Want Nifong "Literally Dead in the Ground"<div class="MsoNormal">
Author William D. Cohan recently departed a columnist’s position at Bloomberg View for one at <i>Huffington
Post </i>(which generally does not pay its columnists). Cohan then used his first <i>HuffPost </i>piece to <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/05/free-speech-william-d-cohan.html">lash
out at the free speech rights of his critics</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Huffington Post </i>also
<a href="http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/william-cohan-the-price-of-silence-duke-lacrosse-scandal/5386554d78c90aff9200017c">provided
what likely will be Cohan’s final promotional appearance for his book</a>. As
with each of his interviewers other than WUNC’s Frank Stasio, the <i>HuffPost Live </i>asked no meaningful
questions about Cohan’s revisionist thesis. Cohan, even so, came across as
noticeably more ill-tempered than in his initial interviews about the book; at
times, he seemed almost unhinged when talking about his critics and
(especially) the defense attorneys.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>Cohan, Unhinged<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Cohan was asked who had suffered the most in the case. The
answer supplied by the passionate Nifong apologist would come as little
surprise. But then the author seemed to lose touch with reality.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<u>COHAN at 13.30</u>: “So you ask who, who came out the worst in all of
this, who suffered the most: I think, obviously, Mike Nifong, the prosecutor,
suffered the most. He’s the only one who spent any time in jail, he spent a day
in jail. He lost his job, he was disbarred as a lawyer. He filed for personal
bankruptcy. I mean, there are—of course, the defense attorneys would say, ‘That’s
not good enough for him, that’s too good for him, and he should be, you know .
. .’ They won’t be happy until he’s literally dead in the ground. And they’re
doing everything they can to try to put him there!”<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Here is a <a href="http://kcjohnson.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/cohan-unhinged-1.mp3">link to the audio</a>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Incredibly, the <i>HuffPost
</i>host made no comment, no request for substantiation, as her guest made this
wild assertion. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Since the criminal contempt trial, the defense attorneys
have had no dealings with Nifong. The idea that they’re “doing everything they
can” now to place him “literally dead in the ground” is nothing short of
bizarre.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
It should go without saying that while Cohan offers such a
crazy claim, he never even tried to interview any of the attorneys he now
claims want Nifong “literally dead.” So how he reached this determination about
their thoughts must remain a mystery.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>Seligmann, Finnerty, and the Party<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Early in the interview, Cohan offered what appears to be a new description of the
party.<br />
<br />
<u>COHAN at 1.53</u>: “In this situation, you had three students, accused of sexual
assault, and rape, after <i>all day of
partying, and drinking</i>, when they thought it would be a great idea to
invite strippers to <i>their </i>house, off
campus.” [emphases added]<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
By this point, it’s beyond clear that Cohan simply doesn’t
know very much about the topic on which he wrote. But could he actually now
have come to <i>believe </i>that Reade
Seligmann and Collin Finnerty lived with the three captains? That they were at
the house “all day” during the day of the party? That strippers were invited to
“their” house? His statement makes no sense otherwise.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>The Nifong Apologist<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The host asked, without providing specifics, if Cohan had a response to criticisms that the book sought to rehabilitate Nifong:<br />
<br />
<u>COHAN at 3.06</u>: “I really find it humorous [<i>at this stage in the video, Cohan looks
anything but amused</i>] and counterintuitive . . . To be criticized for
talking to one of the principal players in this drama, no pun intended, the
prosecutor, Mike Nifong, who brought this action, [<i>voice rising</i>] to be criticized for actually giving him a chance to
tell his story, by other journalists who criticize me—many other journalists [<i>voice rising again</i>] have criticized me
for allowing Mike Nifong to have a microphone!”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Given that a bit later in the interview, Cohan would lament
Nifong’s suffering, present him as the major victim in the case, and wildly
claim that defense attorneys were trying to leave him “literally dead in the
ground,” the denial about his status as a Nifong apologist rings a bit hollow.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the event: to the best of my knowledge, no one has
criticized Cohan for speaking to Nifong. I certainly haven’t. The criticism—<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/03/coman-to-neff-nifong-characterizations.html">made
by the first person to publicly comment on the matter, Joe Neff</a>, and echoed
by me <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/search/label/Cohan%20book%3B%20Nifong%20apologists">after
I got to read the book</a>—has been that Cohan uncritically accepted the
version of events presented by a convicted liar, that instead of functioning as
an “investigative journalist,” Cohan saw his role as a pro-Nifong propagandist.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Nothing Cohan has said or done at any point in his publicity
tour has refuted this criticism.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>Math Lessons from William D. Cohan<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>COHAN at 4.00</u>: “So you’ve got a 620-page book, 600 pages of which
are incredibly critical of everything Mike Nifong did along the way, and 20
pages of it are Mike Nifong explaining why he did what he did, and also to some
extent admitting many of the things his critics ascribe to him, and basically
saying if he could have done it differently, he probably would have, and yet
also defending many of his actions!<o:p></o:p>”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I addressed this <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/math-lessons-from-william-d-cohan.html">very
strange argument previously</a>. At this point, Cohan’s repeating the assertion
suggests either that he hasn’t read his own book or he possesses an almost
casual willingness to make demonstrably false statements.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>Cohan and His Enemies<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>COHAN at 4.22</u>: [<i>increasingly
passionate as he proceeds</i>] To somehow ascribe to me motives, as if I were
trying to rewrite this story [<i>recoils, as
if horrified</i>], or to give Mike Nifong a platform he doesn’t deserve, to me
is so ridiculous, and so absurd, that I was absolutely—I wasn’t shocked by it, but
I couldn’t believe that people who consider themselves to be professional,
responsible journalists today, and who have gotten space in some of our most
well-respected publications like the <i>New
Republic </i>[Stuart], and <i>Commentary </i>[me],
and the <i>Wall Street Journal </i>[<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/05/rabinowitz-eviscerates-author-cohan.html">Dorothy
Rabinowitz</a>], to make their, you know, vitriolic cases against me. One of
their main criticisms would be that I gave air time to Mike Nifong and Crystal
Mangum, two of the principal uh, uh, actors in this drama, is <i>patently </i>absurd.<o:p></o:p>”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Cohan has already made clear that whether his critics
deserve free-speech protections is an open question. The criticism that Cohan
gave “air time” to Nifong and Mangum appeared nowhere in any of the reviews
that Cohan mentioned. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Notice that amidst his self-professed horror, Cohan nowhere in
the interview addresses the actual criticisms of his book. At this point, I
think it’s fair to say that his silence regarding the substantive critiques
speaks volumes.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>Proper Procedures for Prosecutors<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The host clearly knew very little about the case. But she
did know that Nifong was disbarred, and six minutes into the interview, she
tried to get Cohan to explain precisely what Nifong did. The guest wasn’t
interested.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>COHAN at 5.51</u>: “[Nifong] was disbarred by the State Bar, . . . then he was found in contempt of court and spent that 24 hours in jail . . . all for doing what prosecutors are supposed to do: which
is, if they believe a crime was committed . . . You know, and prosecutors can
believe a crime is committed for any number of different reasons—they believe
the witness, they believe the police investigation, they looked at, you know,
the documentary evidence and the DNA evidence, they talked to the nurse that
examined Crystal Mangum on the night this supposed, uh, felony was committed.
For whatever reasons that he believed a crime was committed, his job as a
prosecutor is to take that evidence . . . forth into a trial.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s terrifying that Cohan believes that a prosecutor who
lies to a judge, withholds exculpatory evidence, violates ethical guidelines
regarding public statements amidst an election campaign, and orders the police
to run a photo array that violates their own guidelines was just “doing what
prosecutors are supposed to do.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Beyond that point, take a look at the remainder of Cohan’s
statements and apply it to this case. Nifong first made his public statements
that he had come to “believe a crime was committed” early in the afternoon of
27 March 2006. At that point, he hadn’t spoken to the witness, the police
investigation had uncovered nothing, he hadn’t looked at the documentary
evidence, there was no DNA evidence, and he hadn’t talked to the nurse that
examined Crystal Mangum on the night this supposed felony was committed.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Cohan’s protagonist,
Mike Nifong, admitting as much during the ethics hearing.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/LDZzK9YivJs" width="480"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
So is it Cohan’s conclusion that a prosecutor can “believe”
a crime occurred, and thus take a case to trial, for any reason at all?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>The Nifong Record<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>COHAN at 6.58:</u> “Well, this was a situation in which this
prosecutor was not <i>allowed </i>to bring
this evidence to a trial. By the way, this was a guy who had been in the Durham
DA’s office for 28 years, and before this he was generally thoroughly
well-regarded as a very strong prosecutor . . .”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Cohan here is describing a legacy that includes <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/05/judges-overturns-howard-verdict-citing.html">the
Darryl Howard case, in which Judge Orlando Hudson found that Nifong made “false
and misleading” statements that led to the conviction, for murder, of a likely
innocent man</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At no point in a 15-minute interview did Cohan ever say that
Mike Nifong made ethically improper public statements in the hopes of
bolstering his election campaign, or that Mike Nifong improperly withheld
exculpatory DNA evidence, or that Mike Nifong lied in open court to a judge.
