More on Marcotte

One possible defense for John Edwards’ appointment of Amanda Marcotte as his campaign’s chief blogger might be ignorance—i.e., this was a low-level appointment in the campaign, one in which the candidate probably had no role and which would have received little notice absent her indefensible comments about the lacrosse case.

Alas, that defense isn’t open to him. The Marcotte appointment generated widespread, enthusiastic praise among the left-leaning blogosphere before word of her lacrosse statements came to light.

My DD:

This is an interesting angle of hires from the netroots for Edwards. Shakespeare’s Sister and Pandagon are blogs that I think would be characterized as ‘ideologically-centered’ as opposed to being ‘big-tent’ democratic blogs.

This is actually the first move by the Edwards campaign in the netroots that I find ground-breaking . . . But most of all, it’s a move on the issues to the liberal side of the spectrum.

What this move symbolizes in the blogosphere is that Edwards team understands how to move to the left on the issues. The early move by Edwards to consolidate the liberal wing of the Democratic party at the beginning is very smart. It’s how McGovern won the 1972 Democratic primary (I’ve been reading Gary Hart’s “Right from the Start”) . . . For Edwards, that show of “organizational strength” means wins in both Iowa and Nevada.

SLOG: (the blog of Seattle’s alternative weekly, in a post entitled, “Yay, Amanda!”)

One of my favorite bloggers, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, has signed on to blog for John Edwards’s campaign—exciting news for Amanda, great news for Edwards. Amanda explains her decision to go to work for Edwards here, noting that her political obsessions— including “women’s rights, ending the war in Iraq, environmentalism, and restoring the American dream where climbing out of poverty and having a middle class lifestyle is an option available to everyone”—are right in line with her candidate’s.

Pandagon: (from Marcotte’s blog partner)

You can’t say that they aren’t a savvy crew over there at Team Edwards, because they are scooping up the big guns on the almost-A list (they are both A in my book, but we know what I mean when it comes to the big boyz). The folks here and at Shakes Sis are large, politically engaged and active readers — and will give the Edwards camp a fair hearing. I’m sure that these developments are due to Elizabeth Edwards, who is well-versed and ever-present in the blogosphere. [emphasis added]

It will be interesting to see what kind of pressure this puts on the other candidates to recruit well-known voices from the netroots, and what editorial effect that will have on blogs generally, since both will continue blogging at their primary pads in addition to their work for JRE. This is certainly generating more buzz on the blogs than developments at Hillaryland. Hoo-hah.

The Impolitic:

There’s something happening here. All kinds of movement in Blogtopia this week. Hot of the heels of Amanda Marcotte’s announcement, now Shakespeare’s Sister tells us she has also joined the Edwards campaign as Netroots Coordinator. I’m not entirely sold on Edwards as a candiate myself but I’m huge fan of Shakes and he’s clearly demonstrated his commitment to connecting with the netroots with these two hires. Congrats to Melissa and good on Edwards for such great picks to run his internet outreach.

Liberal Values:

John Edwards has been really concentrating on getting improving his strength in the blogosphere. Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon is taking over as blogmaster . . . [Edwards] certainly is going all out in utilizing every new bell and whistle which has been added to blogs since the Dean campaign.

So, the Marcotte move was one that generated a lot of high praise for Edwards among a key constituency. Now, Overlawyered has the story of Marcotte deleting many of her most outrageous comments. Is this the message that Edwards is intending to send? Some might call it a cover-up.

Sunday Wrap-up

Writing in Roll Call, Stuart Rothenberg, one of the nation’s most astute political commentators, urged politicians not to “lower the bar for candidates’ campaign bloggers.”

The occasion for his column? Amanda Marcotte’s apologia, in which she claimed that her departure from the campaign was a blow for those hoping to allow “everyday citizens to engage in politics in the language and manner that is comfortable for us, if not for the establishment.” If Marcotte’s comment is any indication, Rothenberg correctly observes, she and her ilk “believe that all ‘everyday, common people’ eschew civility and reason. Sorry, but that’s not the case. Not by a long shot.”

Marcotte and other populist bomb-throwers can write whatever they want—this is one of the nice things about a blog. But that freedom, Rothenberg argues, “doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be held responsible for their comments or that mainstream reporters should pay much attention to them”—as Marcotte demanded when she attacked those who had criticized her writings on the lacrosse case. Indeed, “since campaign bloggers are no less campaign staffers than press secretaries, a campaign ought to take responsibility for hiring those people, including any embarrassing past behavior.”

Rothenberg concludes that Marcotte and her blogger colleague, Melissa McEwen, “would have been “fired immediately by Edwards if they had been in a traditional staff position.” Why should candidates apply a different standard to bloggers?

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As if to prove Rothenberg’s point, Marcotte, having resigned in disgrace from the Edwards campaign, is again offering her theories on the lacrosse case. Her remarks came in comments from her following post: “I just want to remind you that having sex with someone too drunk to resist is against the law and you can be found guilty of rape if you do it.” Since there’s not a scintilla of evidence of any “sex” in the Duke case, much less a contention that the accuser was unable to resist because she was too drunk to resist (Nifong, as it’s worth remembering, once demonstrated to a national TV audience how aggressively the accuser “resisted”), it would seem that Marcotte’s post would have nothing to do with the Duke case.

But such a view, of course, would not allow for entering the mind of Amanda Marcotte. In her comment, she began by claiming that Ryan McFadyen “would defend a rapist who was caught in the act on videotape.” (The statement is demonstrably untrue, but facts aren’t exactly Marcotte’s friend.) Moreover, as another commenter told Marcotte:

As a blogger who claimed that your posts were satire, ironic and utilised literary techniques to make a point, surely you can recognise it when others use it to make their own point. So which is it Amanda? What you wrote was satire and didn’t divulge any hatred or bigotry of Catholics?

Then the above quote is also satire, as the writer claimed it was. It clearly uses hyperbole to make an ironic point. i.e.: That they would not behave in such a manner ever, even though many are prejudiced and bigoted to believe that they do. That to believe so is absurd . . .

Or are you implying that you get to be held to one standard and those you disagree with are held to another?

Marcotte, obviously, believes that she gets to be held to one standard, and her critics another. She then addressed anyone who has contended that no rape occurred. “No one talks to you,” Marcotte fumed, “because you are rape-loving scum . . . That you defend [the players] makes you such lowly, sleazy scum that it’s no wonder no one talks to you. They’re afraid by acknowledging you, they will catch the evil. Know this. Absorb it. Hope you enjoy sleeping at night, you sick, hateful bastards.”

This is the person that John Edwards wanted as his campaign blogger.

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Even sympathetic commenters have had enough of Marcotte. Another wrote,

As someone with whom I agree in so many respects, I do not know why you are so dumb about the Duke lacrosse case, and why you continue to perpetuate the myths about it. This is a case over which the left wing should be outraged, it is a classic case of railroading innocent men, but just because the accused are white men and the accuser a black woman, you must pretend to believe her and join in railroading . . .

Feminists and the left in general are totally mad to support the Duke lacrosse prosecution, because it is a travesty of justice, and it will be used against feminists and more importantly genuine rape victims will have to fight it before they are able to fight their own, for years to come.

I urge you to reconsider your approach on this one, because, you are damaging those you claim to support.

Don’t count on a change from Marcotte anytime soon.

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My colleague, Stuart Taylor, spoke about the case Friday in Memphis. The summary of his remarks, entitled “The Duke Lacrosse Case and What It Says About Our Criminal Justice Process, Academics, and News Media”:

What it says, he suggested, is mostly bad: Durham N.C. prosecutor Mike Nifong made an "outrageous rush to judgment," most of the media botched the story because of their political correctness and general shadiness, and Duke professors and administrators were spineless and all too eager to join Nifong’s side.

Two prosecutors served on the panel with him; both provided what could charitably be termed unimpressive commentary. Federal prosecutor Tim DiScenza said that while Nifong might have “violated every prohibition we have about disclosure of evidence,” in the federal system, North Carolina rules might be different. (Actually, they’re not more lenient, and in any case, the Constitution does apply in North Carolina.) He also chastised Taylor for criticizing the media’s coverage of the case, and for suggesting that grand juries are rubber stamps of prosecutors.

DiScenza’s remarks continue what has been an unusual pattern in this case: the prosecutors who try to find excuses for Nifong. The most egregious figure to behave in this fashion has been former Denver district attorney Norm Early.

Here’s Early, on CNN, on December 26:

I don't know whether [Nifong] has done a great job, an average job, a medium job of handling this case, because I don’t know all the evidence. But what I do know is that the defense has done a very good job of trying to smear the victim and smear Mr. Nifong.

He did not possess enough information on December 26 to evaluate Nifong's performance?! Early—as customary in his comments about the case—refused to supply any evidence to substantiate his allegation.

