LEXINGTON, Ky. (April 7, 2008) – The University of Kentucky Libraries Wendell H. Ford Public Policy Research Center will present a talk on the now infamous rape case lodged against members of a Duke University athletic team. Bob Ashley, editor of the Durham Herald-Sun, will present "The Kaleidoscopic Narratives of the Duke Lacrosse Case" at 4 p.m. Wednesday, April 9, in the William T. Young Library Auditorium. The talk is free and open to the public.
In March 2006, three Duke lacrosse players were charged with rape by district attorney Mike Nifong. Over the next 18 months, as tumultuous events in the case unfolded, the issues of race, gender, class, and the sometimes negative “town gown” relationship that existed in Durham, were exposed in ways that received national media attention. In the middle of the affair was the local newspaper, the Durham Herald-Sun, which reported and editorialized on the matter, earning widespread praise [from whom: the Group of 88? Anti-lacrosse extremist Orin Starn?] and criticism from many corners.
On April 9, the editor of the Herald-Sun comes to UK to present “The Kaleidoscopic Narratives of the Duke Lacrosse Case.” Although charges were dropped against the defendants and Nifong was disbarred for his prosecution of the case, the case left an indelible mark on the school and the community. Ashley will discuss his own controversial role in the case, as well as how the case has affected many different constituencies at Duke University and in Durham . . .
For more information on the Ashley presentation, contact Esther Edwards at (859) 257-1742 or by e-mail.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Remarkable
Even now, there are case-related events that leave me stunned. The below is an actual press release.
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Chill off. Nifong ought to appear with Ashley. Meehan, too. After all, this is Kentucky. All DNA is the same in Kentucky.
even if there were civil rights violations, and even if the grand jury indictment did not provide a sufficient shield for the defendants, everything bad that happened was Mike Nifong’s fault, and the disgraced former D.A. is solely and entirely liable.
Why does this reek of Boardhead? Could it be the "even if" related to the "whatever they did"?
The rats are jumping ship. Alleva is the latest. At least he won't have to worry about breaking his back when he jumps---he's just another spineless Duke employee. Hopefully, Boardhead and Steal will get to the plank soon. Their arrogance has so over-inflated body parts, they will sink upon hitting the water.
Just please, please don't tell me a settlement is in the works. The whole story needs to be told. Nifong is easy to blame. The idiots in power at Dook and in Duhm want us to believe that Nifong led them astray. Yeah, right. Just like the Pied Piper led the rats out of the city. Hey, there's an idea. Maybe Boardhead and Steal will follow Alleva's lead. Then again, they have such an elevated opinion of themselves
To RRH: if your nephew has been thoroughly versed in the pitfalls of Dook and Duhm tell him to take the money. You appear to be on top of things so hopefully he can too.
KC, I can't find the news release at the link that you included.
Btw, I think you are 10-15 years younger than I am. Up until about seven years ago, the saying that "No matter how cynical I get, I can't keep up" described me pretty well. I think I have finally caught up, and that you will, too, one day.
RRH
P.S. Ok, it's true that even my finely honed cynicism didn't prevent a shock from hearing of the infamous "Ad of 88", whose second anniversary is tomorrow, April 6th. But journalists intentionally lying? -- Remember, I'm a journalism graduate.
Joe Aleve has resigned as the athletic director at Duke to take a similar position at LSU. (Look out coaches and athleteas at LSU!). Perhaps there is hope yet at Duke that those involved in the lacrosse debacle at Duke will pack their tents and go away.
Somebody from the blogging community needs to be at this presentation to ask Ashley some hard questions about the performance of the Herald -Sun in the lacrosse case which allegedly earned it "widespread praise."
Specifically, someone might start by asking Ashley why the term I sue--allegedly--was not more prominent in his paper's coverage of the case!
Diesel
Let us now praise infamous men.
Ashley's talk at UK would be the perfect time to someone in the audience to ask Ashley about race, if he a) thinks race played a role in the kid glove treatment of the 17 year old Eve Carson murder suspect through out his busy criminal career...or b)that the NC Parole system employees are just lazy and incompetent?
How jolly it would be for some DIW regulars to attend those functions with some pointed questions directed at Mr. Ashley's role in the sordid press coverage.
I think I'm going to throw up.
Bob Ashley commenting in any authoritative way on the Lacrosse Hoax is sick.
He sat in his little sterile office with equally sterile run-of-the-mill untended house plants by the window-with-a-view wringing his hands and dreaming up new ways each week to blow air kisses to the whipped-up, loony "activists" of Durham.