Instead, he said that Nifong made unspecified “mistakes.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>Enemies of the “Truth”</u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>COHAN at 8.57</u>: “I dug up as much as I could that raised some
serious questions about what happened. Of course, any time you say this,
there’s an established narrative out there—there’s an established narrative out
there that the people are very, very wedded to (the parents of the kids, the
kids themselves [he’s describing here people in their late 20s or early 30s],
their attorneys, and their powerful allies in the media) who don’t want anybody
bringing this up, and would go to whatever length they could—for them, this is
a war. This is a war that began in 2006, and it’s going to continue until, uh,
you know, until it can’t continue anymore. Until all the principal people are
no longer alive! And by me taking an objective look at what happened, seven or
eight years after it happened, it apparently, you know, something that they’re
having a real trouble dealing with.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Cohan might, at some point, want to consult a dictionary to
determine the meaning of “objective.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That said, consider the oddity of Cohan’s first sentence. With
regards to the criminal case, the only thing that Cohan “dug up” was the
revelation that as his ethical misdeeds were exposed, <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohans-approach-to-op-eds-new-items-in.html">Nifong
confined his reading to the <i>New York
Times</i></a><i>. </i>None of his lengthy
interviews with Nifong brought any new facts about the criminal case. His
shorter jailhouse chat with murderess Crystal Mangum did dig up two new items,
but both (that medical personnel had to remove wooden shards from her, that
Reade Seligmann carried her to the car) were demonstrably false.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Has Cohan now conceded that all that his book “dug up” about
the criminal case was precisely . . . nothing?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>Media Expert<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>COHAN at 3.20</u>: “The job of the investigative reporter is to go
back to Ground Zero of the story, accumulate all the information that he
possibly can, all the documentary evidence, and talk to as many people as
possible who would talk to him.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Author Cohan fulfilled the task of seeking to “talk to as many
people as possible who would talk to him” by <b><i><u>not</u></i></b> seeking to
talk to (among many others): any of the defense attorneys, any of the senior
prosecutors in the AG’s office, the Bar prosecutors, Nifong’s primary campaign
manager, the DHC chair and members, Judge Smith, the criminal contempt
prosecutor, and (it appears) 43 of the 44 unindicted members of the 2006 lacrosse
team.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It would seem, therefore, that Cohan failed the “job of the
investigative reporter,” at least as he defines it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>“Rush to Judgment”<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The host—who at several points in the interview seemed a bit
startled by the passion that Cohan brought both to his defense of Nifong and to
his attack on the falsely accused players—noted that from the standpoint of the
falsely accused, there was a rush to judgment. Cohan responded:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>COHAN at 12.17</u>: “Everybody rushed to judgment, including the
prosecutor, Mike Nifong. But he did, you know, believe that a rape had
occurred, and he was going to make it his duty to bring it to a court of law,
which is his job, to either prove it or not prove it.<o:p></o:p>”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If it’s possible to get beyond Cohan’s claim that the
defense attorneys want Nifong “literally dead,” this was clearly the oddest
statement of the interview. If, as Cohan now admits, Nifong “rushed to
judgment,” how, possibly, could it have been proper for him to have sought
charges based on his rush to judgment? That question, unsurprisingly, was one
that Cohan showed no interest in answering.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>Contempt for the Falsely
Accused<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>COHAN at 12.36:</u> “Uh, you know, the kids, from their point of view—I
mean, people are accused of crimes, you know, all the time. Uh, either they did
them, or they didn’t do them. Either they could be proved in a court of law
they did them, or they didn’t do them, and you know, there are plenty of cases
where there are people who are wrongfully convicted [<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/05/judges-overturns-howard-verdict-citing.html"><i>like Darryl Howard</i></a>], who spend, you
know, 18, 20 years in prison [<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/05/judges-overturns-howard-verdict-citing.html"><i>like Darryl Howard</i></a>], and get out
based on new evidence, or new DNA evidence [<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/05/judges-overturns-howard-verdict-citing.html"><i>like Darryl Howard</i></a>], and they get,
you know, whatever, $20,000 a year for their pain and suffering. I mean, these
three kids didn’t spend a day in jail, there was no trial, and they ended up
with $20 million each. [<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/weekend-reading-and-listening.html"><i>No, they didn’t</i></a>.] This party cost
Duke $100 million, all told, with legal fees and settlements, etc.” [<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohan-fact-fiction.html"><i>No, it didn’</i></a><i>t</i>.]<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>The Attorney General<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>COHAN at 8.35</u>: “There was a secret investigation done by the state
attorney general [<i>no criminal investigation in North Carolina is conducted in the open</i>], who declared them <i>innocent
</i>at the end of that 4-month investigation, and he won’t be interviewed about
it [<i>untrue: Roy Cooper did a press
conference, and then was interviewed by Lesley Stahl</i>], and he won’t allow
his investigatory filed to be viewed [<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohan-why-why-why.html"><i>because it’s the law</i></a>] . . .<o:p></o:p>”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>COHAN at 14.01</u>: “We’ll never know what really happened . . . The
State AG won’t open his investigatory files. I have sued in North Carolina to
force him to open those files. I’m sure I’ll lose, and he won’t have to.<o:p></o:p>”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I hope that representatives of the North Carolina
attorney general’s office take notice of this comment, which essentially
features plaintiff Cohan admitting that he has filed a frivolous lawsuit.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>Cohan’s Publicity Tour Is (Literally) Cut Off<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
COHAN at 14.22: “This is just sort of one of those incredible
anomalies of justice that’s occurred in our society, that if you even have the
temerity to talk about it, you get, you know, eviscerated by—<o:p></o:p>”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At that point, the host appeared to have had enough with Cohan’s pity
party, cut the author off, and ended the interview.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>Due Process and False Charges</u> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Cohan also offered his typically bizarre interpretation of
the legal system, suggesting that even though the prosecutors from the AG’s
office and the defense attorneys both believed the players were innocent, they
nonetheless should have faced a trial:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>COHAN at </u> <u>7.12</u>: “In our system of jurisprudence, the prosecutor
brings cases before the jury, the people decide whether he’s right or he’s
wrong, the people are not guilty or guilty, and that’s the way the system
works. Here was a case—whether these kids were not guilty or guilty, they were
ultimately declared innocent by the state attorney general. Our justice system
was subverted in this case. And I think that is the most profound uh, uh action
to come out of this whole incident. That our system of justice was subverted by
very clever, deep-pocketed defense attorneys who exploited every mistake that
the prosecution made and that the principal witness made.<o:p></o:p>”</div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
A good response to this basic misunderstanding of our legal
system came from one of these “deep-pocketed defense attorneys,” Brad Bannon,
during the Nifong ethics hearing:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/fONhsGOunJ8" width="480"></iframe> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Needless to say, this was another section of Bannon’s
testimony that <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/06/cohan-side-by-side.html">never
found its way</a> into Cohan’s book.<o:p></o:p></div>
kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com41tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-52146626191528405812014-06-07T00:01:00.000-04:002014-06-07T12:28:46.218-04:00Bannon-Nifong ConversationGiven the . . . unusual . . . <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/06/cohan-side-by-side.html">editing strategy of author William D. Cohan</a>, I thought I would post the video of the testimony in which Brad Bannon revealed a private conversation with Mike Nifong in which the rogue DA exhibited odd behavior.<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/T2h8QBYP-PY" width="480"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
Of course, not only did Cohan (at the very last minute) cut this passage from his book, but he also eliminated a less-than-flattering interview snippet from his book’s hero and protagonist: “Nifong said of Bannon’s testimony that it was ‘snide’ and that Bannon was ‘a little pissant, is what he is, and there’s no cure for that. Quite frankly, whatever career he has, I wouldn’t want.’”kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-18497822060556743752014-06-04T00:01:00.000-04:002014-06-04T00:02:53.972-04:00Cohan: Side-by-Side<div class="MsoNormal">
The handful of close readers of the William D. Cohan book (a
list that, alas, did not include reviewers from the <i><a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/new-evidence-from-karen-r-long.html">Economist</a> </i>and <i><a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/new-evidence-from-karen-r-long.html">Newsday</a></i>)
doubtless noticed an anomaly—minor errors, usually by a page or two, in the
index. It was almost as if there were lots of small, last-minute alterations to
the book, some of which led to pagination changes that weren’t accurately
reflected in the index.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It turns out that the
manuscript <i>was</i> reduced by 22 pages. Some of the shift came from modifying the spacing
and the margins. Cohan also made minor cuts of little editorial consequence. But
myriad alterations better framed the argument, by: eliminating criticism of the book’s protagonist, Mike Nifong; cutting passages that reflected very poorly on Nifong’s conduct or temperament; bolstering the Cohan/Nifong “something happened” thesis; or downplaying positive portrayals
of the lacrosse players’ character.<br />
<br />
The Cohan book
was filled with hundreds of pages of recycled material—paragraph after
paragraph, seemingly prepared by a research assistant, blandly summarizing an
article by reporter <i>x </i>or the opinions
of columnist <i>y</i>. It would not have been
difficult to cut 22 (or 222, for that matter) pages of fat, without (as Cohan did) eliminating several items of significant substance.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>The Smoking Gun<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
. . . comes in, of
all places, the acknowledgements. In the book, Cohan thanks a Nifong
acquaintance named Pat Devine, who created what the author describes as an “oral
history” of the lacrosse case. He remarks that “without Pat and her
inspiration, this book would likely not have been possible.” He then moves on to
thank other people, leaving the reader to speculate how he ever came across
“Pat” and her so-called oral history.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It turns out that a specific individual guided Cohan to Pat:
“I would also like to thank especially my friend Peter Wood, the former Duke
history professor, who introduced me to Pat, Peter’s former neighbor in
Hillsborough, North Carolina.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This sentence disappeared from the final version. In
that version, Cohan treated his “friend” <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohans-duke.html">Wood’s analysis of campus events as prescient</a> (without mentioning he was, in fact, praising the work of a “friend”),
and offered a passive-aggressive critique of the Duke report (by the Coleman
Committee) that <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2006/05/coleman-committee-report-and.html">undermined his “friend” Wood’s credibility about the lacrosse players’ in-class behavior</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So: at the last minute, Cohan chose to hide
from readers that he was a “friend” of perhaps the <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2006/07/shameless.html">fiercest critic</a> of the
<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2006/09/fact-and-fiction-in-new-yorker.html">lacrosse players</a>’ <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/09/crisis-for-peter-wood.html">character</a> on the <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2009/06/cci-closing-months.html">Duke campus</a>, and that this same
“friend” had introduced him to a source without whom the “book likely would not
have been possible.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s rather difficult to come up with an innocent
explanation for this omission.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>Defending Nifong from Himself<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Perhaps the most stunning deletion came in the coverage of
Nifong’s ethics proceedings, where this full paragraph was cut on what became
page 522:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“[Brad] Bannon also described how Nifong lost his temper
during a telephone call on October 20. Bannon and Cheshire . . . had written
Nifong a letter trying to get additional evidence and information from Nifong. ‘I
thought the conversation was cover at that point in time,’ Bannon testified, ‘but
Mr. Nifong then brought up a letter that Mr. Cheshire and I had sent to him regarding
other discovery issues that had come up in the intervening period of time. And he
got extremely upset with me about that letter and said we weren’t acting in
good faith as lawyers. He wanted to know why we were always accusing him of
withholding information . . . I tried to explain to him what some of our
concerns were about the discovery materials being withheld. And he sort of at
the end of the exchange, just his volume kept going up and up and up. He wouldn’t
let me respond in any way. And he finally hung up the phone on me.’ (A day
earlier, Wade Smith had testified about his April 13 meeting with Nifong and
two other defense attorneys and said that he had ‘never experienced such
behavior in his more than forty years of lawyering’ and that ‘it was clear Mr.
Nifong was extraordinarily agitated and upset, and we left.’) Nifong said of
Bannon’s testimony that it was ‘snide’ and that Bannon was ‘a little pissant,
is what he is, and there’s no cure for that. Quite frankly, whatever career he
has, I wouldn’t want.’”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(Well: Nifong got his wish.)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Consider the remarkable content of this paragraph: Nifong lashing
out at the attorney who exposed his hide-the-test-results plot; the deeply
respected Wade Smith providing historical context for Nifong’s misbehavior; and
the recounting of a private vignette that until Bannon’s testimony wasn’t
publicly known. It’s hard to imagine any reasonable editorial judgment that
would justify its exclusion, especially in a book that contains so much filler
material.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But, of course, the material in the paragraph—and especially the last two
sentences—was also wholly inconsistent with author Cohan’s portrayal of the Christ-like
Nifong, “<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohan-i-certainly-feel-sorry-for-mike_28.html">crucified</a>” for Duke’s sins. Instead, readers would have seen the
embittered, egotistical Nifong that so many people affiliated with the case
encountered.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The deletion of Nifong’s slur against Bannon wasn’t the only
time Cohan used the editor’s blue pencil to save Nifong from himself. Cohan dropped two paragraphs of Nifong sounding delusional, suggesting
some sort of conspiracy theory about the Bar complaint: “The unspoken subtext
was,” Cohan’s readers didn’t learn Nifong said, “‘We know that you are
committed to this case and if we can get anybody else but you involved in the
case than the level of commitment would be les,’ and I completely understood
that. I don’t think they honestly could deny that was part of their strategy.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Awhile later (p. 544), Cohan protected Nifong from seeming
closed-minded, cutting out two sentences in which the rogue prosecutor
discussed the AG’s evidence: “And actually assuming that I had seen the same
things that they [the AG’s office] refer to in their report upon her taking the
stand in the suppression hearing, I may easily have reached the conclusion at
that time. But other than the conclusion not to proceed with the case, I am not
sure that I would ever take that next step.” But much of the report
wouldn’t have come out at a suppression hearing, and Nifong’s admission that he
doubted he could “ever” recognize the players’ innocence, regardless of the
evidence, was telling.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Virtually the only <i>new </i>material gathered by Cohan came from the Nifong interviews; the
author’s handful of other interviews were far shorter and mostly of little
consequence. That Cohan cut such obviously relevant Nifong items from his book’s
major primary source shows the passion that he brought to his cause of
rehabilitating Nifong’s reputation.<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>Removing Sharply Negative Comments about Nifong<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Several last-minute cuts applied to sharp criticisms
of Nifong, items that had been accurately offered in the penultimate version of the text, presumably from
material prepared by his research assistant. For instance, on what became p.
253, a strong attack on Nifong by the third candidate in the DA’s primary,
Keith Bishop, ultimately didn’t see the light of day. “I would have been very
certain of the facts before I jumped out in the media and virtually guaranteed
an arrest,” Cohan’s readers ultimately wouldn’t learn that Bishop said about
the book’s protagonist. Bishop added in the deleted passage that Nifong “wants
to win so badly that he will do anything and will say anything. It reflects
political immaturity. He thinks that simply pandering to race will get him the
breakout he needs.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Cohan eliminated a paragraph (p. 272) containing Reade
Seligmann’s reaction to learning from Kirk Osborn that Nifong wouldn’t drop the
case. “I don’t know much about the law,” Seligmann said but Cohan’s readers
never learned, “but you hear the word ‘alibi’ and that’s one of the first
things that you think a prosecutor would want to have . . . you don’t charge an innocent person and an
innocent person won’t go to jail.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Cohan also (p. 369) chopped a paragraph quoting from Duke Law
graduate Karen Bethea-Shields, who had represented a black defendant in a
racially charged 1975 murder case. Bethea-Shields, Cohan’s readers ultimately
didn’t learn, was “’appalled’ that Nifong had given so many interviews during
the early weeks of the case, and irritated that Nifong had made race such a big
factor.” Nifong’s pre-primary publicity spree, Bethea-Shields wondered, forced
people to pose the question: “Why was [race] important to bring up? You don’t
go leaking a little bit here and a little bit there and get the community all
riled.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s easy to see why someone as passionate in his defense of
Nifong wouldn’t want those passages to appear in his final product.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>The “Something-Happened” Thesis<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In addition to rehabilitating Nifong, Cohan aggressively (as
his publicity tour demonstrated) advanced a “something-happened” thesis. Perhaps
the clearest example of this argument guiding his decision to eliminate
material came on p. 513, when he cut a quote from Inv. Ben Himan: “Himan said
that during Cooper’s investigation, he became aware of evidence he did not even
know existed. ‘<i>They had numerous,
numerous accounts of pictures, documents, alibis, receipts. It was unbelievable
how much stuff they actually turned over to the Attorney General’s Office</i>.”