Just like the Trustees’ refusal to condemn the Duke faculty who misbehaved has created a false impression that extremists among the Group of 88 are characteristic of all Duke professors, so too do comments such as Early’s create a false impression that somehow Nifong’s behavior is the norm among prosecutors nationwide.

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Those who want to return to events of last spring can sample this youtube video of one of the potbangers’ protests—in this case, their march on Provost Peter Lange’s house.

That people made snap judgments was unsurprising. What is striking, however, is the moral certainty of the potbangers. Based solely on an unsubstantiated allegation, they had no hesitation in taking absolute actions, and using the case to make broad statements about society.

And, of course, the potbangers, like 87 members of the Group of 88 (the exception is Math professor Arlie Petters), have not only refused to apologize but continue to defend the propriety of their actions.

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The Chronicle has a new, and well-done blog, which contains a link to the Common performance containing one of the rapper’s two insults of the lacrosse players.

I am puzzled that this issue persists. As far as I understand (and if I’m wrong, I hope Duke students will correct me), the Last Day of Classes event is intended as a celebration for students. We have, in this case, a performer who insulted Duke students in a public, and vulgar, fashion. How can there be any doubt but that his invitation to perform should be rescinded?

Three arguments in favor of moving forward with the performance have been advanced: (1) the contract cancellation fee would take a bite out of the Student Activities budget; (2) there might not be enough time to book another act of comparable quality; (3) lots of other people, not just Common, rushed to judgment last spring.

Addressing (1), it would seem, provides a perfect opportunity for the Brodhead administration to encourage healing on campus, by volunteering to cover the cost of the cancellation fee out of University funds. Objections (2) and (3) are hard to take seriously.

A performer invited to campus has insulted students using a vulgar epithet as he grabbed his crotch. And yet the “campus culture” activists are quiet; from the Duke professors who have spent the last several months behaving as if they were latter-day cultural Puritans, we hear nothing. Why is this selective silence not surprising?

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[Update, 10.57am]: A rare useful article in today's Herald-Sun notes that Mike Nifong is becoming legendary in federal circuit courts. Nifong's actions have made it into two opinions, one in the 5th Circuit and the other in the 6th Circuit, as emblematic of prosecutorial misconduct.

Bill Thomas on the development: "I am not aware of any other case from the circuit courts that single out a prosecutor by name to exemplify prosecutorial misconduct. It is an extremely unusual circumstance. I have never seen it done before in my career of more than 25 years."

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In the Wonderland that is Durham, public information officers seem to practice disinformation instead. A case in point is DPD spokesperson Kammie Michael. She reached her high point in the lacrosse case on March 28, when she definitively stated, in writing, that Kim Roberts was not the first 911 caller. In fact, Roberts told the responding officers on March 14 that she had made the call, and she reiterated the point in her March 22 statement.

So, two options exist: (a) Michael was lying; (b) Michael is incompetent, and gave the press wrong information because she didn’t know how to find accurate material.

It appears Michael’s performance in the lacrosse case was not a one-shot deal, and the matter has now come to concern Mayor Bill Bell. A week ago Saturday, a Durham police officer Charles Callemyn, was killed in a traffic accident. Michael told both reporters and a list-serv that Callemyn “had not been involved in any prior traffic accidents while he was a Durham officer” and “had a clean driving record” with the department. Both statements were wrong.

Bell was blunt in his response: “We need to check our facts before we put information out to the public. If that wasn’t done, we need to understand why.”

The episode came on top off inaccurate information recently supplied to the City Council by Police Chief Steve Chalmers. Meanwhile, the information officer appears to have gone out of business: “As per Deputy Chief Ron Hodge, I am under a directive not to respond to any further questions from The Herald-Sun at this time. Please have Bob Ashley contact Deputy Chief Hodge if you need any further clarification.”

If she’s not supplying information, for what is she being paid?

One final item: despite addressing the theme of Michael providing inaccurate information to the press, the Herald-Sun article ignored the deception practiced by Michael in the lacrosse case, even though it involved a H-S reporter (Brianne Dopart). Apparently, Editor Ashley's loyalty to Nifong's prosecution transcends even solidarity with a fellow reporter on staff.

More Airbrushing

Creatively reinterpreting the past appears to be a theme in case-related matters this week. The potbangers blazed the trail; Amanda Marcotte took up the challenge.

The ex-official blogger for the Edwards campaign published an explanation of her departure yesterday in Salon.

Her departure from the Edwards campaign, in her view, was a cataclysmic setback. In her article, she claimed:

• “Regardless of its motive, the result of the smear campaign was to send a loud, clear signal to young feminist women. It tells them that campaigning for Democratic candidates, and particularly doing so in positions that would help the candidate connect with young feminist communities like the one that thrives in the blogosphere, is a scary, risky prospect.”

• “When I was trying to decide whether to resign, no other concern weighed as heavy as the fear that resigning would tell the right-wing mob that harassing young feminists works.”

• “It’s also plausible that the right-wing noise machine was working on pure misogynist emotion.”

• “This was just the first sign that the established media and political circles will not be letting the blog-writing rabble into the circle without a fight.”

Marcotte mostly attacked the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue. But, she conceded, her problems began when she “noticed a small flare-up of oddly aggressive and misogynistic comments in my moderation queue over a short, irritated post I wrote about the coverage of the Duke lacrosse rape case on CNN.” That post, dated early January, openly asserted that a sexual assault took place.

Her response? To assume “that some anti-feminist blogger had linked me and so, in frustration, I went and rewrote my by-then week-old post to mock the commenters by spelling out my views in childish, easy-to-understand language.”

Marcotte is a professional blogger; I’m not. But I don’t consider it common practice at most blogs to, upon receiving questioning comments, eliminate the original post and replace it with something else.

And how does Marcotte define an “anti-feminist blogger”? Apparently anyone who believes that no evidence exists in this case to suggest that a rape occurred.

The affair, laments Marcotte, “may have been the first indication that the right-wing noise machine had noticed me and was looking for something with which to hurt me and my new employers.”

The blogs that did the most postings on Marcotte and the Duke case were Liestoppers and DIW—hardly part of the “right-wing noise machine.” Liestoppers was devoted to a campaign designed to allow Mike Easley, a Democrat, to appoint Durham County’s next DA; this blog is run by someone backing Barack Obama.

But, as Marcotte made clear in her original (airbrushed) post about the case, she clearly is someone for whom the facts are secondary to advancing her ideological agenda.

By the way, Marcotte also claimed in her Salon column that “liberal blogs are issue-oriented and good at parsing out complex ideas that don’t fit well into the sound-bite-driven mainstream discourse. They are a good fit for wonky Democrats.”

Here’s a compilation of Marcotte’s postings on the lacrosse case. How many people would consider these postings examples of “parsing out complex ideas,” or “wonky,” or “issue-oriented”?

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Another redefining occurred this week in the Chronicle column of one of the few remaining defenders of the Group of 88, Samson Mesele. Echoing the assertion of Charles Piot from last Monday’s edition of the Group of 88 Rehab Tour, Mesele claimed that the Group of 88 is really the Group of 89—that “in my view, [President Brodhead] is an honorary signatory of the ad and its references to student-identified problems of racism, sexual coercion and social inequality at Duke.” (I’m not sure Brodhead would agree with this claim.)

Mesele articulated the Group of 88’s current talking points—(1) the ad had nothing to do with the lacrosse case; (2) dozens of professors taking out full-page ads “listening” to their students is somehow routine in higher education: (3) critics have willfully misinterpreted the document, which no one noticed at the time.

“Indeed,” he wrote, “the April ad’s social commentary transcends the very dimensions of the lacrosse case. Publishing student experiences is . . . an extension of the University’s educational interests.”

The latter claim is, of course, absurd: it would imply that every day, college newspapers are filled with dozens of ads published by dozens of professors “listening” to students with whom those professors agree on ideological issues.

But what of Mesele’s first claim? His assertion echoed that of the “clarifying” faculty, whose defiant open letter asserted that the Group of 88’s statement was not “a comment on the alleged rape, the team party, or the specific students accused.”

Here’s an announcement (scroll down the page) of an April 12 event at the John Hope Franklin Center:

Wednesday, April 12th, 2006: 07:00 PM - 08:30 PM

Room 240, John Hope Franklin Center

Panel Discussion

Thinking About This Social Disaster

Wahneema Lubiano (AAAS and Literature), Thavolia Glymph (AAAS and History), and Serena Sebring (Sociology)

The presenters will talk about what has happened, what is happening, and what is coming together in the framing of the accusation of rape against members of the Duke men’s lacrosse team and its afterlife. [emphasis added] There will be plenty of time for audience members to be part of the discussion.

