New Years' Roundup

Michael Skube, a former Pulitzer Prize winner and professor at Elon University, predicts in an L.A. Times op-ed that Duke’s “recovery from a rush to judgment” might be a painful one indeed. As “the vigilante posters have come down” and “the candlelight vigils have gone dark,” it seems that “this time the story might not be reducible to the all-purpose epistemology of race, gender and class.” Critics of Duke’s response, Skube perceptively observes, are most united by “a reaction to the group-think that immediately took hold once the story came to light.”

Skube discovered that the potbangers of last spring have erected a “wall of silence.” From Jennifer Minnelli, who attended a March vigil: “I have no comment. Good luck with your research.” From the husband of a vigil organizer: “Your chances of getting a comment from her or from anyone in this house are exactly zero.”

Skube obtains a quote from one protester, Ned Kennington, who does regret his actions, but who deflects blame onto Nifong. “Duke,” Kennington states, “is populated by a faculty that is very socially conscious. I think I am guilty of that. But this [case] was fueled by Nifong’s assertions, which fit into our preconceptions.” He adds, “I trusted that Mike Nifong was talking in a careful, judicious way when he called the lacrosse players hooligans.”

(Consider the unintended irony of that last remark. Also, blind faith for the police and/or prosecutors is rarely a trademark of the academic Left.)

Nearly nine months out, not one of the Group of 88 has retracted his or her signature from the document. Or expressed a word of support for the lacrosse players. Or even publicly criticized Mike Nifong. And despite prompting from Ed Bradley, Richard Brodhead refused to have anything critical to say of the Group of 88’s rush to judgment. Skube concludes, “For the university, those preconceptions — a reflexive, left-leaning culture shared by many of its supporters — are part of the larger problem.”

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As John in Carolina has noted, Mike Nifong is scheduled to be sworn into the office for which he sold his soul tomorrow morning at 8am, in Courtroom #1 on the fifth floor of the Durham County Courthouse.

With the Troika—wife Cy Gurney, chief “investigator” Linwood Wilson, resident homophobe Victoria Peterson—determined, for their own reasons, for him to stay on, perhaps the D.A. plans to proceed with the event.

If he were willing to widen his network of advisors, however, perhaps he’d be considering some other options, such as:

• Taking early retirement, and asking the governor to appoint his replacement.

• Taking a leave of absence, with the hope of returning at an unspecified date, perhaps to two more years at Traffic Court, so he could obtain his much-desired maximum pension.

• Entering into the equivalent of a plea bargain with the Bar, perhaps trading his resignation for a pension deal.

Nifong’s decisionmaking process as of late has been, to put it charitably, erratic. But whatever leverage he possesses in terms of a deal begins to vanish once the swearing-in date passes.

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Every year, the Duke chapel features a well-attended Christmas Eve service. The Durham Police often sends an officer to provide security for the affair. I’ve spoken to a couple of people who went to this year’s service, from whom I received interesting news.

It seems that this year’s police officer was a somewhat well-known figure. I’ll supply two clues as to his identity: (1) his initials are M.G.; (2) he’s known for a remarkable ability to recall conversations, verbatim and without notes, months after the fact.

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The mainstream print media in Australia has done a far superior job covering this case than its American counterpart. While for months the Times propped up Nifong and the Washington Post played the race card, Marc Coultan has provided first-rate reporting for Australian readers.

He continued to do so in his summary of last week’s events, entitled, “Prosecutor in hot water over evidence.” Coultan’s reporting provides straightforward recapitulation of the facts, without any attempt to defend Nifong, and allows the readers to draw their own conclusions. After describing the accuser’s new story of December 21, he dryly remarked:

It was the latest in a series of uncertain identifications from the woman. It came after a court hearing in which the person who did the DNA tests admitted he had agreed with Mr Nifong not to include vital evidence in his report that would have helped the players’ defence.

Coultan also succinctly laid out Nifong’s evasions regarding what he knew about the exculpatory DNA evidence and when he knew it—highlighting the March 18 court filing, “The state is not aware of any additional material or information which may be exculpatory in nature.” That statement, we know now, was a lie—perhaps explaining why the prosecutor is in “hot water.”

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Last Wednesday’s Washington Post carried an uplifting op-ed exploring recovery efforts in New Orleans by Duke historian and Group of 88 member William Chafe. Chafe, who recently spent a week in New Orleans, detected “a remarkable resiliency of spirit” in the city, where “energy, engagement and love persist, creating tiny ripples of hope, from thousands of individual acts of courage.”

Chafe celebrates the activities of the “Rainbow Tribe”—a commune—which includes more than 100 volunteers who have come to New Orleans to help the city rebuild. Most, he says, spend their time gutting local houses ruined by Katrina. And these aren’t just any kind of volunteers: “They respect the integrity and autonomy of the neighbors they are there to help, committed not to fall into old hierarchies of white and black, male and female.”

On the Sunday when he was in town, Chafe stopped by a small bar, where “30 neighborhood residents gather for a weekly get-together. White and black, gay and straight, old and young, they listen to their favorite jazz quartet and vocalist. They hug, laugh, cheer. They welcome strangers in their midst, anxious to talk about what they’ve been through.” Again, uplifting and hopeful.

But let’s have a reality check. This is the same man who, late last March, wrote that the whites who lynched Emmett Till provided an appropriate historical context through which to interpret the actions of the lacrosse players. Then, in mid-May, once his assumptions proved wrong, he denounced the players for drinking and said he no longer would comment on anything related to the case.