[emphasis added]<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s easy to see how an author who proclaimed to CNN that an
“<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/05/rabinowitz-eviscerates-author-cohan.html">incredible
amount of evidence</a>” exists of a crime would want to keep out his
“definitive, magisterial” account such an assertion. Even Cohan couldn’t
try to include Himan in what the author has portrayed as a <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/05/counselor-cohan-on-law-proces.html">wide-ranging conspiracy</a> to block the truth from coming out.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The “something happened” thesis also required bolstering the
credibility of murderess Crystal Mangum, a task to which Cohan took with gusto,
both in the book and in his press appearances. Indeed, even as he needed to cut
material, Cohan added 22 lines (at p. 39) from the report of UNC doctor Yvonne
Lai, who examined Mangum on the day after the part (15 March). The fresh items
included such passages as “the doctor noted that Mangum had suffered an
‘assault last night,’” that she had “new neck pain,” and felt “wobbly.” The
added passages also mentioned that Mangum was “plugged into a rape support
group” and that her boyfriend (unclear exactly who) was “very upset with her
currently because of this rape.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
These additions cemented an impression that Mangum had
experienced some sort of physical injury at the party—a useful editorial
approach for someone committed to the “something happened” thesis.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A further bolstering of Mangum appeared on p. 513, when
Cohan eliminated one of the two paragraphs (reducing the section from 27 lines
to 12) in which Himan explained why he had concluded that Mangum had lied. In
addition to the material already mentioned, Cohan’s readers didn’t learn that
Himan recounted, “On multiple, multiple times, she was contradicted with
indisputable evidence, with her time lines and pictures and stuff like that . .
. Even when she said that the two people who assaulted her brought her out to
the vehicle, <i>they have pictures of people
putting her into the vehicle, and it’s not David Evans, and it’s not Collin
Finnerty, and it’s not Reade Seligmann</i>.” [emphasis added]<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><u><br /></u></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><u>Seven pages</u></i>(!!)
after this passage disappeared from the book, Cohan included an uncorrected
assertion from Mangum, in her jailhouse interview with him, falsely asserting
that Reade Seligmann carried her to the car. Cohan had mentioned the photos,
accurately, hundreds of pages before, but only the most careful reader would
have recalled such information in evaluating Mangum’s tall tale. But it’s easy
to see how an author passionately committed to the “something happened” thesis
would remove a neutral, factual assertion from Himan that would prompt readers
to understand that his “victim” was lying through her teeth. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>Heightening a Negative View of the Lacrosse Players’
Character<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Cohan eliminated (p. 218) several sentences describing a spring
2006 <i>Chronicle </i>editorial in which the
paper’s editors argued quite strongly that the lacrosse team should be viewed
as typical Duke students, for good or ill. He also cut (p. 372) two paragraphs
from a largely sympathetic view in <i>ESPN </i>magazine
about the unindicted players’ experiences. And he chopped (p. 560) an entire
paragraph from David Evans, Sr., reflecting on how his “son has led the way in
handling this outrageous situation well, looking out not only for himself but
for his teammates and his friends.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The boldest shifts, however, came in one reduction and one
addition. On what became p. 388, Cohan made a two-page deletion (the longest of
the entire last-minute editorial process) to omit all mention of the fantastic <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/01/power-of-college-press.html">summer 2006 <i>Chronicle </i>article</a> by John Taddei, featuring interviews
with Bo Carrington, Tony McDevitt, Rob Wellington, and John Walsh. As with much
else in this section of the book, the material clearly came from Cohan’s
research assistant, and faithfully summarized the article, which humanized the
lacrosse players and provided remarkable insight into their on-campus negative
experiences in spring 2006. Indeed, the article was one of the most important
media pieces in the case, representing as it did the first time that multiple
members of the team spoke on the record about their experiences in the spring
2006.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As the<i> </i>interview
with team members vanished, Cohan <i>added </i>material
attacking the players’ character—through a lengthy three-paragraph insertion (almost
two pages) from his unidentified “friend,” Peter Wood. On pp. 179-180, readers
now heard from “friend” Wood about how lacrosse players in his class were part
of a culture “occasionally tinged with defiance, belligerence, and even
antisocial racism.” Wood purported to have confirmation of his criticism of the
players from other, unnamed professors (the Coleman Committee, of course, found
otherwise), and the added material also featured Wood affirming that he had “heard
plenty of confirmation from undergraduate remarks regarding the unsavory
reputation of the team in social matters on and around campus.” (Why a
professor was gossiping with his students about other students’ “social matters”
Cohan did not reveal.) The inserted passage concluded with the lengthy e-mail
from Group of 88’er Susan Thorne to Wood, <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohans-approach-to-op-eds-new-items-in.html">which I profiled previously</a>.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A largely sympathetic portrayal of members of the team, from
one of the best media sources on the case: out. A character assault from the
author’s “friend”: in.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
-----------------<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The only change to the final manuscript that seemed to rebut
Cohan’s thesis came on p. 538; Cohan added a paragraph summarizing the portion
of the Cooper report describing the DNA transference theory. This change,
ironically, suggests that Cohan was well aware of the transference theory—even as
he went on talk show after talk show never once mentioning it, even <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/05/counselor-cohan-on-law-proces.html">bizarrely suggesting</a> that defense attorneys claimed that the possible DNA match came from
Dave Evans picking up the fingernails from the floor.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Cohan’s book, and his many guilt-presuming public appearances,
speak for themselves. Even if he had made no cuts, the book’s biases would have
been self-evident. But the last-minute editorial changes—the removal of clearly
significant items (the “pissant” comment, Himan’s first-hand recollection of
the evidence), coupled with the deception regarding both Cohan’s relationship
with Peter Wood and Wood’s role in jump-starting the entire project—gives a sense
of just how deeply committed Cohan was to his effort to rehabilitate Nifong.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A final note: Cohan’s original list of media-type sources (p. 619 of
the book) ended with a discussion of WRAL’s online archive. But in his final
version, he added the names of a few specific figures. One such addition: “K.C.
[sic] Johnson,” who author Cohan described as exhibiting an “obvious bias.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Glad to know I was in his thoughts.<o:p></o:p></div>
kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com30tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-74153062459833403202014-06-02T00:03:00.001-04:002014-06-02T12:02:25.872-04:00More on McLeod<div class="MsoNormal">
[Update, Monday at 11.15am: in the WSJ Law Blog, Jacob Gershman has an excellent summary of the case, including a revealing comment from the Duke spokesperson.]<br />
<br />
Last year, James Taranto <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303615304579157900127017212?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop">published
a sensational piece</a> on a kangaroo court at Auburn; I <a href="http://www.mindingthecampus.com/forum/2013/12/the_scandal_at_auburn.html">praised
it at Minding the Campus</a>. Taranto’s effectiveness came in his ability to
bring observers inside a badly flawed sexual assault process.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Liestoppers board has posted many of the documents from
the <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/05/due-process-and-duke.html">McLeod
lawsuit against Duke</a>. In a different way than occurred with Taranto’s
article, they help bring us inside Duke’s curious processes and seemingly ever-shifting
standards. Some discussion below, and I will also have some more to come at MTC.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Duke made two arguments against the McLeod lawsuit. The first,
which Judge Smith at least at this stage rejected, was that Duke had <a href="http://lincolnparishnewsonline.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/supplemental-brief-in-oppositon.pdf">no
legal obligation to follow its own standards</a>, and therefore the expulsion
should stand. (More on this below.) The second, on which Judge Smith has deferred,
was that McLeod had no right to a Duke degree, since McLeod “failed to meet the
standard of conduct required of members of the Duke community.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Duke further added that awarding McLeod a degree would “hinder
Duke’s ability to act out its values.” And in testimony before Judge Smith,
Dean Sue Wasiolek <a href="http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/a-duke-senior-sues-the-university-after-being-expelled-over-allegations-of-sexual-misconduct/Content?oid=4171302">affirmed</a>
that a Duke degree suggests that a student is “of high character.” McLeod’s
attorneys correctly countered that “rather than Duke’s ‘honor’ being at stake,
the only ‘injury’ is that a small number of Duke administrators would be angry
or offended” by the court acting.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The assertions by Duke and Wasiolek are baffling, for three
reasons. First, it’s true that some schools, usually affiliated with the
religious right (e.g., Liberty, BYU, Baylor) have student character clauses. But
it’s inconceivable for any elite institution to claim that each and every one
of its graduates is of “high character,” since such a policy basically means
that students have no academic freedom at all. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Second, even if Duke had such a standard, it has never
before applied it to sexual assault. The <a href="http://lincolnparishnewsonline.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/plaintiffs-closing-argument.pdf">filing for McLeod’s attorneys</a> reveals
that “Dean Sue Wasiolek testified that up until Mr. McLeod’s case, no Duke
student had ever been expelled for sexual misconduct.” If true, does that mean
that until 2013, Duke believed that students who committed sexual misconduct
were of high character? Or does it mean that Duke has no such degree standard?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Finally, assume for the sake of argument that Duke had such
a standard and has applied it for some time. By what grounds could the
university have concluded that Chauncey Nartey fit this amorphous
good-character requirement? Nartey was the Duke student who <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/06/nartey-dilemma.html">sent a
menacing e-mail to the Presslers</a> (<span style="background: white;">“WHAT IF
JANET LYNN WERE NEXT???”</span>) referencing their daughter’s name as possibly “next”—at
the height of the media and faculty frenzy against the lacrosse team. Later on
in his Duke career, the <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/04/ccis-impending-train-wreck.html">fraternity
of which Nartey was president was suspended</a> for inappropriate behavior.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If, as Wasiolek claims, Duke has a “high character” standard
for a degree, it’s hard to imagine how the author of such an e-mail could have
passed the test. Yet not only did Nartey receive his degree, he did so with a
full scholarship (at least <a href="http://www.chaunceynartey.com/rad-school/my-story/">according to his
website</a>), thanks to <a href="http://www.reggies.duke.edu/program/about/">funding</a>
from a Duke “scholarship program specifically targets exemplary students of
African descent.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The McLeod filings also indicated another intriguing linkage
to the lacrosse case. Even a figure as biased as author William D. Cohan
conceded that a member of the Duke administration shouldn’t have counseled the
lacrosse captains not to tell their parents about the investigation—silence that
delayed the hiring of attorneys by around a week. Cohan suggests that this move
played a role in Duke’s decision to settle with the falsely accused players.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And yet the university didn’t seem to learn any lesson. McLeod
claims that Dean Stephen Bryan told him (according to the filing) “that an attorney
would not be useful or necessary in the disciplinary matter.” The advice could
not have been more unhelpful. The filing makes clear that McLeod’s non-attorney
“advocate,” while well-intentioned, was of little or no assistance. He only met
with McLeod twice (and one of those times only briefly), provided routine and
perhaps even counterproductive feedback on drafts of McLeod’s statements to the
tribunal; and had never served as an advocate for a student who would face
expulsion if found guilty. Nor, it appears, had the advocate received any
special training in how to determine intoxication levels for accusers—the key
issue at play in the case.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Finally, the McLeod filings return to an old standby for
Duke—the university’s assertion that while it can use the student bulletin to
enforce punishment against students, the school has no legal obligation to be