The same announcement on the African-American Studies program blog helpfully contained a link to the (since-removed) URL of . . . the Group of 88’s ad.

Serena Sebring, as a post earlier this week noted, was a prominent potbanger; when asked whether the protesters should apologize for their rush to judgment, she eloquently replied, “Nope.” At the forum noted above, Thavolia Glymph lamented how “since the [negative] DNA results were returned Monday, we [have been] moving backwards.” And Lubiano, of course, was not only the author of the Group of 88’s ad, but the author of eight of the student quotes in the ad, which came not from a transcript but from her (apparently unverified) notes.

To review:

• The “listening” statement, which contained quotes about what “happened to this woman” and thanked protesters for not waiting, was entitled, “What Is a Social Disaster?”

• Six days after its publication, the AAAS hosted a forum entitled “Thinking about a Social Disaster,” which addressed “what has happened, what is happening, and what is coming together in the framing of the accusation of rape against members of the Duke men’s lacrosse team and its afterlife.”

• The official announcement of the event on the AAAS website linked to the “listening” statement.

But the ad was not “a comment on the alleged rape, the team party, or the specific students accused.”

As Marcotte discovered, it’s difficult to airbrush the internet.

Edwards Keeps Marcotte

The Edwards campaign has just issued a statement, contradicting reports from yesterday, that it will retain Amanda Marcotte as the candidate's official blogger. The candidate remarked,

The tone and the sentiment of some of Amanda Marcotte’s and Melissa McEwen’s posts personally offended me. It’s not how I talk to people, and it’s not how I expect the people who work for me to talk to people.

This statement begs the question: if "the tone and the sentiment" of some of the duo's posts offended the candidate, and did not meet the standards for his employees, why did Edwards hire the duo in the first place?

The Edwards-Marcotte Fiasco

An astute observer of this case recommends analyzing events through the prism of what he’s termed the “courage-meter.” People in positions of authority have displayed little or no courage to do the right thing throughout this affair. North Carolina’s senators, Republicans Elizabeth Dole and Richard Burr? Zero on the courage-meter. The state’s governor, Democrat Mike Easley? Another courage-meter zero. Durham’s Democratic congressman, David Price? A negative score, based on his de facto endorsement of Nifong only days before the state bar deemed the D.A. a rogue.

But this quartet has the hearts of lions compared to the state’s best-known Democrat, John Edwards, currently making his second bid for President. Before entering politics, Edwards was one of the state’s best-known civil attorneys*. He even worked in the law firm of Wade Smith, Collin Finnerty’s lead attorney in the lacrosse case. So if anyone should be sensitive to massive prosecutorial abuse, it’s Edwards.

His response? First silence—and then, as Liestoppers and Betsy Newmark have noted, appointing as his campaign’s lead blogger a figure who has branded the players guilty, in ugly rhetoric that almost makes Wendy Murphy look temperate.

Amanda Marcotte wrote on the Edwards blog that she came to her post after a stint at Pandagon, “which is one of the top liberal political blogs on the internet and known mostly for insightful and often humorous political blogging.” [emphasis added]

What kind of “insightful” blogging has Marcotte offered on the lacrosse case? Liestoppers had the graphic detail:

In the meantime, I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good fucking god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and fucked her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out.

Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it?

So unfair.

Yes, how dare a rape victim act confused and bewildered like she was raped or something.

Natalia, do you know the details of the case? If so, why do you think a women enthusiastically jumped into a sexual situation with men making slavery jokes at her? Furthermore, what is your theory on why she supposedly looooooved having sex with guys holding her facedown on the bathroom floor? There’s no “if” they behaved in a disrespectful manner. We have conclusive evidence that happened.

This is about race and class and gender in every way, and there’s basically no way this woman was going to see justice. In her part of the country, both women and black people are seen as subhuman objects to be used and abused by white men.

Yeah, I know, Alon. Which is why I’m frustrated that people are pretending ‘can’t identify which one raped her” somehow equals ‘wasn’t raped’. I had some initial confusion about exactly who was assaulting me when I was assaulted, but that doesn’t mean that his hands weren’t actually where they were.

Plus, the media is acting like these men are exonerated!

After James Taranto brought attention to the words above, Marcotte deleted them (so much for “transparency” in the Edwards campaign). Her new statement?

Since people are determined to make hay over this quick shot of a post, I’m deleting it and here’s my official stance. The prosecution in the Duke case fumbled the ball. The prosecutor was too eager to get a speedy case and make a name for himself. That is my final word.

“Too eager to get a speedy case”?! Nifong has been dragging the case out for months, and opposed defense efforts to get a speedy trial.

Anyhow, the above post looks like more than a “quick shot of a post”—it comprised several paragraphs, and showed some knowledge of the basic outline of the case. Marrcotte even took the time to make a comment herself in the comment thread, suggesting that she hardly dashed off the post and then forgot that it existed.

The wording of the retraction post clearly implied that John Edwards’ official campaign blogger is still on record believing that a rape occurred.

Moreover, as the Liestoppers post makes clear, Marcotte’s position in the since-deleted post is fully consistent with her other “insightful” commentary on the case:

• There’s just something about this Duke rape case that’s inspiring to rape apologists . . . [Feminists] could certainly come up with a more efficient method if we wanted to of getting men in jail besides getting ourselves raped and then raising a fuss as if we had a right not to be raped. Pandagon 5/10

• In almost every article and piece of commentary, the event is portrayed not as a crime between individuals but as a clash between classes, races and sexes. That might be because the rapists [no “alleged” for Edwards’ official campaign blogger] were making jokes about slavery and picking cotton to the victim, which is to say reminding her of their racial privilege by referencing the history that created it. Pandagon 4/09

• Smarty-pants, educated womenz (and one dude who loved the cock) who have sex with guys who aren’t me raped that stripper at Duke, not a bunch of overly entitled rich white boys making cracks about picking cotton. Pandagon 8/31

Edwards should demand Marcotte’s immediate resignation from campaign.

[Update, 6.11pm: See Overlawyered for additional details, including Marcotte's going beyond removing her original post to now deleting other comments she made about the case as well. Some people might call this an "Edwards Cover-up."]

[Full disclosure: I support Barack Obama, one of Edwards' rivals for the nomination.]

*--correction

Sunday News

One obstacle to Mike Nifong’s efforts to retain his law license is his difficulty in offering consistent defenses for his actions. He or his attorneys have provided no fewer than 11 different explanations for his decision to intentionally enter into an agreement with Dr. Brian Meehan to withhold exculpatory DNA evidence.

He and his attorneys also have struggled to come up with a consistent line to explain his improper public statements. In a July 28 press conference, he described the “first message” of his pre-primary publicity barrage as affirming that “the community was in good hands with respect to this case, and they did not need to worry about it.” Nifong never explained why this role could not have been fulfilled by people not covered by the Bar’s Rules of Professional Conduct, such as the mayor, or town manager, or the Police Department, as occurs in every other case.

Anyhow, Rule 3.8 of the Code of Conduct contains no “good hands” waiver, and this line of defense has now vanished from the Nifong repertoire. In his “Today” show appearance, David Freedman, Nifong’s attorney, relied on what the Bar has termed Nifong’s “hair-splitting” strategy, rationalizing the statements on the grounds that they “didn’t go particularly to any of the defendants themselves.” In his July 28 defense of his statements, Nifong didn’t raise this line of argument at all. If, in fact, the new rationalization explained Nifong's motivations all along, I wonder why the DA forgot to mention it on July 28?

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An important post from John in Carolina on the origins and funding of the Group of 88’s “listening statement.” Given the seemingly irregular nature in which departmental approval was (or wasn’t) obtained from four departments, JinC wanted to know

how did it happen that Duke faculty in 15 departments and programs didn't know they were being listed on a full-page Chronicle ad that thanked people who harassed and endangered Duke students by, among other odious acts, cheering a “CASTRATE” banner and distributing “Vigilante” posters within sight of Duke President Richard H. Brodhead’s office?

JinC closes with some provocative questions:

Who paid for the ad?

Did individual faculty members pay for it with their personal funds?

Or were department funds used?

And if department funds were used, which department or departments paid out the money? Who authorized departmental payout(s)?

Or did the money come from one of the many “discretionary funds” which various Duke administrators and senior faculty can access?

If that’s the case, who was the administrator or faculty member accessing a fund and which discretionary fund was accessed?

All questions that deserve responses.

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Amanda Marcotte, John Edwards’ former campaign blogger, continues her efforts at revising the past. In mid-February, she described her departure from the campaign as sending a message “to young feminist women . . . that campaigning for Democratic candidates, and particularly doing so in positions that would help the candidate connect with young feminist communities like the one that thrives in the blogosphere, is a scary, risky prospect” and representing “just the first sign that the established media and political circles will not be letting the blog-writing rabble into the circle without a fight.”