Given the magnitude of Chafe’s misinterpretation of events in Durham—and his subsequent refusal to acknowledge his error—it’s rather difficult to take anything else he says seriously, even his uplifting tale of the New Orleans Commune whose residents are committed to approaching issues of race, class, and gender in a way that Chafe deems acceptable.

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Outside the editorial room of the Durham Herald-Sun, it’s not easy to come up with a pro-Nifong editorial given recent events, but two papers recently have managed to do so—using remarkably similar tone and (non-)content.

In Idaho, columnist Tom Henderson in the Lewiston Morning Tribune sneers that the dropping of the rape charges* “must be a moment of profound jubilation down at the country club.” The op-ed concedes that the accuser might have changed her story on multiple occasions, but “a court can decide” whether she’s lying, since “as long as Nifong thinks he has evidence against the defendants, justice demands that he pursue it.”

• Any mention of the state bar filing ethics charges against Nifong? No.
• Of Nifong ordering police to construct a lineup that violated their own procedures? No.
• Of the North Carolina Conference of DA’s demanding that Nifong recuse himself? No.
• Of the Nifong-Meehan conspiracy to withhold exculpatory DNA evidence? No.

Likewise, an editorial in the Wilmington Journal scoffs that “money trumps justice.” As in Idaho, the moral certainty is clear: “This case needs to go the distance, no matter how that’s defined by the court system in Durham.” The editorial accuses the “Dukie Three-ers” of constructing “a lie-ridden, racist fairy tale” in demanding a change of venue, part of a veneer of “lies, distortions and racism” from critics of Nifong.

• Any mention of specific “lies” or “distortions” by Nifong’s critics? No.
• Of the state bar filing ethics charges against Nifong? No.
• Of Nifong ordering police to construct a lineup that violated their own procedures? No.
• Of the North Carolina Conference of DA’s demanding that Nifong recuse himself? No.
• Of the Nifong-Meehan conspiracy to withhold exculpatory DNA evidence? No.

Early in the case, such fact-free, impassioned commentary was commonplace. But it appears, fortunately, as if we’ve passed a tipping point, in which crass appeals to class or race bias no longer carry much weight.

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One issue that received little attention from the Meehan hearing. As Meehan made clear, the purpose of his hiring was his lab’s ability to perform Y-chromosome testing, which isolates male DNA. Yet, under repeated questioning from Brad Bannon, Meehan admitted that his lab also ran standard DNA tests—which the State Bureau of Investigation lab had already done. Why would Meehan duplicate the SBI tests?

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A couple of excellent commentaries in the national media. At MSNBC, Mike Celezik terms the manner in which Nifong dropped the rape charges—just before Christmas, in a Friday filing by fax—“disgusting,” consistent with Nifong’s “campaign that has long since had no purpose other than to destroy the reputations and futures of three young men.”

Nifong, Celezik correctly notes, has “not only smeared the three players, he’s dragged an entire profession even deeper into the muck of public opinion.” And he “is the worst sort of public servant: a coward”—someone who couldn’t get enough of the cameras when things were going his way, and who then refuses to publicly justify his actions once the real facts have come out. Celezik concludes:

If it weren’t so tragic — a word I don’t use often, but one that fits here because of the senseless wrong that has been done for the most selfish and venal of reasons — it would be painfully funny, a parody of a prosecutor making a parody of justice.

In the Washington Times, Tom Knott reasons that “the travesty of the Duke University lacrosse case is descending to absurd depths, mostly because . . . Nifong is up to his neck in muck and has no choice but to cling to the varied recollections of the accuser without the benefit of DNA evidence.”

Knott especially takes to task “Duke’s higher-ups and the activist branch of its faculty.” He observes:

They can cling to the notion that theirs is a fairly special campus, although there was nothing special about the rush-to-judgment actions of the university: the cancellation of the rest of the lacrosse season, accepting the resignation of the coach and all but convicting the three defendants. They connected the dots of race, class and gender and made their pedestrian conclusions, not unlike the talking heads on cable TV.

And, like the talking heads on cable TV, they’re determined to admit no error. So much for the dispassionate analysis of evidence, or the need for educators to engage in “critical self-reflection.” Indeed, with the Campus Culture Initiative, the Group of 88 appears determined to use the affair to create what Mark Anthony Neal termed a “progressive” campus.

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ABC’s Law and Justice Unit has an important piece placing the Conference of DA’s letter in context. With so much that’s occurred over the last several days, it’s easy to overlook the letter—even though the document is even more extraordinary than the State Bar filing ethics charges against a sitting D.A. for a case that’s still pending.

The article, by Lara Setrakian, terms the Conference’s letter “yet another moral blow” to Nifong, and she goes outside the state for context. Joshua Marquis, a district attorney in Oregon who is active in the National District Attorneys Association, terms the letter “extraordinarily unusual and it means a great deal.”

Marquis is blunt in his evaluation of Nifong:

As prosecutors, we do not try our cases in the media. We do not file charges frivolously . . . I do not know what the merit of the charges are, but Mr. Nifong has not brought respect to our profession. Some of his actions have brought great disrepute on the profession of prosecution.

Setrakian also obtains a comment from the third member of Duke Law’s faculty to publicly criticize Nifong. Law professor Thomas Metzloff, a Yale graduate who obtained his J.D. from Harvard Law School and is an advisory member to the State Bar’s ethics committee, remarked that the ethics complaint “crystallizes the conflict of interest.” He thereby endorsed the proposal made months ago by his colleague, Jim Coleman, that the case be turned over to a special prosecutor.

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Finally: historians are not supposed to make predictions, but the staff at DIW will violate this principle with today’s post. I predict that Mike Nifong will not find 2007 to be an enjoyable year professionally.

*--corrected item