bound by the bulletin’s provisions. Going even further than they did in the
lacrosse case, Duke’s attorneys <a href="http://lincolnparishnewsonline.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/brief-in-opposition.pdf">refer
to the bulletin</a> as an almost ephemeral document, one “based on an
aspirational “statement of principles.”<br />
<br />
They’ll only go so far to say that Duke
has an “<i>intention </i>to administer” [emphasis
added] its disciplinary process as outlined in the guide (explaining,
perhaps, why it was OK to change the punishment protocol without adding it to
the guide). At most, according to Duke, the guide provides “a hearing free from
procedural errors that substantially affect the fairness of the hearing.” But
in in a hearing based on a preponderance-of-evidence (50.01 percent) threshold virtually
<i>any </i>procedural error would affect the
outcome.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
[I should note that while Duke, both here and in its lacrosse-case filings, dismisses any legal obligation for the university to uphold the terms of the student bulletin or faculty handbook, it never has taken that position in admissions office publications or in communications with prospective students or parents on its website. It’s almost as if the university doesn’t want the people who will be spending more than $200,000 over four years to have access to this information.]</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As to what constitutes “due process” at Duke, the university
suggests that McLeod was entitled to five elements: (1) receiving the material
to be used against him five days before the hearing; (2) right to witnesses;
(3) ability to present questions to the disciplinary panel, which the panel
might (or might not) then present to the accuser and other witnesses; (4) an
opportunity to give opening and closing statements; (5) an opportunity to
present written character statements from other people. How ensuring a student
of sexual assault these five items means that the student gets anything
approximating a fair process Duke doesn’t say.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
No wonder Judge Smith issued a preliminary injunction.<o:p></o:p></div>
kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-61345510258544203092014-05-30T00:01:00.000-04:002014-05-30T17:44:29.982-04:00Due Process and Duke[Update, 5.43pm: Judge Smith's <a href="http://lincolnparishnewsonline.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/prelim-inj.pdf">preliminary injunction is here</a>.]<br />
<br />
Over at Minding the Campus, I <a href="http://www.mindingthecampus.com/forum/2014/05/duke_grossly_unfair_again_is_b.html">write about Duke joining</a> the list of universities facing a lawsuit for violating the due process rights of a student accused of sexual assault. The student, Lewis McLeod, was expelled under what appears to be dubious reasoning just before he graduated. (And a hat tip to <i>Independent </i>reporter John Tucker, <a href="http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/a-duke-senior-sues-the-university-after-being-expelled-over-allegations-of-sexual-misconduct/Content?oid=4171302">who covered the hearing and provided a comprehensive report</a>.)<br />
<br />
In a bold move, last yesterday afternoon Judge Osmond Smith (to whom the case was assigned) <a href="http://www.heraldsun.com/news/x1374786136/Judge-issues-injunction-against-Duke">issued an injunction against Duke</a>, preventing the university from expelling McLeod until a trial can be held. Smith acted on the basis that a trial would show that Duke had “breached, violated, or otherwise deprived the plaintiff of material rights.”<br />
<br />
The Duke spokesperson responded to the legal setback by (very oddly) terming the school “pleased.” The spokesperson added, “Duke follows federal legal requirements for complaints of student sexual misconduct and <i>works very hard to make sure the process is fair and just in every case</i>.” [emphasis added]<br />
<br />
That “fair and just process” is one in which:<br />
<ul>
<li>the accused student is consigned to an “advocate” who cannot speak in the hearing that will determine whether Duke brands him a rapist;</li>
<li>consent is vaguely defined, on grounds that “alcohol or other drugs can lower inhibitions and create an atmosphere of confusion over whether consent is freely and effectively given”;</li>
<li>a preponderance of evidence (50.01 percent) threshold is used;</li>
<li>the accused student cannot directly cross-examine his accuser;</li>
<li>the accused student only has a maximum of five days to examine the evidence that Duke has compiled against him, while he lacks the power to subpoena potentially exculpatory evidence from the accuser;</li>
<li>double jeopardy exists, in that the accuser can appeal a not-guilty finding;</li>
<li>Duke is allowed to use evidence from anonymous parties against the accused student.</li>
</ul>
Fair and just, according to Duke.kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-33674793639556719872014-05-27T15:37:00.002-04:002014-05-28T19:39:33.174-04:00Judges Overturns Howard Verdict, Citing Nifong's "False and Misleading" Statements<div class="MsoNormal">
[Update, 5.46pm: Joe Neff and Anne Blythe <a href="http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/05/27/3891620/judge-overturns-durham-mans-double.html?sp=/99/100/&ihp=1">have an article on the ruling in the <i>N&O</i>.</a> Will the Durham Police Department now re-examine all cases in which rogue prosecutor Mike Nifong was involved?]<br />
<br />
[Update, 9.34am, Wed.: As of this time, there is no mention on the <i>Herald-Sun</i> website of the Hudson ruling. And, of course, Nifong apologist William D. Cohan has made no comment or tweet regarding the further disgrace of his book's central hero.]<br />
<br />
[Update, 7.08pm, Wed.: More than 24 hours later, <a href="http://api.viglink.com/api/click?format=go&jsonp=vglnk_jsonp_14013201837297&drKey=1082&libId=e0f59b22-ff33-4e24-a15f-8648617fab9e&loc=http%3A%2F%2Fs1.zetaboards.com%2FLiestoppers_meeting%2Ftopic%2F5490388%2F8%2F&v=1&out=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heraldsun.com%2Fnews%2Fshowcase%2Fx1374785926%2FDA-will-appeal-new-trial-order-for-Darryl-Howard&ref=http%3A%2F%2Fs1.zetaboards.com%2FLiestoppers_meeting%2Fforum%2F201036%2F&title=Nifong%20Prosecutorial%20Misconduct%20Again%20-%20Howard%20Conviction%20Overturned&txt=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heraldsun.com%2Fnews%2Fshowcase%2Fx1374785926%2FDA-will-appeal-new-trial-order-for-Darryl-Howard">word of the ruling finally appears</a> in the <i>Herald-Sun, </i>though with an emphasis on the DA's decision (for reasons not explained) to appeal. Still no mention of his protagonist’s further disgrace from author William Cohan, whose <a href="https://twitter.com/WilliamCohan">twitter feed</a> instead has focused on such pressing topics as a picture of tulips and a complaint about the cover of the <i>New York Post</i>.]<br />
<br />
Radley Balko reports that Durham judge Orlando Hudson has
overturned the conviction of Darryl Howard, citing police and prosecutorial
misconduct. (The prosecutor in the case was then-ADA Mike Nifong.) Howard will
now receive a new trial. Given the paucity of actual evidence against Howard, hopefully the state will drop the case.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Balko <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/05/27/n-c-judge-overturns-darryl-howard-conviction-finds-prosecutor-misconduct-by-mike-nifong/">covers the ruling in greater detail</a>; and I’ve
previously <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/03/comments-on-balko-article.html">written about the case </a>also. The thrust: much like the lacrosse
case, Nifong reacted to a negative DNA test result not by wondering whether he
was trying the wrong party, but instead by suggesting that the DNA evidence was
irrelevant to the case. In the lacrosse case, Nifong behaved unethically by
withholding exculpatory test results from the defense and lying about them to a
judge. In the Howard case, he behaved unethically by misleading the court about
the state’s original theory of the crime once that theory became inconsistent
with DNA test results showing that the DNA of two unidentified men--but not
Howard--was found in the two murder victims.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In his ruling,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/r/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2014/05/27/Editorial-Opinion/Graphics/2014-05-27_balko.pdf">Hudson
is unsparing in his criticism of Nifong</a>. In comments about Nifong, the
judge began by taking notice of the fact that more than a decade after the Howard
case, Nifong would be disbarred and held in criminal contempt for “suppressing
exculpatory evidence and willfully making false statements” to Judge Smith in the
lacrosse case.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the Howard case, Hudson quoted from Nifong’s closing
argument to the jury: “This case was never investigated as a sexual assault and
it was never suspected to be a sexual assault.” For good measure, Nifong
explained away the presence of DNA in the case by baselessly suggesting that a
13-year-old murder victim had been sexually active with her boyfriend.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Hudson found that Nifong’s assertion was simply not true. He
noted that a Durham Police Department document--included in the DA’s
files--suggested that the DPD had received a tip that the case was a sexual assault/murder, a tip that was consistent with the presence of DNA in both of the victims. No
evidence exists that prosecutor Nifong turned over this document, despite its
highly exculpatory nature, to the defense. The existence of this memo, Hudson
found, was “directly contrary” to Nifong’s statements to the jury.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Hudson concluded that Nifong had failed to turn over the DPD
memo to the defense, and therefore had committed a<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Brady</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>violation.
But Hudson then went further, and held that Nifong violated a 1959 case called<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Napue
v. Illinois</i>, in which the Supreme Court ruled that “a State may not
knowingly use false evidence, including false testimony, to obtain a
conviction.” The false testimony in the case was given by the lead detective,
but Hudson noted that Nifong was responsible for the testimony, since he had
access to the DPD memo showing that what Dowdy told the jury wasn’t true.
Indeed, Hudson described Nifong’s statements to the jury as “false and
misleading.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As a result of this conduct, Hudson concluded that Nifong
violated Howard’s rights under the 4<sup>th</sup>, 5<sup>th</sup>, 6<sup>th</sup>,
8<sup>th</sup>, and 14<sup>th</sup> amendments.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is the same Mike Nifong that author William D. Cohan
has deemed “<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/fisking-cohan-on-rehm.html">honorable</a>”
and “<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohans-nifong-blindness.html">quite
credible</a>,” and has said that he “<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohan-i-certainly-feel-sorry-for-mike_28.html">certainly
feels sorry for</a>.”<o:p></o:p></div>
kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-60466492671041502542014-05-26T15:36:00.000-04:002014-05-26T18:47:53.422-04:00Lacrosse, Litigation, & Editorial Strategy<div class="MsoNormal">
Earlier today, the Duke lacrosse team narrowly defeated
Notre Dame in the national championship game. In the run-up to the event, <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/casey-carroll-army-veteran-duke-lacrosse-player-salutes-veteran/">CBS
Sports had an article</a> on Casey Carroll, a member of the 2006 team whose
life has taken an extraordinary turn since then. Carroll graduated from Duke in
2007, and, inspired by the legacy of former Duke lacrosse player Jimmy Regan, a
U.S. Army Ranger who was <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/02/regan.html">killed in Iraq
in February 2007</a>, Carroll enlisted in the Army. He had four tours of duty
in Afghanistan and Iraq. He also married his college girlfriend, and the couple
has two children.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
After Carroll’s time in the military, he returned to Duke, using
GI Bill benefits to enroll in the business school. And with one year of
eligibility left (thanks to the efforts of Duke’s Chris Kennedy), he returned
to the lacrosse team—where this year, at age 29, he was a <a href="http://www.goduke.com/ViewArticle.dbml?ATCLID=792807">regular starter on
defense</a>. He was named ACC defensive player of the week in his first week
back at Duke (a span of nearly 2500 days between games). And he started in the
national championship game, which was held on Memorial Day.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
ESPN2 led its broadcast with a discussion of Carroll (and of
Regan’s parents, who attended the game). It’s easy to see the journalistic
significance.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
--------------<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Carroll’s is exactly the kind of story that seemingly would
have yielded itself to telling in William D. Cohan’s “definitive, magisterial”
account—especially given Cohan’s suggestions as to how he benefited from the
passage of time in putting together his publication. Yet there’s no evidence
that Cohan ever sought to interview Carroll, even though Carroll was back on
the team (he missed the 2013 season due to an injury) during the time Cohan claims that he was <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/05/cohans-greatest-hits.html">engaged
in a frantic effort</a> to <span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white;">“</span></span><span style="background: white;">just
gather up everything I could about what happened, talk to anybody and everyone
who would talk to me</span>.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Indeed, while the three falsely accused former students
declined to speak to Cohan, it doesn’t appear as if Cohan sought to interview <i>any </i>of the unindicted players, except
for Ryan McFadyen. This unusual strategy differed from how Stuart and I
approached <i>UPI</i>; we interviewed 15
members of the 2006 team on the record. (We also did off-the-record interviews.)