Of course, some might have attributed Marcotte’s departure to the difficulties of a presidential campaign keeping on staff a figure who regularly employed vile language and who had presumed guilt in a high-profile state from his home state.

Last week, Marcotte went even further, remembering “the railroading of me and Melissa off Edwards’ staff.” “Railroading”? Is Marcotte now claiming that she didn’t write the posts that caused so much controversy, or that people misquoted her?

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An amusing cartoon speculating on why City Manager Patrick Baker might actually like all the negative press attention that Mike Nifong has received.

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At the University of Minnesota, three African-American football players were arrested last week on allegations of rape. The football coach suspended them from the team.

The issue, however, attracted quite different national media attention than did the Duke case. The AP story did not mention the race of either the accuser or the accused. No jeremiads from Selena Roberts or Harvey Araton are likely to appear. University officials have given no inclination that they plan to cancel the team’s season or even cancel one spring practice. And those awaiting the University of Minnesota faculty equivalent of the Group of 88 to issue a denunciatory statement will, I suspect, be waiting a long time.

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Another sign of Mike Nifong’s diminished power came last week, when Durham’s senior resident Superior Court judge, Orlando Hudson, granted a motion filed by Freda Black and set the stage for the release of Raymond Lee Parker. Parker was convicted of robbery (which netted $173) 27 years ago in a case prosecuted by then-ADA Mike Nifong.

The victim has died, and Parker remains in jail, even though under current North Carolina law, his maximum sentence would be under 14 years. The N&O’s Anne Blythe: “Nifong could not be reached for comment Thursday.” That line has become quite familiar in recent weeks.

Liestoppers also observes that having a disgraced DA makes it difficult to negotiate with the state legislature to obtain increased funding. The post notes that Nifong appears to be double dipping in his appeals, asking for more state funds on the grounds that he can't rely on county support and requesting more county support on the grounds he can't rely on state support.

More generally: how, possibly, could a state legislator vote more funds for an office headed by a figure that the state Bar has contended violated three North Carolina laws and the U.S. Constitution?

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Group of 88 leader Karla Holloway penned a column last week for the Chronicle on the shortcomings of current Duke “diversity” efforts. Apparently reacting to comments from student critics of the Campus Culture Initiative, Holloway argued that “institutionally produced, racially assigned programming does not quite match the vision of inclusiveness we broadcast as our desire,” and therefore the administration should avoid student-led racially restrictive recruitment efforts. Instead, she argued, the administration should aim to be more inclusive in all such initiatives, seeking to bring people together rather than segregate them by race or ethnicity.

Economics professor E. Roy Weintraub appropriately responded, “Karla Holloway’s thoughtful and cogent message encourages us all to move away from the past's strategies to foster diversity at our university, and to recognize new ways that Duke may again show leadership in developing a more inclusive university community. Her intervention in this discussion is most appreciated.” Michael Gustafson agreed,

To me, this article speaks to what valuing diversity really should mean for the university as opposed to our merely claiming a diversity in metrics. Involving a broader base of students as well as of staff and faculty in the recruiting experiences will both demonstrate Duke's commitment to engaging difference and in the process will serve to open the lines of communication whence inclusive communities come. Examining how the criteria of various scholarship programs may lead to a greater diversity metric for the university, but with a catastrophic side-effect of more highly segregated sub-communities of scholars, is an important task for a university that desires a greater breadth of experiences to form the intellectual “collision spaces” our programs provide.

Holloway’s column is a further, welcome indication that the ultra-politically correct recommendations of the Campus Culture Initiative (of which she served as race subgroup chair) have little chance of adoption. Hopefully, the column also represents an indication that Duke might reconsider its “diversity” agenda in faculty hiring as well.

Hat tips: J.M., A.A., K.E.

Edwards Indictment

[Update, 6 June. 4.40pm: And, in another intersection between the Edwards affair and the fringes of the lacrosse case, check out this sensational co-authored piece by Joe Neff, detailing the plea bargain negotiations between the Edwards team and the Justice Department.]

Former North Carolina senator and two-time presidential candidate John Edwards was indicted today, on six counts related to his cover-up of an affair with a campaign aide. The charges were filed in the Middle District of North Carolina, and so it's little surprise that Edwards has reached out to the area's best criminal defense attorneys: both Wade Smith and Jim Cooney are members of the Edwards defense team. Cooney told American Lawyer that he took the case in part because of his longstanding ties to Edwards, dating from the time when Edwards was among the state's leading plaintiffs' attorneys.

Though Edwards' behavior was undeniably unethical (he arranged for massive payments from a 96-year-old wealthy friend and donor to his mistress, all while publicly denying the affair and the woman's resulting pregnancy), it might not have been illegal. In any event, the prosecution will be a precedent-setter, one way or the other.

This is, by the way, the second occasion in which the Edwards campaign intersected with the fringes of the lacrosse case. In 2004, during his first presidential bid, Edwards ran as a Southern moderate. But in 2008, he reinvented himself as a far-left, anti-poverty crusader. As part of this effort, in early 2007, the Edwards campaign hired as its official blogger Amanda Marcotte, known for her intemperate rhetoric and extremist views.

Though Edwards, a North Carolinian and former law partner of Wade Smith, had remained silent on the lacrosse case, Marcotte had lots to say. Among her insights: "Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it?"

Once her words attracted public attention, Marcotte deleted them from her blog.

Marcotte eventually departed the Edwards campaign after an outcry over her anti-religious rants. And, of course, Edwards eventually departed the presidential race, after losing in Iowa and New Hampshire, and then getting crushed in Nevada and South Carolina.

Marcotte Out?

Salon is reporting that the Edwards campaign has fired blogger Amanda Marcotte, she of the following insightful January observation about the Duke case: "Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it?" Salon termed Marcotte a victim of "the right-wing blogosphere." Indeed.

The Edwards campaign issued a semi-denial of the report, saying it would "caution [Salon] against reporting that they have been fired. We will have something to say later."

Hat tip: R.T.

Case Narative, III

Yesterday’s post continued the case narrative first provided on October 16. Today’s post will bring matters up to the present.

Nifong’s Ethics Problems

On January 12, apparently under advice from counsel, Mike Nifong formally recused himself from the lacrosse case—the first step, in all likelihood, toward losing his license to practice law. Cameramen captured a shot of the springtime media darling walking, alone and in the dark, to his car as he drove away from his office. The attorney general’s special prosecutions division took over the case.

Shortly after Nifong removed himself from the case, the Bar amended its ethics complaint against him. Focused on his decision to enter into an intentional agreement with Dr. Meehan to withhold exculpatory evidence, the Bar accused Nifong of not only massive ethics violations, but also of repeatedly lying to the court, breaking three state laws, and violating the Constitution. In many ways, the disgraced DA was his own enemy: he offered no fewer than 11 separate (and often mutually contradictory) explanations for the decision to withhold the DNA.

The Bar, it was clear, had heard enough from Nifong. In a devastating response to Nifong’s plea to dismiss some of the charges against him, the Bar accused the DA of asking the Disciplinary Hearings Commission “to undertake statutory construction, interpretation of case law, and semantic hair-splitting.” It ridiculed his citation of court orders from Judges Stephens and Smith, noting “that the content of each Order was based on Nifong’s misrepresentations to the Court as alleged in the Amended Complaint. Therefore, Nifong is effectively arguing that he can make false statements to a court which result in the entry of an order, and then use the order that is based on his misrepresentations to claim he committed no discovery violation.” And it correctly argued that the “Defendant’s contention that he was under no obligation to provide the information because no trial date was set necessarily implies that he was also entitled to withhold and never disclose potentially exculpatory information in any case that settled prior to trial.”

Nifong and the Political World

Smart political figures distanced themselves from Nifong; those less politically astute failed to do so. In the former category was Governor Mike Easley, who told an audience at the NYU Law School that Nifong was his “worst appointment.” In the latter category was Amanda Marcotte, appointed as chief blogger to John Edwards’ presidential campaign only days after penning the following “analysis” of the case:

I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and fucked her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out. Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.

When criticized for the remarks, Marcotte deleted them from her website. As other groups pored through Marcotte’s writings, it turned out she was an equal-opportunity author of vile material, and soon thereafter she resigned from the campaign.

The Campus Contest

But while Nifong was gone from the scene and seemingly on his way to losing his law license, the furor he unleashed continued unabated, especially at Duke. As the new year dawned, Brodhead invited Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty to return for spring-term classes. (Both declined to do so.) Then, in perhaps the most important campus development in the previous nine months, 19 professors (17 from Economics) published a letter implicitly rebuking the Group of 88, endorsing Brodhead’s call for an inquiry into Nifong’s misconduct, and stating that they would welcome all student-athletes, including lacrosse players, into their classes.

