Still Foolish

In his closing remarks at the Nifong ethics hearing, Lane Williamson noted, “Those who made a rush to judgment based upon an unquestioning faith in what a prosecutor had told them were made to look foolish and many still do look foolish.”

The “sliding scale” employed by critics of the three accused players is quite remarkable. Take, for instance, Syracuse assistant professor Boyce Watkins. Immediately after Nifong’s disbarment, Watkins penned a column asserting, “I believe something happened in that house. The contentiousness was evident from the witnesses who saw the men yelling the n-word at the women as they were leaving the party. The men were rowdy and drunk, and even they may not remember what they did that night. Let’s be clear about another fact: Being found not guilty is quite different from being found innocent.”

Leaving aside the fact that Kim Roberts explicitly said that none of the accused players was the one in a racially charged argument with her as the party ended (indeed, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann were hundreds of yards away from the house by that point), I e-mailed Watkins, noting that in fact the three accused players had been “found innocent,” in a public proclamation.

His response? “I personally believe that Nifong was covering his own butt. I did not see the results of any investigation that showed beyond a reasonable doubt that these guys were innocent. It appeared that the innocence proclamation came as Nifong was facing disbarment. Personally, I would have done the same thing.”

I then sent another e-mail to Watkins, pointing out that the proclamation of innocence was made not by Nifong but by Attorney General Roy Cooper, and that whatever can be said about Cooper’s motives, “covering [Nifong’s] butt” was not among them. Since Watkins claimed to have not seen the results of the investigation, I sent him a link to the AG’s report.

Watkins’ response? Not to acknowledge his failure to do even minimal research on the case before suggesting that the players were merely found not guilty, but simply to change his frame of reference. In a column published yesterday morning, he proclaimed that no one “will ever be able to prove innocence beyond a reasonable doubt.” Evidently, there's no difference between being found not guilty and being found innocent, despite what Watkins himself had said three days before.

To quote Williamson, “Those who made a rush to judgment based upon an unquestioning faith in what a prosecutor had told them were made to look foolish and many still do look foolish.”

Or take the case of Washington Post sportswriter Mike Wise. Wise recently wrote, “With all due respect to those ‘INNOCENT’ bracelets worn around Durham this year, this isn’t ‘To Kill a Mockingbird II.’”

I e-mailed Wise, suggesting that the case paralleled To Kill a Mockingbird. (Indeed, Jason Whitlock detected this point early on, and Judge Gerald Tjoflat made the comparison in his alumni speech.) I noted to Wise that, as in To Kill a Mockingbird, this case involved an unscrupulous prosecutor playing to the racial passions of the mob, and courageous defense attorneys standing up for principle.

Wise’s response? “One [accused player], in fact, is on probation right now for clocking a kid in Georgetown that he called ‘a fag.’ I don't know about you, but I never thought of the man Gregory Peck represented in the movie to be that kind of individual.”

Leave aside the fact that Collin Finnerty isn’t on probation “right now,” or that even prosecutors conceded that he didn’t “clock” anyone, or that the personal character of Tom Robinson, the man falsely accused of rape, wasn’t a major theme of Harper Lee’s novel. As I e-mailed Wise, “Gregory Peck played not the person falsely accused of rape but the lawyer willing to stand up for what was right, regardless of the color of his client or the short-term political unpopularity of his cause. And yes, I could easily see Joe Cheshire, who served as Dave Evans’ attorney, in such a role.”

Wise’s response? Not to acknowledge that he based his column on an incorrect reading of Harper Lee’s book, but simply to change his frame of reference. When another correspondent subsequently pointed out the shortcomings of his rejecting the To Kill a Mockingbird analogy, Wise wrote, “Collin Finnerty ain’t Tom Robinson. And there’s nobody remotely worthy of Gregory Peck playing them in the movie, not even Evans’ attorney.”

Oh.

To quote Williamson, “Those who made a rush to judgment based upon an unquestioning faith in what a prosecutor had told them were made to look foolish and many still do look foolish.”

We’ve seen other examples of this “facts-be-damned” mentality. Yesterday, the pro-Mangum blog abyss2hope published a piece peculiarly arguing “alleged victims who lose public support and are labeled as an unreliable witness routinely face cruel and unusual punishment from people who claim to uphold the rights of all men. Many of those who kept saying, ‘innocent until proven guilty’ hated the fact that this woman's claim was being investigated at all . . . If people can't imagine why Nifong would want this case fully investigated for any reason other than political gain, that tells us more about their ethics than it does about Nifong’s.”

Or take N&O columnist Barry Saunders, who not once but twice approvingly published Nifong’s courtroom claim that “something happened.” When people wrote to complain about his first column, he responded, “I never said anything happened in that bathroom. I then promised to punish myself by listening to a Kenny G CD if she could show where I ever accused the men of rape.”

In December, I e-mailed Saunders, pointing to a Liestoppers post examining his reaction to another gang rape allegation, involving NCCU students in early 2001, and noted, “In the earlier case, you seemed strongly sympathetic to the plight of defendants in cases of rape; in this case, you have seemed strongly, almost bitingly, unsympathetic. I was wondering if between 2001 and now you have become persuaded by feminist legal theory on the validity of all rape allegations.”

Saunders’ response? “You may be right.”

But Saunders wasn’t accusing the players of anything.

Finally, take the North Carolina NAACP. The organization’s homepage still features an error-riddled, pro-prosecution “memorandum of law.” Visitors to the page learn about the “mountain of physical evidence, that is corroborated by, we have reason to believe, accounts of some of the men who were at the party who have cooperated with the police and the D.A. from early on.” Readers also are informed that “around 12:20, some men who saw the vulnerable Ms. M[angum] returning to the house called their friends who had taken cabs and gone to get some cash from an ATM. Some returned.” The AG's report, of course, refuted both claims, as well as several others on the NAACP site.

The NAACP homepage also features a photograph and flattering story on Rev. Curtis Gatewood, the former four-term head of the Durham NAACP. This is the same man who, in late January, denounced the State Bar for joining “the lynching mobs in Durham who have verbally lynched and sought to politically assassinate DA Mike Nifong”; the group, he contended, “wrongfully used their influence to attack the integrity of a prosecutor at the rare time he prosecutes a case which profoundly has the potential to challenge racism, classism, and sexism simultaneously.”

To quote Williamson, “Those who made a rush to judgment based upon an unquestioning faith in what a prosecutor had told them were made to look foolish and many still do look foolish.”