We spoke to people from each of the four classes; to those who were at the
party for the duration, those who left the party, and those who never attended
the party at all. The idea was to obtain (to borrow a term) as definitive an
account as possible of the lacrosse team’s experiences.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(Perhaps Cohan shied away from trying to speak with Carroll
because it would have been difficult for him to have described a person with Carroll’s
experiences as a “boy,” the author’s <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohan-does-c-span.html">preferred
term</a> of <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohan-why-why-why.html">reference</a>
for the <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohan-dna-not-essential-for-thousands.html">now-late-20s/early-30s</a>
lacrosse <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/fisking-cohan-on-rehm.html">players</a>
targeted by his book’s protagonist, Mike Nifong.)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Even if Cohan didn’t see Carroll’s recent story as significant
enough to fit into a 621-page book, it’s hard to come up with an explanation as
to why the author apparently tried to speak with only one of the 44 unindicted
players. It’s even harder to come up with an explanation as to why, having
chosen this odd tactic, Cohan then selected McFadyen as his sole subject.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Alone among the unindicted players, McFadyen wasn’t on the
Duke campus for the entire spring semester in 2006 (he was suspended in early
April), so on those grounds would seem the <i>least
</i>suitable candidate for a sole interviewee. Moreover, because of his e-mail,
McFadyen probably has a more negative public reputation than any former member
of the team except for Matt Zash. It’s almost as if, by choosing McFadyen as
the sole interview subject among the 44 unindicted players, Cohan wanted to
create the impression that McFadyen was typical of the team as a whole.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is, in the end, one clear difference between Cohan’s
treatment of McFadyen and of Carroll. As he has cast aspersions on the finding
of innocence while advancing his “something happened” thesis, Cohan has <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohan-does-c-span.html">definitively
excluded McFadyen from his insinuations</a>. (“<span style="background: white;">He
was never, you know, in or near the bathroom. He was never accused of anything.
He was just, you know, doing, you know, the usual underage drinking that’s so
prevalent.</span><span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">”</span>) Relying on the <i>exact same evidence</i>, Cohan has refused
to make such a declaration for Carroll, or any of the 45 other members of the
2006 team. (“<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/05/rabinowitz-eviscerates-author-cohan.html"><span style="background: white;">There is an incredible amount of evidence</span></a><span style="background: white;"> [which he won’t identify] that something untoward
happened in that bathroom . . . <i>Who did
it </i>[emphasis added], when they did it, what they did is absolutely just
still not clear.</span><span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">”)</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The “dispassionate” author at work.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
------------------<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Only one lawsuit remains—filed by three former members of
the team, with McFadyen as the lead plaintiff. Last week, Judge Beaty issued a
ruling that further narrowed the suit, and ensured that former SANE
nurse-in-training (and Cohan heroine) Tara Levicy would never take the witness
stand to account for the full range of her conduct in the case.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Beaty (not incorrectly) noted that the “spirit” of the 4<sup>th</sup>
Circuit’s ruling demanded dismissing the claims against Levicy. Even though, as
he noted, the plaintiffs claimed that Levicy produced “false corroborated
evidence” as “part of a conspiracy to assist police officers in a criminal
investigation,” they had no case, since Levicy was seeking “to aid police
officers, among others, in a police investigation.” That this “aid” allegedly
occurred as part of an effort to frame innocent people is no longer a cause for
action in the 4<sup>th</sup> Circuit—provided that the prosecutor was in on the
conspiracy, and provided that the grand jury (fooled by testimony recounting
the non-existent evidence) brought back an indictment.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is the “rule of law” in the Carolinas, Virginia, West
Virginia, and Maryland.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Beaty ruling also contained a touch of humor—at the
expense of Linwood Wilson, who continues to prove the aphorism that a lawyer
who represents himself has a fool for a client. Wilson, who has distinguished
himself throughout this litigation for <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2008/01/postscript-wilson-response.html">bizarre
legal assertions</a>, had demanded that Beaty impose sanctions against the
lacrosse players’ attorneys.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Beaty denied the request with a biting comment: “The basis
of Defendant Wilson’s request for sanctions is that he believes that the claims
brought by Plaintiffs in this case are groundless and vexatious and that the
Court should impose sanctions in this case. However, the Court finds Defendant
Wilson’s Motion itself to border on being vexatious given that it largely
consists of copied and pasted paragraphs.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
-------------------<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Finally: Cathy Davidson is best-recalled for her January
2007 apologia for the Group of 88 statement, in which she <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/01/apologia-for-disaster.html">took
to the pages of the <i>N&O</i></a> to
preposterously justify the Group’s actions on the grounds that “racist
and sexist remarks swirling around in the media and on the campus quad” during
the time in which the ad was considered. Inventing a past that never occurred,
Davidson told <i>N&O</i> readers, “The
insults, at that time, were rampant. It was as if defending David Evans, Collin
Finnerty and Reade Seligmann necessitated reverting to pernicious stereotypes
about African-Americans, especially poor black women.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of course, “at that time,” virtually no
one was “defending” any of the lacrosse players, much less Seligmann and
Finnerty (who weren’t even considered suspects). Before April 6 “on the campus
quad” there <i>were</i> “rampant” insults
directed against Duke students, such as the “castrate” sign, the plastering of
“wanted” posters, and one lacrosse player being surrounded on campus by black
students urging him to turn in the rapists. None of these events appear to have
troubled Davidson, since the lacrosse players weren’t the Duke students that
concerned her.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At the time her whitewashing <i>N&O</i> piece appeared, Davidson also admitted privately that she
had consulted an attorney, who informed her that the Group members could be
legally vulnerable for their actions. A few months later, when Duke entered
into an approximately $20 million settlement with the three falsely accused
players (<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/stuart-taylor-on-cohan.html">not, as William Cohan has incorrectly suggested, a $60 million payout</a>), the settlement contained an unusual clause immunizing the Duke faculty
from individual lawsuits.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
So where is Davidson now? In what seems like Exhibit 200 of
the lack of accountability in the academy comes from a recent notice from the
CUNY trustees. The announcement indicated the arrival of one Cathy Davidson
to the CUNY Graduate Center—where she will receive an annual financial
supplement of $28,594 beyond her salary as full professor.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As someone who teaches at Brooklyn and the Graduate Center,
I can fully understand why Davidson would consider CUNY a more appealing place
to work than Duke. But consider the likelihood of her (or any other Group
member) being hired away from Duke if the races in the case were changed. That
is: if the case involved a white stripper making false allegations against <i>black </i>Duke students; and if Nifong
needed to maximize the <i>white </i>vote to
win, and broke all sorts of ethical rules to fabricate a case; and if Davidson
had signed a public statement implying the guilt of these same <i>black </i>Duke students; and if, months
later, Davidson presented an inaccurate op-ed to justify her decision to ignore
the plight of these <i>black </i>Duke
students and turn a blind eye to the prosecutor’s misconduct, the obligations of
the Faculty Handbook, and basic principles of due process.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Does <i>anyone </i>believe
that, having participated in such a scheme, someone like Davidson, or Grant
Farred, or Houston Baker, or Charles Payne, or Rom Coles would have been <a href="http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/05/what_ever_happened_to_the.html">hired
away by other schools</a>, with more prestigious appointments, given the nature
of the contemporary academy?<o:p></o:p></div>
kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-58581955394224807162014-05-22T00:01:00.000-04:002014-05-22T00:01:00.140-04:00Free Speech & William D. Cohan<div class="MsoNormal">
Author William D. Cohan’s first written comments on the Duke
case came in an unusual forum—a CNN column <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-turn-of-season.html">bizarrely arguing</a> for lowering the
national drinking age to 19 years old. Cohan’s proposal would have left the
strongest moral arguments against the current policy—that if you can die for
your country, you should be able to buy a beer—in place, perhaps explaining why
not a single state is considering the idea. But the column seemed designed not
to influence public policy but instead to give Cohan an opportunity to launch
character attacks against the lacrosse players. Of the tens (hundreds?) of
thousands of instances of excessive drinking on campus in the past decade,
Cohan focused on the lacrosse party.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Having departed Bloomberg View for the <i>Huffington Post</i>, Cohan used his <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-d-cohan/how-much-freedom-of-speec_b_5353325.html?utm_hp_ref=politics&ir=Politics">inaugural
<i>HuffPost </i>column</a> to again
ostensibly comment on a policy issue but mostly to discuss <i>The Price of Silence</i>. The column’s arresting title: “How Much
Freedom of Speech Is Too Much?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Cohan offered three examples of an allegedly disturbing
trend of excessive free speech. One was a lawsuit from Virginia, involving
allegedly defamatory statements made about the work of a contractor. The second
was a lawsuit from Oregon, involving allegedly defamatory statements made about
the work of a contractor. The third was the fate of “<span style="background: white;">authors whose books appear for sale on Amazon and then quickly get
reviewed by an increasingly large army of people who seem to have nothing
better to do with their time</span>.” It appears as if Cohan’s chief interest
is the fate of one author in particular:<span style="background: white; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span>William
D. Cohan. He mentions no other Amazon author in his column.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For those interested in logic puzzles, one of the three examples
in Cohan’s column is unlike the other two.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Having earlier <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/05/counselor-cohan-on-law-proces.html">floated a conspiracy</a> of defense attorneys,
the State Bar, the AG’s office, and unnamed Northeastern lawyers to explain the
exoneration, Cohan is now reduced to alleging a “well-organized” conspiracy (of
unidentified individuals, led by unidentified parties) of “haters” (a <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/thin-skinned-cohan-attacks-stuart-taylor.html">favorite Cohan term</a>!) to “poison the well” regarding what one commentator has termed a “tightly
wound 621 pages devoted to a balanced assessment of a complex event.”<br />
<br />
(That
commentator, by the way, was William D. Cohan, practicing the kind of speech that
author William D. Cohan seems to very much like.)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Cohan’s central claim in the column is that people who hadn’t
read his book gave it negative reviews. Given that <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/05/on-amazon.html">one of his five-starreviewers outright admitted not reading the book</a>, and several others either
described a book that didn’t exist or didn’t mention Cohan’s arguments at all, Cohan’s
complaint seems one-sided. His concern seems to be less “instant, unvetted and
unfiltered commentary” than “instant, unvetted and unfiltered commentary” that
doesn’t say the sort of things that William D. Cohan wants said.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Indeed, Cohan has complained about the “speech” of critical
reviewers before; in his <i>New York </i>interview,
he <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/fisking-cohan-new-york.html">fumed </a>about the <i>New Republic </i>and <i>Commentary </i>turning to Stuart and me to
review his book. In a Facebook comment, he <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohan-attacks-joe-neff.html">falsely suggested</a> that Joe Neff hadn’t
read the book before writing about it. He’s been silent or praiseworthy, on the
other hand, regarding positive commentaries (<i>Economist, <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/new-evidence-from-karen-r-long.html">Newsday</a></i>) from reviewers who took away from the book
items that the book didn’t actually include. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s hard to imagine any neutral readers will come away from
Cohan’s column jumping on the anti-free speech bandwagon. The author, in any event,
comes across as obsessed with Amazon—the column is at least the third time he’s
complained about the site’s reviews, even as many of the negative reviews are
quite detailed and clearly come from people who are engaging with his book’s
claims. In a surprising tactical move, he even confesses to having contacted
Amazon, to inquire about an unspecified number of negative reviews (or what he
deems “clearly biased reviews”) being taken down. He gives no indication of
having demanded that Amazon remove positive reviews from people who admitted
not having read the book. Amazon unsurprisingly rebuffed Cohan’s complaint.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the end, though, Cohan perhaps unintentionally reveals
his chief concern. The reviews, he laments, show that “the market’s verdict has
been rendered: this is a two-star book, not worthy of a moment’s consideration.”<o:p></o:p></div>
kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com36tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-88601187225364868082014-05-18T19:03:00.002-04:002014-05-19T12:28:41.905-04:00Rabinowitz Eviscerates Author CohanIn the Monday edition of the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dorothy Rabinowitz <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304081804579558413534190406">has thoroughly taken apart the arguments of author William D. Cohan</a>, as expressed in both Cohan's book and his myriad interviews. In addition to winning the award, Rabinowitz also had been a <a href="http://www.pulitzer.org/biography/2001-Commentary">Pulitzer finalist</a> for her extraordinary commentary on prosecutorial misconduct and the conviction of the innocent. That honor came from her work <a href="http://www.amazon.com/No-Crueler-Tyrannies-Accusation-Witness/dp/0743228405">examining (and exposing) the false sexual abuse charges</a> associated with the the 1980s and 1990s day-care cases.<br />
<br />
In reviewing Cohan's oeuvre, Rabinowitz concludes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In Mr. Cohan's fair-to-everyone tome, spoiled white males, arrogant athletes, the entitled affluent all prevailed against the forces of light. Against this golden-oldie pack of villains stood Mr. Nifong, a man of honor unable to succeed in his search for justice thanks to the deep pockets that paid for sharp lawyers. He wrote this book, the author told his WAMC interviewer, as a way of having the trial that was never allowed to take place.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
To Mr. Cohan, apparently, true justice is served by allowing a prosecutor oblivious to ethical constraints to bring a groundless case in the hopes of winning a jury conviction. And by the writing of his book attempting to restore the taint of guilt and suspicion on three young men who had been cleared despite all Mr. Nifong's fraudulent effort. Mr. Cohan's grim refrain, "We will never know what happened in that bathroom"—a faithful image of the substance Mr. Nifong brought to his case—stands as a perfect tribute to that predecessor.