The Group of 88 swiftly responded. Karla Holloway resigned her position as the Campus Culture Initiative’s race subgroup chair by publicizing fifth-hand, unsubstantiated gossip about Duke students. (To my knowledge, she was neither disciplined nor criticized for her actions.) Cathy Davidson published an N&O op-ed describing the Group’s ad as a response to racist defenses of Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and Dave Evans “on the campus quad” sometime between March 29 and April 6. Neither then nor at any time since has Davidson revealed who these defenders were or what they were saying. She appears to have simply made up the rationalization. Holloway joined 86 colleagues in issuing a statement purporting to “clarify” the Group of 88’s ad, which defiantly rejected all “public calls to the authors to retract the ad or apologize for it.” Then, Group members Diane Nelson and Pedro Lasch darkly hinted at a conspiracy against them—motivated for unspecified reasons and staffed by unspecified people.

The duo had joined four other anti-lacrosse professors at a “shut up and teach” event at which they barred all recording devices and then proclaimed that their critics should “shut up and teach.” (“Free speech for me, not for three,” apparently.) Finally, on February 23, the Group saw one of its most prominent members, Political Science professor Paula McClain, elected to a two-year term as chairwoman of the Academic Council. McClain’s triumph coincided with the long-anticipated release of the Campus Culture Initiative report, which carried political correctness to a new level—demanding, among other things, the end of admissions breaks for athletes but their expansion for minorities. The report’s highlight, however, was a de facto Group of 88 Enrollment Initiative, a proposal that all Duke students be forced to take a class on “diversity” in the United States—offerings disproportionately taught by the Group of 88. The CCI report was scarcely a week old when it had been torn apart by several Chronicle editorials and op-eds.

The Nifong Faithful

Group of 88 members weren’t the only Nifong enablers to remain faithful to the end. Politically correct columnists acted as if nothing had changed after April 6, 2006. From the shelter of her lily-white, upper-class Connecticut suburb, Times columnist Selena Roberts penned a column mocking the lacrosse players for seeking jobs on Wall Street and arguing, “To many, the alleged crime and culture are intertwined . . . but the alleged crime and the culture are mutually exclusive.” One problem: Roberts herself, in a March 2006 column, had made precisely that connection.

A handful of other columnists joined Roberts in pretending that no new facts had emerged after April 6, 2006. People like Michael Corey (Blue Devil Weekly), Josh Perlin (Cornell Daily Sun), and Steven Marcus (Newsday) provided more examples of why this case had given the media such a bad name. And, of course, the Herald-Sun continued its case-long record of serving as a de facto Nifong press office.

The state NAACP, meanwhile, maintained its record of using the case to abandon 70 years of positions on criminal justice issues. Rev. Curtis Gatewood, president of the Durham NAACP from 1994 until 2002, described the State Bar’s ethics charges as part of a “conspiracy to disrupt justice in this Durham case.” And state NAACP head Rev. William Barber, invited to preach in the Duke Chapel by his “good friend,” Duke Chaplain and CCI member Sam Wells, continued the organization's practice of lionizing the accuser and demonizing the lacrosse players. Several people in attendance walked out during his sermon.

As the special prosecutors continued their investigation, the Seligmanns’ lead attorney from April through October, Kirk Osborn, suffered a massive heart attack and died. He was hailed widely: Orange County DA Jim Woodall: “Not only was Kirk Osborn a very good friend, he was also a zealous attorney and a stellar representative for his clients and showed great professionalism in the courtroom.” Buddy Conner: “He hated injustice. That was the essence of his life. He carried a tremendous amount of credibility, but he did it without getting all angry and aggressive and arrogant.” Judge and former DA Carl Fox: “I often said that if I had a situation where I needed to be represented, I would call him. He was never a person who was very showy or anything like that. You’d never see him in the paper for a lot of the cases. That just wasn’t his thing.”

In a statement, the Seligmanns commented,

While it is now plain to anyone with any reason and objectivity that there was no sexual assault and that Reade has been the victim of an unprincipled prosecution, we are nonetheless saddened that Kirk did not live to see the day when Reade will be completely exonerated. While that day will come, it will now come too late for Kirk to share in it. When that day does arrive, it will be as a direct result of Kirk’s courage, skill and passionate belief in the truth.

With the N&O reporting that the players have arrived in the Triangle, ABC's Law & Justice Unit, the Drudge Report, and other sites are now reporting that AG Cooper has decided to drop all charges. An inevitable result--but a nonetheless welcome and long overdue one. But one mystery remains, as Duke law professor Paul Haagen noted: "I think the critical thing could be the wording. It could simply say the state can no longer prove its case, which would be a very harmful outcome for the community." Or the AG "could provide a full accounting of why the case should never have been brought."

Sunday Roundup

Liestoppers yesterday broke the news that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has endorsed calls for a Justice Department inquiry into Mike Nifong’s misconduct. In a letter to a constituent, the Illinois senator wrote, “This independent inquiry is needed, and I will be following its progress closely.”

Compare Obama’s approach to the case with that of his two main rivals for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. Clinton has remained wholly silent on the issue—even though one of her constituents (Collin Finnerty) is one of the three people who suffered at Nifong’s hands. Moreover, as those who recall the workings of Kenneth Starr are fully aware, Clinton has a good personal reason to be sensitive to the workings of a prosecutor run amok.

Then there’s John Edwards. Amidst a high-profile case of prosecutorial misconduct that effectively defined North Carolina justice for the nation, Edwards first remained silent, then hired as his chief blogger Amanda Marcotte, and then declined to fire Marcotte even after her indefensible remarks about the case went public. (Marcotte eventually resigned from the campaign.)

It’s not difficult to see which of the three candidates has been on the right side of the case.

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Speaking of the Justice Department, other North Carolina district attorneys are using the current scandal of Alberto Gonzales’ dismissal of U.S. attorneys to beat back a proposal in the North Carolina legislature dubbed by some the “Nifong bill.”

The bill is actually far too mild: it gives the governor authority to suspend a district attorney if and only if the Bar both moved to have a disciplinary hearing and asked the governor to suspend the D.A.

Such a scenario, it would seem, rarely if ever would occur: most D.A.’s would have enough respect for the law to request a leave of absence if they were charged by the bar with multiple ethics violations, breaking three state laws, and violating the U.S. Constitution. The state does need, it would seem, some more flexible check on what is now the all-but-unlimited authority of local chief prosecutors.

Nonetheless, North Carolina DA’s, who were slow to move against Nifong (though, on December 29, they did so), strongly protested the measure. In an interview with Herald-Sun reporter Ray Gronberg, Orange County (Chapel Hill) DA Jim Woodall said, “We really have to be on guard that it’s never used as a political or tactical tool to dissuade a district attorney from taking a difficult case or taking a position in a case that’s unpopular. It really seems to open the door for both political or tactical maneuvers to chill a DA or remove a DA from office because somebody doesn’t agree with something they’re doing that’s very proper.”

Such cautions are well-taken. Yet the DA's position would be considerably stronger if they recommended an alternative. The state should have had some mechanism in place to remove Nifong once it became clear—by early May, certainly—that he was prosecuting the case in a highly unethical manner.

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Yesterday’s posting of the police photo of the accuser, taken on March 16, 2006, gave the lie to the claims by the accuser’s father, Travis Mangum, that his daughter had swollen eyes following the “attack.”

It’s worth raising the photo in another case of journalistic malpractice—the August 25 Wilson/Glater article in the New York Times. Upon, they claimed, reviewing the entire discovery file then available (more than 1800 pages), Wilson and Glater wrote,

But in addition to the nurse’s oral description of injuries consistent with the allegation, Sergeant Gottlieb writes that the accuser appeared to be in extreme pain when he interviewed her two and a half days after the incident, and that signs of bruises emerged then as well . . . During that [March 16] interview, the woman, who is dark skinned, said bruises were beginning to show from the attack. A female officer took photographs and confirmed that “she had the onset of new bruises present,” Sergeant Gottlieb wrote. (The female officer’s report does not mention bruises.)

Did Wilson and Glater believe that the photo suggested the onset of new bruises? If not, why did they repeat Gottlieb’s claim as if it could be true? Or, perhaps, did they actually fail to review the entire discovery file, as they had claimed?

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Speaking of the Times, the paper’s ideology-infused journalistic standards remains on display, with Selena Roberts—fresh from her appearance at Orin Starn’s Friday anti-lacrosse hate-fest—returning to the Duke case after a months-long absence. When last heard from, Roberts was mysteriously describing a search warrant as a “court document,” falsely stating that none of the players had cooperated with police, and comparing the team to gangsters or drug-runners.

Did she use her column to offer a mea culpa? Absolutely not. “The sexual-assault case involving Duke lacrosse players may soon be over, but that won’t end the race and class divides that long existed within the radius of Duke.” In other words: Roberts claims that she was right all along.