</blockquote>
Given how thoroughly Rabinowitz eviscerates Cohan's work, a reader might be tempted to show a smidgen of sympathy for the embattled author. Might be tempted, that is, until the reader recalls that Cohan wrote a book, and has spent the last month-plus on a publicity tour, seeking to cast aspersions on falsely accused people as he aggressively attempted to rehabilitate the reputation of a prosecutor whose ethical misconduct was notorious.<br />
<br />
[Update, 1.15am: Indeed, Rabinowitz's column was quite timely. In his most recent press appearance, Cohan offered perhaps his most extreme commentary yet, <a href="http://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2014/05/16/duke-durham-lacrosse-scandal/">telling CNN</a> that "there is an incredible amount of evidence that something untoward happened in that bathroom . . . Who did it, when they did it, what they did is absolutely just still not clear." What this "incredible amount of evidence" might be must, it seems, remain a mystery, and CNN's Jake Tapper did not press him on the bizarre nature of this assertion, or why this mystery evidence didn't appear in the AG's report.<br />
<br />
When Tapper asked whether the case was one of "misconduct" by Nifong, or "mistakes," Cohan replied, "Mistakes." Nifong's conviction of 27 of 32 counts of ethical misconduct apparently doesn't count to Cohan; and Tapper didn't challenge Cohan on this point. Indeed, <i>Tapper didn't mention the specifics of Nifong's ethics charges at all</i>. Did he even know about them?<br />
<br />
Cohan also repeated his incorrect claim that each of the falsely accused players received $20 million from Duke; Tapper, reflecting his . . . hard-hitting . . . approach to journalism, responded to this assertion not by questioning it or asking for Cohan's source, but by near-exclaiming, "<i>Each </i>one got $20 million?!" The non-curious Tapper then expressed puzzlement as to how Duke did anything at all wrong--not mentioning Tara Levicy, or the Group of 88, or the administration's early response. An embarrassment of an interview, even by the low standards we have seen on the Cohan tour.]kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com41tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-82728830003514922132014-05-17T01:28:00.004-04:002014-05-17T01:28:38.022-04:00Nifong Ironies in SettlementTwo Nifong-related ironies in the civil suit settlement:<br />
<br />
First, the <a href="http://www.heraldsun.com/news/x1596735228/Settlement-reached-in-Duke-lacrosse-lawsuit"><i>H-S</i> reports</a> the following: Seligmann attorney Richard Emery “said the former prosecutor had agreed to make a $1,000 contribution to the Innocence Inquiry Commission and reaffirm 'his statement of [the players] innocence.'”<br />
<br />
If so, of course, Nifong has repudiated the Cohan “something happened” thesis, and has effectively repudiated much of what he told Cohan for the book. If the settlement is as reported, will Cohan now issue a retraction?<br />
<br />
Second: the <i>N&O</i> obtained a <a href="http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/05/16/3866342/city-of-durham-settles-long-running.html">statement from the head of the state Innocence Inquiry Commission</a>, Kendra Montgomery-Blinn, who commented,“It was an honor and a surprise to be chosen to receive this grant . . . We will put the money in a special fund, and it will be used for the investigation of innocence claims. We are pleased that the important work of the Innocence Inquiry Commission was recognized in this way.”<br />
<br />
Does her acceptance of the donation mean that Montgomery-Blinn has now accepted that the case was one of actual innocence, in which the prosecutor violated ethical norms? The former Durham ADA (and <a href="http://www.durhampa.org/kendra">member of the politically correct People's Alliance</a>) once believed differently: in one of the most jaw-dropping moments of the Nifong ethics hearing, Montgomery-Blinn testified <i>in defense</i> of Nifong, on both substantive and character grounds. As Joe Cheshire <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20070820175321/http://www.newsobserver.com/news/crime_safety/duke_lacrosse/nifong/story/608852.html">noted at the time</a>, “It is very troubling for anyone’s faith in the innocence commission when its director testified for a man who tried to put demonstrably innocent people in prison. It’s going to take a lot of work to give anyone any comfort that she can properly screen claims of innocence.”<br />
<br />
For a taste of the Innocence Inquiry Commission head defending the actions of the state's highest profile rogue prosecutor, see below:<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="390" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/ZcseuYUlnY0" width="640"></iframe><br />
<br />
Hopefully Montgomery-Blinn now has a more fair-minded view of the dangers of prosecutors abusing their power for personal gain.kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-42811252346865409282014-05-16T12:54:00.003-04:002014-05-16T13:53:27.473-04:00Civil Suit SettlementAnne Blythe at the <i>N&O</i> <a href="http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/05/16/3866342/city-of-durham-settles-long-running.html">brings word of the final resolution of the civil suit</a> filed by the three falsely accused players. The suit was <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-4th-circuit-effectively-frees-durham.html">effectively neutered by the 4th Circuit</a>, and the settlement reflects that reality: the city has agreed to make a $50,000 donation to the state Innocence Inquiry Commission, but otherwise make no payments or admit to any wrongdoing.<br />
<br />
Updated, 1.07pm:
The city of Durham released a statement, indicating the following: “As the City has maintained throughout, it believes that its police officers had an obligation to investigate the allegations made by Crystal Mangum in 2006 and that no police officer nor any other City employee engaged in improper conduct.”<br />
<br />
And so Durham has now reaffirmed that it was not improper conduct:<br />
<br />
--for a member of its Police Department to <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/08/gottlieb-files.html">give misleading testimony to the grand jury</a>;<br />
<br />
--for its Police Department to <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-himan-gottlieb-replies.html">run a rigged photo array confined only to photos of the suspects</a>;<br />
<br />
--for one of two investigators on the case to not keep contemporaneous notes on his exchanges with witnesses, and then months later to produce a <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/08/gottlieb-files.html">straight-from-memory report</a> that seemed designed to fill in holes in the case;<br />
<br />
--for its senior police leadership to transfer supervisory control of a major police investigation to a county prosecutor;<br />
<br />
--for members of the police department to (at the bare minimum) not speak up when the prosecutor and lab director discussed, in the officers' presence, producing a report that did not include all DNA test results;<br />
<br />
--for members of the Police Department to enter Duke dorms and seek to interview suspects that the department knew were represented by counsel;<br />
<br />
--for a police department employee to give <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/03/more-crimestoppers.html">wildly misleading</a>, and in some cases <a href="http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/johnson/flyer.PDF">simply inaccurate</a>, public statements about the case.<br />
<br />
According to Durham, none of this constituted improper conduct.
<br />
<br />
[Updated, 1.46: WRAL has a <a href="http://www.wral.com/durham-settles-with-wrongly-accused-duke-lacrosse-players/13650645/">longer version of the Durham statement</a>. In addition to describing the above conduct as not improper, the city also forcefully rejected the Cohan/Nifong theory of the case: “Today, the city reaffirms that it fully concurs with the attorney general’s decision to dismiss the charges and with his conclusion that Mr. Evans, Mr. Seligmann and Mr. Finnerty were innocent of the charges for which they were indicted.”kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-88949598195746835842014-05-13T00:01:00.000-04:002014-05-13T11:28:27.054-04:00On the Rev. Barber<div class="MsoNormal">
Amidst the lacrosse case, more-than-occasional comparisons
occurred to the Tawana Brawley rape hoax. The cases, in fact, don’t seem to me
all that much alike: there was no prosecutorial misconduct in the Brawley case
(if anything, there was the reverse), and there was nothing like 88 Columbia or
Fordham or NYU professors taking out a full-page ad to proclaim something “happened”
to Brawley.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But there is one similarity between the two cases—the eventual
mainstreaming of advocates for the false accusers. In the Brawley case, of
course, the highest-profile such figure was Rev. Al Sharpton, who has evolved
from a charlatan to a Democratic presidential candidate (2004) to host of a talk show on which many Democratic politicians appear.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the lacrosse case, the best example of mainstreaming
comes with the Rev. William Barber, head of North Carolina’s NAACP. Since Republicans
captured control of the state’s legislature in 2010 and then governorship in
2012, Barber has assumed a high-profile role in the state’s politics. In 2012,
even as the state’s African-Americans favored marriage discrimination by a <a href="http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2011/PPP_Release_NC_506.pdf">20-point
margin</a>, Barber led the opposition to Amendment One; its passage made North
Carolina almost certainly the last state to add an anti-gay amendment to
its state constitution. And last year, Barber again marshaled protests against
what election law expert Rick Hasen <a href="http://electionlawblog.org/?p=54296">has termed one of the most
restrictive voting laws in the nation</a>, a measure that will disproportionately
affect the very poor, minorities, and students.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Those who followed the lacrosse case, however, should recall
a very different image of Barber than a figure who courageously stands up
against majority sentiment on behalf of civil liberties and civil rights. Instead,
his organization rivaled the <i>Herald-Sun
</i>and the Group of 88 in serving as the biggest local cheerleader for Nifong’s
case. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That’s not the image, however, a reader would have gathered
from Anne Blythe’s recent profile of Barber. Blythe (whose reporting on the
lacrosse case I generally admired) <a href="http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/05/10/3849327/william-barbers-name-and-fame.html">wrote
the following</a>: “<span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">In
2006 and 2007, he frequently weighed in on the Duke lacrosse case, highlighting
issues of racial disparity while urging people to withhold judgment on the
accused and accuser until the legal process played out.</span>”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I suppose it’s true that Barber’s remarks at the time could
be seen as “highlighting issues of racial disparity”—though since the events
involved a prosecutor exploiting the case to maximize his share of the <i>black </i>vote, Barber should have emerged as a fierce critic of the race-baiting Mike Nifong, something that most definitely did not occur.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Suggesting that the reverend wanted people to withhold judgment,
in any case, is hard to square with Barber’s record. It’s true that—unlike the
Group of 88—Barber was savvy enough to toss in a line about withholding
judgment to most of his public remarks. But <i>everything
</i>the NAACP did in the lacrosse case presumed guilt.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To review:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The State NAACP <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/01/state-naacps-hypocrisy.html">presented an 82-point “memorandum of law” in August 2006</a>. Riddled with factual errors—all
of which tilted the presentation in favor of Nifong’s case—the “memorandum of
law” falsely claimed that: “the only Black [lacrosse] player, a
freshman, left the party before the dancers arrived”; “the lacrosse team member
asked the women to dance and simulate sex acts between them, similarly to
scenes from a book and movie that several of the Lacrosse team members enjoyed
reading and talking about—<i>American Psycho</i>”; “after about three minutes
of dancing . . . there were racial remarks made”; and perhaps most outrageously,
a simple invention of facts to make Reade Seligmann look guilty: “around 12:20,
some men who saw the vulnerable Ms. M returning to the house called their
friends who had taken cabs and gone to get some cash from an ATM. Some
returned. Sometime between approximately 12:21 and 12:53, Ms. M has stated she
was kidnapped into the bathroom, beaten, robbed, choked, and vaginally and
anally raped.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Lest there be any doubt of Barber’s
connection to the memo, written by NAACP legal advisor Al McSurely, here’s a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20070223021255/http:/www.naacpncnetwork.org/Publicity/768">screenshot
of the NAACP’s then-webpage</a>, with Barber’s photo alongside the memo.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg66LNz0xM6c7mboi8K8Ql_Bq6svMYwjvnc9_cVmiSSIIoIrOUjiiVKJRwx_Y6ggJ36tkADkMcD3S5NE-UvUGwxNnMt53qJ112zFKNjK2RFYtPovIe8uP_XiWqcZHHA33LffgcV-g/s1600/barber.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg66LNz0xM6c7mboi8K8Ql_Bq6svMYwjvnc9_cVmiSSIIoIrOUjiiVKJRwx_Y6ggJ36tkADkMcD3S5NE-UvUGwxNnMt53qJ112zFKNjK2RFYtPovIe8uP_XiWqcZHHA33LffgcV-g/s1600/barber.PNG" height="228" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Note that the webpage also leads with the wild claim—right next to Barber’s face—about “Crimes and Torts [<i>no withholding judgment here</i>] Committed by Duke Lacrosse Team Players on 3/13 and 3/14.”<br />
<br />
It’s rather difficult to reconcile the
McSurely memo, McSurely’s <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2006/12/baum-letter-and-durham-trial.html">repeated
condemnation of the defense attorneys</a>, the state NAACP’s call to gag the <i>defense attorneys</i>, and the assertion
next to Barber’s face of the lacrosse players committing “crimes and torts”
with a description of Barber as a figure who urged “<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">people to withhold judgment
on the accused and accuser until the legal process played out.</span>”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The State NAACP also appointed a legal “monitor,” NCCU
professor Irving Joyner, to observe the case. Joyner spent most of his time
apologizing for Nifong’s conduct in a manner that might have made William D.