In her March 31 column, Roberts all but stated that a rape occurred, and seemed to be demanding that the players be charged with obstruction of justice. Now, she says, the rape allegation was irrelevant to the broader cultural issue: the “irrefutable culture of misogyny, racial animus and athlete entitlement that went unrestrained that night.”

Roberts concludes her column by urging Duke to implement the recommendations of the Campus Culture Initiative. CCI leaders Peter Wood, Karla Holloway, and Anne Allison no doubt are heartened by the endorsement from their ideological comrade.

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Friday, WRAL ran a story describing the procedures employed by the special prosecutors. Reporter Julia Lewis noted that James Coman and Mary Winstead have not spoken to the media, but have met with defense attorneys. They also have interviewed several members of the lacrosse team.

Nifong, of course, did none of these things. While he was eager to meet with the media in his pre-primary publicity barrage, he had no eagerness to actually obtain evidence that the people he was targeting might be innocent.

UNC law professor Joseph Kennedy, a Nifong critic, praised the behavior of the special prosecutors: “In a high-profile investigation like this, they assume the very first action on the case will be seriously scrutinized.”

Kennedy added that it was perfectly appropriate for the prosecutors to have repeated meetings with the accuser to discuss the events of the evening. “Given some of the questions raised about the accuser’s story, they’re probably trying to resolve any sort of ambiguity or contradictions. And secondly, make an overall determination if the person would come across credible in the courtroom.” Nifong, of course, never met with the accuser to discuss the case, and didn’t send anyone from his office to meet with her until December 21, when the accuser told a tale that contradicted each of her previous myriad, mutually contradictory, stories.

Of course, as ABC’s Law & Justice Unit has reported, the accuser has decided to perform as “The Uncooperative Miss M,” refusing to answer prosecutors’ detailed questions about the evening’s events.

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A good cartoon of Nifong's difficulties before the Bar. And this well-written post summarizes the Nifong response to the Bar as "the dog ate my legal obligations."

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The Chronicle continues its common-sense approach to the Campus Culture Initiative report with another first-rate editorial, this time on the CCI academic proposals. The editorial board praises some of the worthy suggestions of the CCI, particularly the call for increased faculty-student interaction.

Yet, quite appropriately, Chronicle editors criticize the mandated “U.S. diversity” course, a/k/a the “Group of 88 Enrollment Initiative.” The paper concludes: “At best, then, this recommendation will be superfluous, codifying something that students already do on their own. At worst, it will be interpreted as little more than a public relations play-damage control in response to last year’s events. Either way, students are likely to chafe against any such changes. Students don’t want, nor do they need, to be force-fed diversity and difference.” Such thinking, of course, is anathema to the Group.

In another academic story, the paper notes that President Brodhead has committed to creating a new dean’s position. The position is designed, according to reporter Iza Wojciechowska, to “better integrate the multiple aspects of undergraduate life-including student affairs and academics-and will act as the University's principal spokesperson on undergraduate education.”

Sounds like a great idea, right? The chair of the search committee for the new position, however, is Peter Burian, chair of classical studies. Burian was last heard from signing on to William Chafe’s latest embarrassment, the February 23 Chronicle op-ed that begged people to act as if no new facts had emerged in the case since April 6. The article used the Group’s favorite tactic of anonymous quotes from alleged students to make the faculty member’s point, although in this case, Chafe was caught recycling alleged student quotes that he had previously had described differently.

Will Burian bring the Chafe mindset to the search committee? His willingness to affiliate with the Chafe op-ed does not offer encouragement.

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With the lacrosse case imploding, Group of 88 member miriam cooke (she does not capitalize her name) appears to have found a new protest cause--Palestinian terrorists. Sami al-Arian was a former University of South Florida professor who pled guilty to conspiring to aid Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist organization. (He entered the plea deal after a trial on more serious charges ended in a hung jury.)

Given that al-Arian admitted his crime, most people would consider him guilty. Not, apparently, cooke. Here she is with members of a group called "Fight Imperialism Stand Together," holding a sign reading, "No More Persecution."

It's good to see that cooke has moved from one mainstream cause to another.

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Finally, a great column in Friday's New York Post from John Podhoretz, noting one of the great ironies of this case. Even as Nifong's career implodes, and the accuser is seen nationally as a liar, and the city of Durham has exposed itself to massive civil liability, "some of the most disgraceful actors in this case will go unpunished."

Podhoretz speaks, of course, of the Group of 88, and campus allies such as Peter Wood and Orin Starn--professors who exploited the case to advance their personal, ideological, or pedagogical agendas on the backs of their own students. As he astutely notes, "It is not too much to say that many of the adults at Duke, who should be stewards for their students, actually wanted the false rape story to be true because it fulfilled their ideological predilections."

Brodhead, Podhoretz notes, might not survive this affair--everything, of course, depends on the reaction of Duke alumni, and particularly of donors. But "for those 88 professors - what consequences will they experience?" Podhortez concludes:

Consequences? Don't make me laugh.

The tenured ones will continue to enjoy their aristocratic installment in Durham. The untenured will be supported in their efforts to find similar perches elsewhere by the rest of the Gang of 88, because that's how academic politics works.

How about even the loss of even a single night of sleep?

Oh, no. Not these folks. They're fighting the white patriarchy. They're on the side of the dispossessed and oppressed. They're giving voice to the voiceless. They're giving hope to the hopeless.

They're fools at best and monsters at worst - and neither fools nor monsters are much troubled by attacks of conscience.

Sunday News

With the legislative session in full swing, here’s hoping that at least a few legislators read the Wilmington Star. Looking back on the case, the paper from Mike Nifong’s hometown detected an inexcusable condition: that even with the State Bar filing ethics charges against Nifong, “nobody could take the case away from him. State law says only a DA can ask for a special prosecutor.”

Nifong, of course, eventually bowed to the inevitable and asked off the case—which, the Star correctly argued, “has made North Carolina an object of international dismay.”

Nifong’s misconduct, however, leaves a question: whether legislators “will give the AG (or possibly the Chief Justice?) authority to take over cases that district attorneys cannot be trusted to handle. They could call it ‘Mike's Law.’” No move, the Star concluded, “could be more important than starting to restore North Carolinians' trust in the fairness, competence and honesty of criminal prosecutions.”

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WRAL reports that Governor Easley could be called as a witness in the State Bar's proceedings against Nifong. Why? Former prosecutor Dan Boyce explained that Easley's statements could confirm a financial motive for Nifong's misconduct.

The pension for a D.A., Boyce noted, is much higher than the pension Nifong otherwise would have received as a longtime assistant. If, in fact, maximizing his pension was one of Nifong's motives for ignoring his ethical obligations, the Bar would be justified in imposing a harsher penalty on the disgraced district attorney.

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In this week’s version of the “only in Durham” file: yesterday’s H-S reported that the city recently changed business software. In most cities, this would be a routine move, hardly the subject of front-page news.

Not in Durham. As part of the process, officials in City Manager Patrick Baker’s office double-checked their books. The result? The city has around $6.2 million in funds that the City Manager’s office thought had already been expended. The H-S didn’t report how long these millions of dollars had, in essence, been lost.

The story continued that the City Council is busily deciding how to spend this unexpected windfall. One unsolicited recommendation: keep some in reserve. It doesn’t take a clairvoyant to figure out that the city is going to be on the losing end of some civil suits over the next few years.

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It wouldn't have been unreasonable to expect that the outcome of the Duke case at least would have provided a deterrent to potbangers at other colleges and universities on campus: as the Duke rush-to-judgment crowd has been discredited (even as they refuse to admit they did anything wrong), activists at other campuses surely would want to avoid the same fate, and work harder not to rush to judgment themselves.

Events at Guilford College belie that expectation. On January 20, a fight occurred between some football players at the college and three Palestinian students. The police and the Guilford administration both conducted investigations, but even before the facts were in, the campus equivalent of the potbangers sprung into action: candlelight vigils proclaiming “tolerance,” students coming up to football players who weren’t even in town the day of the fight denouncing them.

Meanwhile, Guilford’s director of Multicultural Education, Sèkinah Hamlin, penned a letter less than 24 hours after the fight announcing that the Palestinian students were “defending themselves against students (and possibly perspective [sic] students).” “The incident, she concluded, “was a hate crime.” Therefore, “we must be united as people of color more than ever. What happened to these three young men could have happened to any one of us. That is the reality of racism and no institution, including Guilford, in this country is free of it.”

Yesterday, the Greensboro police announced they wouldn’t pursue charges against any of the players. Charges filed by a magistrate remain, but at the very least, this affair hardly seems like the clear-cut racially provoked attack that Hamlin and her allies were describing.

John Hood, president of the John Locke Foundation, also noticed the connection. In the Duke affair, he observed, “there was undisputedly a rush to judgment on the sexual-assault allegations—a rush to judgment that has seriously damaged the credibility of prominent news outlets, columnists, commentators, and legal ‘experts.’ Perhaps the most-damaged institution is Duke itself. A large segment of the faculty didn’t just jump the gun. They turned their ideological blunderbusses on the supposed link between the supposed crime and a host of social ills, caring little who or what took collateral damage.”

And now, “activists at Guilford, Chapel Hill, and other campuses are demanding immediate action. The professional meta-meaning mavens are swooping in, ascribing all sorts of significance to events that may or may not have happened.” As Hood concludes, “The facts will emerge. Burning candles and hoisting banners won’t change them or speed their collection.”

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Along these lines, Thomas Sowell, one of the first commentators to publicly express skepticism about the Duke case, penned another thoughtful column on the matter last week. As the case collapses, Sowell detects an important lesson: “However reprehensible District Attorney Mike Nifong’s words and deeds have been, it is a mistake to see in this tawdry episode just the vileness of one man.”

People who should have known better—the media, certain quarters of the Duke faclty, civil rights groups—instead rushed to judgment. To Sowell, “the haste and vehemence with which scores of Duke professors publicly took sides against the students in this case is but one sign of the depth of moral dry rot in even our prestigious institutions.”

Sowell hopes that the unraveling of Nifong’s case will “be a wake-up call, both for blacks and liberals, on how easy it is for their emotions to be manipulated by a third-rate demagogue with a flimsy fraud. The time is long overdue for those who consider themselves ‘thinking people’ to start thinking.”

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James Ammons, chancellor of North Carolina Central, announced last week that he’ll be leaving the post to take a comparable job at Florida A&M, his alma mater. This affair was a no-win situation for Ammons: with students like Chan Hall appearing to reflect mainstream campus opinion, the complainant describing herself as an NCCU student—even if no one on the campus seems to have ever seen her—and Nifong using the campus as a political springboard in both the primary and general elections, Ammons could hardly comment on the procedural fraud.

Ammons deserves credit for avoiding any inflammatory statements. At the very least, he didn’t make a bad situation worse—which, by the standards we’ve seen in Durham, is a pretty good performance.

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Susan Estrich is one of the few victims’ rights advocates whose credibility wasn’t tarnished by the lacrosse case. In her initial comments on the case, she sided with the accuser—but she very quickly reversed course, first faulting Nifong for his procedural misconduct, then labeling the accuser a “liar.” She did so, she said, for two reasons: a respect for procedure; and a concern for future, legitimate, victims.

Estrich turned to the latter theme in a column last week, lamenting, “Those of us who have been fighting for dignity for the victims of sexual assault understand that we are facing a backlash in this country. We will pay the price for Mike Nifong’s mishandling of the Duke lacrosse case, and we know it.”

Estrich continues “The Duke case accuser it now seems clear, lied about being sexually penetrated by the three students who should never have been charged with rape – and would not have been, had prosecutor Mike Nifong followed the applicable rules in his own office. But that doesn’t mean all rape victims are suspect, or give police or courts the authority to treat them that way.”

Estrich argues that “the message that needs to be sent to victims, particularly with all the publicity that has attended the Duke case, is that they will be treated with respect if they call the police and their complaints will be addressed seriously.”

Unfortunately, with NOW effectively siding with Nifong and victims’ rights groups posting “talking points” from Wendy Murphy on their websites, it seems like the people who most need to listen to Estrich are her fellow victims’ rights advocates.

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Add the Wilson Times to the list of North Carolina newspapers that have criticized Nifong’s handling of the case. Will the Herald-Sun ever come around? Don’t bet on it—though it’s remarkable that the paper has remained utterly silent on the question of whether a DA who the state bar has accused of breaking three laws should step aside until his ethics charges are resolved.

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Yesterday's post listed some of the heroes of the affair, but missed one obvious person: Kevin Cassese. In the weeks after the restoration of the lacrosse program, he helped keep the team together, with good morale and solid recruiting—all while preparing for the Lacrosse World Games for Team USA, playing for Major League Lacrosse, running camps of his own, buying a home, and planning a wedding.

He stood by the team, as the assistant and then the interim head coach, and when he was appointed to the interim position affirmed his belief in the characters of the players he was coaching—at a time when few were willing to speak up publicly.

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The Amanda Marcotte affair has attracted notice in political circles, generating a lengthy writeup in Beltway Blogroll from National Journal. Indeed, Beltway Blogger Danny Glover terms the episode "the first blog scandal of the 2008 campaign."

"Marcotte's attempts to airbrush her past," Glover observed, "are fast becoming a black-eye for Edwards, even as he earned raves yesterday for a speech at the Democratic National Committee winter meeting in Washington . . . As often is the case in politics (and blogging) -- and as a prominent blogger like Marcotte should have known -- the cover-up is worse than the crime. And it doesn't help that Marcotte has been both dismissive and defiant in response to her critics."

Intriguingly, Glover also noted that Marcotte seems to have a habit of airbrushing items from her blog--in this case an announcement from former Pandagon blogger Jesse Taylor about his joining the campaign of now-Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland.

Writing at Overlawyered, Walter Olson summarized the issue succinctly:

John Edwards's life in the law and experience with the justice system is his major resume item dating back beyond the past few years, as well as the major reason this site has given his career extensive coverage. Moreover, the Duke case, which looks ever more like the Scottsboro Boys case of our era, has been convulsing his own state of North Carolina for month after month. Edwards' dodging of the case—his apparently successful stifling of any urge to speak out at the plight of the falsely accused—might on its own stand as merely cowardly. Marcotte's hiring, on the other hand, throws an even less attractive light on it, rather as if, in the Scottsboro Boys days, an on-the-sidelines Southern senator took on as a major spokesperson someone who'd been yelling the Boys' guilt from the rooftops in the most crudely prejudicial language.

As far as I can tell, the Edwards campaign has made no comment on either Marcotte's writings or on her tendency to airbrush controversial opinions from the record.

Sunday Roundup

Those intent on starting Sunday morning in a depressing fashion can read this recent article from the Baltimore Sun. The upshot: 17 students in a communications class at NCCU were recently asked their views on the case. Nine said they believed the accuser was sexually assaulted. The other eight said it could have happened, but that she might be impaired and couldn’t remember anything.

Said one NCCU student: “You have this team of white lacrosse players from Duke, and you have this North Carolina Central University black girl that strips for a living. It’s just kind of not in her favor.” Added a local pastor, Carl Kenney, “The consensus I’m gathering, particularly from African-American females, is that the system was weighted very heavily on behalf of the privileged.”

To say that the system favored the “privileged” and “white lacrosse players from Duke” means that we should just ignore the events of the last 10 months, in which the county’s district attorney and the city’s police broke rule after rule in order to back up the accuser’s tale.

Other quotes:

• “I personally believe something happened.”
• “We saw an African-American female and white young men, and we still see that. And the history between the two groups is one that’s not favorable. So for us, especially being black women, even today we stay on the defensive.”
• “None of us have really been in that type of situation she was in. To be violated like that, that’s trauma . . . there is truth and there is validity to that story.”

The last student didn’t identify which of the accuser’s many stories contained truth and validity.

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As part of the continuing stream of impressive commentary from the college media, Brandon McGinley had a must-read column in the Daily Princetonian. His topic? The “disgraceful aftermath” of the allegations made against the lacrosse team: that “without considering the potential innocence of their students, the postmodern elite among the faculty at Duke sprung into action.”

As McGinley observed, “It was irrelevant that the case against the students deteriorated daily; it was irrelevant that the accused were members of the Duke community and, as such, might be entitled to respect and support; and it was irrelevant that the young men were innocent until proven guilty. Their status as wealthy Caucasian males was enough to pass judgment on their actions and their character.”

McGinley recounted some of the most indefensible comments (Houston Baker, Karla Holloway), but focused primarily on Group of 88 members’ refusal to reconsider their actions in recent weeks. “One would hope,” McGinley correctly reasoned, “that now, after the accuser and the prosecutor have been discredited and the allegations have been all but obliterated, the faculty who encouraged this shameful display would have the humility to acknowledge their error.” Instead, of course, the “clarifying” faculty produced a document, “published only a few weeks ago, which pompously rejects all requests for apology or retraction.”

McGinley also took note of Cathy Davidson’s apologia, particularly her claim that the real “social disaster” was that “18 percent of the American population lives below the poverty line” and “women’s salaries for similar jobs are substantially less than men’s.” McGinley, unlike the Group, has no trouble identifying “the real social disaster” in this case—that 88 members of “the Duke faculty appointed themselves the sole arbiters between right and wrong, innocence and guilt” and “determined the guilt of the lacrosse players based solely on preconceived notions about their race, gender and financial situation—prejudices equal to racism and sexism.”