Cohan blush. Over the course of 2006, Joyner and McSurely <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2006/08/nifong-tarnishes-naacp.html">repeatedly
took pro-Nifong stances</a> that contradicted longstanding positions of the
national NAACP; their (and Barber’s) silence about the rigged photo array was
particularly outrageous given past NAACP work on the question.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Barber himself traveled to Duke Chapel as Nifong’s case
imploded, and <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/01/barber-wells-and-sins-of-denial.html">delivered
a sermon widely interpreted as attacking the character of the lacrosse players</a>.
In 2008, he <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2008/12/ten-questions-for-rev-barber.html">offered
a wildly misleading account of his and his organization’s role in the case in a
WRAL chat</a>. And, even after the legal process ended with AG Cooper’s report,
there was some talk from the NAACP of a new (what could now be called
Cohan-esque) investigation into the case.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Barber deserves praise for opposing state government discrimination
against gays and lesbians, the poor, students, and minorities. But simply because
he’s redeemed himself in recent years is no reason to ignore (or misleadingly
portray) his record in the lacrosse case. <o:p></o:p></div>
kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-47962169209040032392014-05-12T00:01:00.000-04:002014-05-12T00:08:07.383-04:00On Amazon<div class="MsoNormal">
I admit that before I purchase a book from Amazon, I tend to
look at the reviews; I’ll rarely purchase a book that has quite negative
feedback. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/04/21/the-attempted-rehabilitation-of-mike-nifong/">Radley Balko first commented</a> on the disparity between the
overwhelmingly negative response the Cohan book received from Amazon reviewers (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Price-Silence-Lacrosse-Corruption-Universities-ebook/dp/B00DPM7YZY/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1399861365&sr=1-1&keywords=cohan+price+of+silence">51
of the 75 Amazon reviews are 1-star</a>) and the puff-piece comments from
reviews in most of the mainstream media.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
The negative reviews clearly captured Cohan’s attention;
he has complained about them in a couple of press appearances. On C-SPAN, <a href="http://www.q-and-a.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1494">he offered the
following remark</a>: “A<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">ll one has to do is go on to Amazon and see already that I’ve
amassed, you know, 25 one star reviews even the book hasn’t been out a week and
it’s a 600 page book, so I’m pretty much guessing that not many of those one
star review writers have read this book.</span>”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">This was an interesting statement in a couple of respects. First,
many of these 1-star comments contain substantive disagreements with Cohan’s
arguments (some of them, in fact, are longer than a standard published book
review). Cohan didn’t tell C-SPAN, and hasn’t said since, how people could have
written a substantive review of a book they hadn’t read. That said, this is a
tactic he’s employed elsewhere, as <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohan-attacks-joe-neff.html">when
he insinuated</a> that Joe Neff hadn’t read the book even as Neff’s coverage
made clear that the <i>N&O</i> reporter
had done so.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Second, it seems as if Cohan’s line of attack better applies
to those who had reviewed the book positively on Amazon. As has often been the case
with the book’s favorable published reviews, many of Cohan’s 5-star
Amazon reviews avoid discussing anything that’s actually in the book.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Some examples, with each of the six below in their totality:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">“</span><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">I'm not a
sports fan but William Cohan tells a story so well that I read ‘The Price of
Silence" like a novel. I even got excited by descriptions of Lacrosse
games, though I doubt that I'd sit through one in real life.</span>”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">“William D. Cohan
has created a masterpiece of both investigative reporting & history. Of the
7 book [??] thus far published about the case, it is the best one yet. As such
it is heartily recommended.</span>”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">“Do not let the
negative reviews dissuade you from this book. William Cohan has done a
masterful job of pulling together the disparate facts concerning what occurred
at Duke and setting forth the definitive account. The book is superb and is a
compelling read.</span>”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">“I am surprised
by all of the negative. No Duke alum wants to rehash this experience but isn't
it at least good to have the facts as opposed to just fleeting bits here and
there? I don't think this is condemnation or judgment as much as it is about
historical account and I for one thing this is incredibly important.</span>”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">“A book that
strikes at the heart of universities today despite the aggressive criticism of
Duke alum. Sometimes the truth can be painful.</span>”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">“I was familiar with the case and have
followed Duke for years and wondered how it turned out</span>, Cohan filled in
the blanks.”<br />
<br />
How someone “familiar with the case” didn’t know how the case turned out the reviewer elected not to reveal.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">One 5-star
reviewer hailed Cohan’s “sympathetic” portrayals of the lacrosse players(!),
while another even labeled the “crucified” Nifong a “serial offender”—suggesting
that whatever book these two reviewers read, it wasn’t Cohan’s.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Of the reviews,
only two—one by an anonymous New Yorker, and the second by a Jerome Buttrick—appeared to embrace the book’s twin </span><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">“something happened”/Nifong’s-a-victim argument</span><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">. Buttrick wrote, “Not only does this
read like a John Grisham legal thriller, it also addresses some of the most
important and difficult issues facing our nation today: social and racial injustice,
‘bad boy’ behavior on college campuses, and the ability of the rich and
powerful to bend the system to their liking.</span>” Neither Buttrick nor the
anonymous New Yorker have reviewed any other book at Amazon.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Two 5-star reviews particularly caught my eye.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">First was this item, from a “D. Retah,” who wrote, “</span><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">For anyone who wants to know what goes on
at colleges today,this [sic] is required reading, and an unforgettable
narrative about a snarled legal sysyem [sic], privilege, and elitism. I found
it unputtdownable [sic] and feel it is a must read.</span>”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">The only other
book the grammatically-challenged “D.” reviewed was <i>UPI—</i>which “D.” reviewed not when it appeared but instead a few days
ago. (Thanks for reading, “D.”!) In her review, “D.” suggested that Stuart and
I lacked the credentials we claimed to possess. I’m sure my superiors at
Brooklyn College would be fascinated by the bizarre claim.</span><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But the classic 5-star Cohan review was this one, from a reviewer named JKR:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">It came
promptly, but I haven't had time to read it.</span>”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Tough to rebut
that line of argument. Perhaps the <i>New
York Times </i>could schedule a third gushing review, with JKR taking the pen?</span><o:p></o:p></div>
kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-51122342862319548192014-05-09T00:18:00.001-04:002014-05-09T01:09:24.317-04:00Cohan's Greatest Hits<div class="MsoNormal">
Now that author William D. Cohan appears to be wrapping up
his publicity tour—and his review process ended with a biting item from the <i>Independent</i>—it might be worth reviewing
some of his “greatest hits” in interviews. A general comment: in a highly
unusual approach to a book tour, Cohan was far, far more aggressive about the
case than he was in the book itself. Could it be that freed from the
constraints of Scribner’s editors and counsel, Cohan could be himself?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>Nifong<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">“I<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>certainly<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>feel sorry for Mike Nifong, the
prosecutor, whose life was ruined because of this.”—WAMC<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">I’m sure that <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/03/comments-on-balko-article.html">Darryl Howard shares Cohan’s sympathy</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">“It’s a 600-page book; 580
pages of it are a condemnation of [Nifong’s] behavior and his decisions and his
judgements along the way.”—<i>New York<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">…suggesting that author Cohan
either is prone to misstatements or didn’t read his own book.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">“I was able to speak to
people who had never spoken before about this, like Mike Nifong.”—Diane Rehm
Show<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">It’s true Nifong had never
spoken about this, if we overlook dozens of press and political appearances and his testimony, under oath, before the State Bar and Judge Smith.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">“This idea that he was
exploiting this case for his election, I think, is ridiculous . . . he was
already an announced candidate.”—Jim Campbell Show<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">Political analyst Cohan: once
a candidate announces for election, he can no longer politically exploit an
issue that emerges.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">“[Mangum] truck me as rational,
thoughtful, articulate.”—WAMC<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">Cohan, on Nifong’s “victim.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“<span style="background: white;">So
within a week’s time he gave up [his preprimary publicity crusade] and
basically didn’t talk to the media again and but he was crucified for doing it
in that very publicly and during that week.”—CSPAN<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">Despite Cohan’s claims,
Nifong, Durham’s Christ-like figure crucified for his sins, didn’t refrain from
speaking to the media after a week; he just spoke less frequently. Lexis/Nexis
and a basic Google search can, sometimes, assist even a “serious investigative
journalist.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>Approach to the Book<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">“In the cool light of day,
just gather up everything I could about what happened, talk to anybody and
everyone who would talk to me, and just start at the beginning.”—<i>New York<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">Talk, that is, to everyone
other than anyone who tangled professionally with Mike Nifong in the courtroom.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“LAMB: Where is [Kim Roberts]
today?; COHAN: I have no idea. She…; LAMB: Did you try to find her?; COHAN: I
did, but I didn’t even know where to look.”—CSPAN <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A “serious investigative journalist” in
action.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">“I wasn’t trying to prove
that these kids were innocent, as [Stuart and KC] were.<span class="apple-converted-space">”—<i>New York<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">For reasons he has never
explained, Cohan appears to believe that the actual writing of <i>UPI</i> occurred in 2006, when there was any
doubt that “these kids were innocent.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">“I have tried to present all
sides to this fairly and dispassionately, but the - the - the haters like
Stuart Taylor don’t want anything to do with a fair and dispassionate
assessment of this case.<span class="apple-converted-space">”—Diane Rehm Show<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white;">Cohan still hasn’t revealed precisely what makes Stuart a “hater.”
Outrage at an author bedeviled by sloppy reasoning?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“LAMB: How did you approach doing
this? COHAN: Completely dispassionately.”—CSPAN<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For those in need of a good chuckle.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">“Why? Why? Why? If there’s
nothing to hide—if it were me, and this had happened to me, . . . and somebody
like me was writing a book about it, I would immediately want to talk to that
person despite what my attorneys were telling me, or despite what I might have
signed in a settlement with Duke.”—Michael Smerconish Show<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">Cohan, on the need to uphold
personal legal obligations.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“<span style="background: white;">I
thought for sure as the President of Duke University, my Alma Mater, knowing my
reputation as a serious investigative journalist, he would have at least have
the courtesy to meet with me.”—CSPAN<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">Cohan’s self-interpretation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><br /></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u>Due Process<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">“[Mangum] eventually did
identify,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>with the help of the
police</i>, [emphasis added] in an identification process, she did identify
three of the players, two with 100 percent certainty, one [sic] with 90 percent
certainty, and those were the three who were indicted.”—Leonard Lopate Show,
WYNC<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">Cohan, describing (and
seeming to defend) the rigged photo array.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white;">“</span></span><span style="background: white;">Mike Nifong would say that
he<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>did<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>turn over the complete DNA
evidence in a timely fashion.”—WUNC<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">Why, then, did Nifong lie to
Judge Smith about doing so?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">“For thousands of years [when
DNA was not identifiable,] rape charges were brought, and people were convicted
or found not guilty.”—WUNC<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">Civil liberties, according to
the man who (except for at WUNC) was the toast of the town on usually
civil-liberties friendly public radio stations.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">“It’s not inconceivable that
something happened that none of us would be proud of.”<span class="apple-converted-space">—Michael Smerconish Show<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white;">Cohan, carrying Richard Brodhead’s mantra that a trial could prove his
students innocent to a new extreme.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><span class="apple-converted-space"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><span class="apple-converted-space">“</span>Between
Nifong, Crystal, and Bob Steel, the consensus seems to be </span>something happened<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white;"> </span></span><span style="background: white;">in that bathroom that<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span>no one would be proud of<span style="background: white;">.”—Bloomberg
TV<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">In around a dozen interviews,
Cohan always refused to say <i>what </i>happened—even
when he was directly asked the question by a savvy e-mailer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">“</span>The
defense attorneys claim that Mike Nifong withheld that information from
them. But that’s just simply not
true . . . He didn’t make it easy for them. He didn’t put a nice bow
around it. He made them dig through it.”—Diane Rehm Show<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">“[Defense attorneys] claimed
that he did not disclose the so-called exculpatory DNA in a timely fashion.