It’s not clear whether the Group of 88 figures presenting at tomorrow’s edition of the Rehab Tour would consider McGinley’s column part of the campaign of “intimidation” against them.

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Beth Brewer’s civil affidavit urging the removal of Mike Nifong from office attracted considerable media attention and an odd resolution—Durham Superior Court judge Orlando Hudson announced that he would stay any action on the matter until Nifong’s ethics trial has concluded.

There is, however, nothing in the relevant law, General Statute §7A-66, to suggest that Hudson possesses the power to stay consideration of Brewer’s affidavit.

How to explain Hudson’s action? It might be that he simply considers state law irrelevant in Durham. More likely, the judge is privy to information suggesting Nifong might be on his way out. (Of course, I admit that I might be overly optimistic in this interpretation, though Hudson does seem to have a good reputation.) WRAL quoted former federal prosecutor Dan Boyce, a frequent commenter on the case unassociated with Nifong critics, arguing that Nifong has “got to consider whether, in the interest of justice and in fairness to the people of Durham County, whether it’s time to resign.”

It remains a mystery to me why the N&O editorial page hasn’t echoed this sentiment—or at least urged Nifong to step aside until his case is resolved. The Herald-Sun, of course, appears to cherish Nifong’s behavior.

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Last week featured a good deal of intentional and unintentional humor.

The unintentional:

1.) Responding to the revelation that Governor Easley had extracted from Nifong a promise to serve only as an interim appointee, Nifong backer Mark Edwards asked in the Herald-Sun: “Is there something special about Mike [Nifong]? Is there something special about Durham?”

After what we’ve witnessed over the past 10 months, it hardly seems necessary to answer those questions.

2.) For Reason&Revelation, Nifong’s reaction to the Brewer affidavit filing was “just too much.”

“I’m looking forward to having the case heard and having the opportunity to have my side told publicly,” Nifong told the Associated Press. “I would really hope that everybody would be willing to withhold judgment until that procedure that is already in place had been given an opportunity to work.”

“If only,” R&R reasoned, “he would have practiced that in the handling of the Duke lacrosse team.” Nifong, it seems, was oblivious to the irony in his comments.

The intentional humor:

1.) The staff at The Hatemongers’ Quarterly announced “painful” news: at a party around a year ago, “either one, two, three, or fourteen Mike Nifongs came up to us, assaulted us, and then brutally raped us. Yeah, that’s right: Every last member of the crack young staff. All 250 or so of us . . . In fact, we’re certain that he had a moustache at the time. And, difficult as it may be to believe, he answered to the name ‘Adrian Zmed.’”

For those who disbelieve this tale, the THQ staff bets “that you also don’t know what a social disaster looks like. Kim Curtis could sure teach you a thing or two about a thing or two.”

They continue:

And we can prove that Mike Nifong was our assailant. In fact, if you line up a number of Mike Nifongs in a row, tell us that each one is Mike Nifong, we’re willing to bet that we could pick Mike Nifong out of a crowd.

In addition, we have absolutely no DNA evidence to help our case. But, heck, who needs that stuff? Certainly not the great legal mind of Nancy Grace.

We have accusers who can identify their assailant. In Durham, it has to go to a jury.

2.) IowaHawk, meanwhile, intercepted the “Pandagon Papers,” heretofore secret correspondence between John Edwards and controversial blogger Amanda Marcotte.

Amazingly, the “correspondence” was copied onto the comments section of the Edwards blog by a reader who thought the e-mails were legitimate.

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In an early November interview with the AP, Nifong remarked, “I must say that the single good thing about all the publicity that I’ve gotten is that so many people know my face now that it’s really easy for me to meet people. Before, literally very few people had any idea who I was, so I had to go up and introduce myself to everybody. And now I don’t have to do that.”

There’s no denying that Nifong has made a name for himself. UrbanDictionary has introduced the word “Nifonged,” or “a verb that describes the railroading or harming of a person with no justifiable cause to do so, except for one’s own gain . . . It is created to display someone being taken advantage of unfairly by someone without scruples or morals.” (“Railroaded” is a suggested synonym.)

Meanwhile, at the N&O’s “Bulls Eye” blog, Ben Niolet discovered that “for at least one judge, Mike Nifong’s name is a shorthand . . . In a federal Court of Appeals, a judge dropped the Durham prosecutor’s name to emphasize what he saw as misdeeds by the government in a case of international money laundering.”

Wrote Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry E. Smith: “This is a case of a prosecution run amok. Mike Nifong, another prosecutor apparently familiar with the ‘win at any cost’ mantra, most surely would approve.”

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Emily Bazelon of Slate had an interesting column last week that placed the ethics charges against Nifong in a broader perspective. What should happen to Nifong?, she asks. “Nothing good, according to just about everyone who has weighed in on the fate of the North Carolina district attorney.”

Bazelon’s column notes that Nifong’s treatment seems to be against the norm: “Prosecutors are rarely punished for breaking the rules designed to ensure that defendants get a fair trial.”

A case could be made, Bazelon contends, that “the North Carolina State Bar may have moved too aggressively. By charging Nifong with ethics violations now, it swooped in to disrupt an ongoing criminal case brought by a duly elected district attorney.”

Of course, the Bar had little choice but to follow this approach, since there appeared to be no other way to get a rogue prosecutor off the case. North Carolina, unlike most states, has not followed Standard 3-2.10(b) of the ABA’s suggested guidelines, which suggests:

The governor or other elected official should be empowered by law to substitute special counsel in the place of the local prosecutor in a particular case, or category of cases, upon making a public finding that this is required for the protection of the public interest.

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The Daily Tar Heel had an odd editorial on Friday. Focusing on the actvities of the Association for Truth and Fairness, the editors noted,

The Duke lacrosse players accused of raping a stripper are facing ever rising legal fees even though it appears they're not guilty But now they're getting help. We just wish that more people who are wrongly accused could be afforded the same aid.

The editorial implied--but never came out and stated--that those contributing to ATAF should spread their money evenly to all other falsely accused defense teams. DTH editors instead might have urged the state NAACP to return to its roots and focus on such efforts, rather than aiding the prosecution of those falsely accused.

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Cathy Davidson was suggesting that the lacrosse players’ behavior could be used to symbolize male/female wage differential and for poverty, so why not make them a symbol for the war in Iraq, as well? This seems to be the operative thesis of among the more vapid columns on the case, a Huffington Post item from Patricia Zohn.

Zohn contended that the recent 60 Minutes broadcast interviewing the President about his policies in Iraq and the three sets of lacrosse parents provided a “telling juxtaposition of subjects, one that served to highlight the entitlement of frat boys of all ages and their enablers.”

“The Duke Lacrosse team,” Zohn observed, “springs from similar elites” as did Bush. “It’s impossible to grow up like that and not have it imbue everything you do.” It’s not clear how Zohn would have interpreted FDR and JFK through this lens, but why let the facts get in the way of a bad argument?

“Athletic teams,” lectured Zohn, “have a culture of unity,” of “conformity and listening to a coach and to each other (and blocking everybody else out),” a “code of omerta, of sticking together, of hard work, yes, but also expected slack in other areas (academics, for example).” How does the Duke lacrosse culture explain the failure of the war in Iraq? “Bush has surrounded himself with powerful men who protect and serve with single minded devotion in a White House where fraternal loyalty is prized over clear, informed thinking.” Based on the quality of her post, it’s not at all clear that Zohn could identify “clear, informed thinking.”

Meanwhile, Zohn conceded that Nifong might have “overreached on the indictment counts and might even have obstructed justice,” but she found it “chilling” to see the parents defend their sons. (Somehow I doubt that Zohn would have objected to seeing Darryl Hunt’s mother defend her son.) “Not one parent,” Zohn fumed, “seemed to find it objectionable that even if their sons were technically not guilty of rape,” that they had done many things wrong, including “that there had been underage drinking and when things had gotten out of hand, that none had come forward to tell the whole, sordid story.”

Zohn’s bio says that she is a “writer living in Los Angeles.” Does she really expect people to believe that as someone who moves in LA’s cultural circles, she’s shocked and appalled by “underage drinking”? And as for no one having “come forward to tell the whole, sordid story,” apparently Zohn overlooked that Dave Evans went to the police without a lawyer and gave a detailed statement, his DNA, his e-mail password, and offered to take a lie detector test; or that Reade Seligmann put out a minute-by-minute account of what he had done that night.

Zohn’s implied meaning is that “none had come forward to tell the whole, sordid story” that she would prefer to hear.

One HuffPost commenter suggested tongue-in-cheek that Zohn must really be Amanda Marcotte’s mother.