But, you know, actually that’s not true!<span class="apple-converted-space">”—Jim
Campbell Show<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We moved from “simply” not true to
Diane Rehm to, a few days later, “actually” not true to Jim Campbell. Either
version of events is, to borrow a phrase, not true.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><u><span style="background: white;"><br /></span></u></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><u><span style="background: white;">Erroneous Descriptions of Evidence</span></u></span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“<span style="background: white;">So my question is: how did
David Evans’ DNA get on those fingernails?”—Jim Campbell Show<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">“On one of those fingernails
was David Evans DNA with 98 percent certainty. Which seems pretty high to me,
but I guess sometimes DNA experts say that two percent probability means that
it’s not related at all.”—CSPAN <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">So at what point in the few
days between his CSPAN appearance and his Jim Campbell appearance did the
“serious investigative journalist” decide that a probability DNA experts say “means
that it’s not related at all” was longer a necessary qualifier?<span class="apple-converted-space"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">“The nurse who examined her
found evidence that she had been brutalized and that she had been hurt very
badly . . . The medical records, I guess . . . nobody made that public until
now. I got my hands on it and reported it faithfully in the book.”—WAMC <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">Tall Tales, with William D.
Cohan.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white;">“</span></span><span style="background: white;">Each of the boys [<i><u>Cohan
is describing people in their late 20s or early 30s as “boys</u></i>”] – each
of the three indicted players got $20 million each from Duke.”—CSPAN<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">Alas, word on the street in
“Duke and Durham” <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/stuart-taylor-on-cohan.html">isn’t always reliable</a>, as a “serious investigative
journalist” should know.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background: white;">----------------<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;">And, finally, my personal
favorite, a nonsense-sentence uttered by someone pretending he knew something
about the law, on the </span><span style="background-color: white;">Leonard Lopate Show, WYNC</span><span style="background-color: white;">:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white;">“</span></span><span style="background: white;">Again, it’s [innocence]
not a word that’s used, uh, in jurisprudent lexicon.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-18247942227902961442014-05-08T11:18:00.000-04:002014-05-08T11:18:00.015-04:00Readership NoteEarlier today, the blog surpassed the 6,000,000 mark for visits. It currently has just under 9.1 million page views. The overwhelming percentage of that total came in 2006 and 2007 (when posts were, at least, daily), but the blog still averages around 7,500 reads per week.<br />
<br />
I should observe that the “definitive, magisterial” account of the case lists DIW readership at 100,000—leaving author Cohan off by a factor of 60 on visits and over 90 on page views. Although this item is insignificant when compared to the book’s serious errors, Cohan has never explained why he chose to use an incorrect figure, or why he did not contact me to ascertain the correct figure before publishing.<br />
<br />
As always, thank you for visiting the blog.kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-34367816943296354492014-05-07T10:38:00.003-04:002014-05-07T10:41:35.130-04:00The Independent: "The Price of Silence Adds Nothing New to the Case or Our Understanding of It"As <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/04/21/the-attempted-rehabilitation-of-mike-nifong/">Radley Balko has presciently observed</a>, the pattern in reviews of author William Cohan’s book has been straightforward: overwhelmingly negative reviews from any reviewer who followed the case closely, coupled with glowing reviews from those who knew nothing about the case and appeared willing to uncritically accept Cohan’s musings without even wondering about the merits of using a convicted liar as the book’s chief source.<br />
<br />
(The sole somewhat-exception to the pattern: Susannah Meadows, whose review admitted that Cohan had failed to provide evidence for his something-happened thesis but nonetheless praised Cohan for producing new findings that either weren’t new or weren’t true.)<br />
<br />
Confirmation of the Balko pattern comes now from a most unexpected source, <i>The Independent</i>.<br />
<br />
As <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-independent-durham-needs-da-with.html">noted below</a>, few publications did more to uphold Nifong’s fraudulent efforts; the paper endorsed him twice and aggressively slanted opinion coverage during the case in his favor. Yet reviewer Stephen Deusner <a href="http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/an-exhaustive-exhausting-investigation-of-the-duke-lacrosse-scandal/Content?oid=4159607">has nothing good to say</a> about the book in which the paper’s one-time hero serves as chief protagonist.<br />
<br />
Reflecting the <i>IndyWeek</i> mindset, Deusner seems eager to embrace Cohan’s message. He opens his review in the following way: “When President Obama recently issued new guidelines for reporting and investigating sexual assaults on campus, he signaled his intention to curb violence against women and to confront a toxic culture that is deeply entrenched in higher education.
Triangle readers might view these policies as a delayed response to the Duke lacrosse controversy of 2006, where a racially charged rape allegation made by a stripper against members of the Duke men's lacrosse team later proved unfounded.”<br />
<br />
While this remark accurately captures the politically correct approach to the issue of campus sexual assault nationally, it raises the obvious question: how would Duke, a rape that not only never occurred, but an episode exposed as an instance of massive prosecutorial misconduct, provide justification for a policy that <a href="http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2014/04/the_white_house_joins_the_war_.html">eviscerates the due process protections of accused students</a>?<br />
<br />
Nonetheless, even a reviewer who seems as highly sympathetic to Cohan’s ideological perspective can’t stomach the book. “Even Jon Stewart could barely hide his skepticism in a recent Daily Show interview,” Deusner correctly notes. (As Stuart Taylor and I commented in <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/05/02/how_the_media_again_failed_on_the_duke_lacrosse_story_122488.html">our <i>RCP </i>piece</a>, Stewart was about the only interviewer, along with <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohan-dna-not-essential-for-thousands.html">WUNC’s Frank Stasio</a>, to in any way challenge Cohan: and Stasio, though his program leans to the left, clearly was knowledgeable about the case.) Deusner observes, again correctly, that critics “have not been kind in their assessments, nor should they be: This very long book is short on insight or purpose.”<br />
<br />
Deusner wonders about the book at a structural level, noting that “Cohan regurgitates seemingly every last shred of information from his files . . . persistently confusing summary with analysis and failing to shape the facts into a coherent or accessible narrative.” He also expresses doubt about Cohan's willingness to rely so heavily on “Nifong, who is perhaps not the most credible witness.”<br />
<br />
Cohan's apparent sympathy for Nifong, Deusner reasons, might be “the unintended consequence of the author's lack of access to other testimonies and to his own mishandling of the narrative.” In the end, the reviewer concludes, neither Cohan nor Nifong are able to provide any “new perspective” on the case.<br />
<br />
Again: all of this comes from a paper that twice endorsed Nifong and whose editorial slant seems highly sympathetic to Cohan overall.<br />
<br />
I suppose Cohan can hold out hope for a positive review from the <i>Herald-Sun</i>? But unless one is forthcoming, the <i>Price of Silence</i> will conclude its reviewer season as an extraordinary example of a book about which no one who knew anything about the case could find anything positive to say.kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-55389965512481945942014-05-05T00:01:00.000-04:002014-05-05T00:01:00.247-04:00The Independent: Durham Needs a DA with Passion, Like Nifong & Cline<div class="MsoNormal">
Tuesday is primary day in North Carolina. The <i>Independent,</i> the Triangle’s alternative
weekly, recently made its endorsement for the Democratic
primary for DA.<i><o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The <i>Independent</i>
hosts the columns of Hal Crowther, <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2014/04/cohans-approach-to-op-eds-new-items-in.html">hailed
by author William D. Cohan</a> as “the conscience of progressive thinkers in
North Carolina.” That would be the <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/06/defending-durham-status-quo.html">same
Crowther</a> who penned a vicious summer 2006 column featuring Peter Wood
speaking disparagingly of the accused lacrosse players he had taught in his
class. When the mother of one of the players, Reade Seligmann, called up Wood
to ask him on what basis he had attacked her son, Wood hung up on her.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(In an intriguing item, Cohan revealed in the WYNC interview
that he knew Wood when he was at Duke, explaining the book’s heroic treatment
of the <a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/09/crisis-for-peter-wood.html">discredited</a>
<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2006/09/peter-woods-distorted-campus-culture.html">lacrosse</a>
<a href="http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2006/05/coleman-committee-report-and.html">critic</a>.)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Indy </i>has quite a
record on endorsements.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the 2006 DA’s primary, the <i>Independent </i><a href="http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/durham-endorsements-spring-2006/Content?oid=1197122">urged
voters</a> to “look beyond the recent handling of one case” (including the DA’s
myriad ethically improper public statements) and vote for Mike Nifong. The
paper’s board praised Nifong’s<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"> “</span></span><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">hardworking and
professional manner,” and suggested that “colleagues and legal opponents alike
laud his sense of fairness and justice.” (This statement came in the midst of
the lacrosse case; Joe Cheshire’s first press conference calling into question
Nifong’s sense of fairness and justice had occurred weeks before.) But Nifong
was acceptable ideologically, and so he earned the nod.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">In the fall campaign, <i>Indy
</i></span><a href="http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/durham-county-endorsements/Content?oid=1199530"><span style="background: white; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">climbed back on board the
Nifong bandwagon</span></a><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">. Editors fretted at how “Nifong has a target on his back,”
and then offered a bizarre recapitulation of events of the year. “Nifong and
the Durham Police Department may have mishandled the case,” <i>Indy </i>delicately noted, and—in a
Cohanesque interpretation—perhaps Nifong spoke out of turn when he “publicly
condemned the defendants before completing his investigation.” But, the editors
assured their readers, “the district attorney has made amends.” The nature of
those “amends” was a mystery in October 2006 and remains a mystery now.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">In the event, even if he was seeking to convict innocent
people without any evidence, <i>The
Independent </i>concluded that “We're sticking with the endorsement we made for
the April primary:<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b>Mike
Nifong.</b>” After all, “maybe he
has a few tricks up his sleeve.” Tricks, perhaps, like withholding exculpatory evidence.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Nifong was removed as district attorney amidst an ethics scandal.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the 2008 primary, after conceding they were hoodwinked by
Nifong, the editors <a href="http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/durham-county/Content?oid=1207984">issued
a glowing endorsement of Tracey Cline</a>. Identity politics was front and
center in the selection; the editorial suggested that Cline, “as a black woman, could be an
excellent role model for the young African Americans caught in the system.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In a remarkable
passage for a paper that had enabled Nifong, the editorial whitewashed Cline’s
role in the lacrosse case. “She is putting to rest questions,” <i>Indy </i>mused, “that she was involved in
Nifong's lacrosse prosecution, a concern among some critics. She told the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Independent</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>that police officers came to her
asking advice about what paperwork to complete, a search warrant or a
non-testimonial order, and when they had completed the paperwork, filed it with
then Assistant District Attorney David Saacks, who signed it. ‘I didn't sign
anything,’ Cline said. ‘All I did was advise them, which I should do on every
single case. Under the same situation, any district attorney would do the same
thing. The statute requires you to do that.’”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of course, the <i>questions </i>extended beyond her giving an
“advice” for a NTO that covered some people the police had no cause to believe
even were in Durham the night of the party. The <i>questions </i>involved what role Cline—second chair to Nifong in the
trial that William D. Cohan desperately wished had occurred—played in assisting
Nifong during 2006. Cline’s Wonderland-like implication that she had never talked
about the case with Nifong fooled no one—except, it seems, the <i>Indy </i>editors.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Cline
was removed as district attorney amidst an ethics scandal.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So <a href="http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/aus-would-be-an-awesome-durham-da/Content?oid=4150368">who has the paper endorsed in the first
post-Cline election</a>? In an editorial that didn’t mention <i>Indy</i>’s endorsements in either 2006 or 2008, the paper endorsed a
“veteran defense attorney” named Brian Aus. What accounted for the choice? “<span style="background: white;">He seems to have more passion than his opponents.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">And, by the way? According to the editors, “passion is the
very quality that sunk Nifong and Cline.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">It’s good to see that for the <i>Independent</i>, reconsidering long-held criteria in face of
contradictory evidence isn’t a useful task.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542246.post-32084418959678014002014-05-03T14:33:00.002-04:002014-05-03T14:33:24.311-04:00Media & CohanStuart and I had a piece yesterday in Real Clear Politics, examining how the failure of (much of) the mainstream media--both in reviewers and interviewers--to critically examine the extreme arguments of author William D. Cohan reveals a new round in the media's rush to judgment about the case. You can <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/05/02/how_the_media_again_failed_on_the_duke_lacrosse_story_122488.html">read the piece here</a>.kcjohnson9http://www.blogger.com/profile/09625813296986996867noreply@blogger.com17