When he got up the courage to peek down the hallway of the H-S building, he stumbled down each corridor in hot pursuit of any agenda-filled diatribe from creek-bed-explorer Orin Starn and the Gang of 88. Anyone with a hard-on hatred for young white male Duke athletes were treated like royalty on the Ashley-run Herald Sun pages.
I only regret that I cannot be in the audience of Ashley's "old Kentucky home" to deliver a few choice words.
Bob Ashley is Durham's Barney Phife without the spare bullet.
A new campaign should be started by posters. Deluge the H-S with ridicule for the role Ashley is now trying to play.
It would be impossible to convey here just how difficult it was to get a column printed in the H-S during the Hoax that said anything good about the lacrosse players.
Kind of interesting article.
Also comical now that we see just where that "theology of hope" has taken so many.
People like Duke's Gang of 88 are still in the same 1960's bell jar of "protests".
Excuse me if I am tired of the over-hyped multitude of King anniversaries. For many, just a way of continuing and complaining about non-existent grievances. The best thing you can be in today's America is a young black man or woman.
Acknowledging the fact that society is just waiting to give you a smooth ride in all that you do would disrupt the proceedings, no doubt.
Duke turned corner after assassination
By Ray Gronberg : The Herald-Sun
Apr 5, 2008
DURHAM -- The turmoil ignited by Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968 also roiled Duke University, provoking a student protest that those who were around now say heralded a major change in the school's culture.
Students reacted to the news of King's death by organizing what amounted to a sit-in at the house of Duke's then-president, Douglas Knight. It began on April 5, 1968, 40 years ago today.
One of the leaders of the protest, then-senior Jack Boger, is now the dean of UNC's law school.
Boger heard of King's death on April 4, 1968, while he was attending a conference on the works of German theologian Jâ??ºrgen Moltmann. The German's first major work, then current, was called "The Theology of Hope."
But when someone walked into the auditorium and announced that King had been shot in Memphis, Tenn., "it all of a sudden made 'The Theology of Hope' seem a little misplaced," Boger recalled.
Through the night and into the next day, student leaders debated what they should do. Some favored mounting a door-to-door political advocacy effort in Hope Valley and other neighborhoods.
But Duke administrators discouraged that, fearing, Boger said, that students might run afoul of vigilantes.
They argued that the protest needed to stay within the "Duke University community," said Bill Griffith, a longtime Duke administrator who was then assistant to the provost for student affairs.
"And in fact, they decided to go into where the Duke faculty [were]," Griffith said. The rationale was, 'Here is part of your family, and those are the people you should be talking to.'"
Some 350 to 400 students wound up gathering outside the president's house the night of April 5. The weather was cold and wet, and Knight elected to invite the students in.
He and the students talked for awhile, but Knight eventually took ill and retired for the evening. But he left word that the students could remain in the public portion of the house.
Knight "had left the television on in his living room, and it was showing images of Washington and other cities that were in flames because of the aftermath of the assassination," Boger said. "There was a sense we were at a pivotal moment in America's racial history, and history in general."
King "was a leader whose morals everyone recognized and who was cut down," he added. "A lot of students were alarmed. I can't think of a contemporary leader whose loss would engender the same response."
The sit-in continued until April 7, a Sunday, when the students opted to move the protest to the quadrangle outside Duke Chapel. There they staged a "silent vigil" that lasted until the morning of April 11.
Throughout, the students pushed four political demands that included one that Knight give up a membership in the then-segregated Hope Valley Country Club.
But the key demand was that the university raise its minimum wage for nonacademic employees to $1.60 an hour -- the equivalent these days of $9.73 an hour.
The demand grew out of a union organizing drive at Duke that was under way before King's assassination.
Leaders of the protest latched onto the demand because of its parallel with the cause -- the plight of city garbage collectors -- that drew King to Memphis, Boger said.
The protest and the organizing drive fed on each other. Dining hall employees walked off the job the afternoon of April 8, a move that wound up revealing divisions in student opinion.
More than 200 students -- including members of the football and basketball teams -- volunteered to work in the dining hall to help keep it open.
Griffith said there were always "mixed emotions" among students about the president's house sit-in and the dining-hall walkout. But everyone worked to ensure that there were no "physical manifestations" to that, he said.
Administrators also had their hands full dealing with complaints from alumni and trustees who wanted firmer action taken against the protestors.
Griffith said he cooled off some of the complaining alumni by pointing out that students had done $5,000 in damage to the campus while complaining about the school's handling of tickets for the football team's 1961 appearance in the Cotton Bowl.
In 1968, by contrast, there were "1,000 students in the main quadrangle not doing any damage," he said.
Students ended the vigil after the then-chairman of the school's Board of Trustees, Wright Tisdale, announced on April 10 that the school would adopt the $1.60-an-hour minimum wage. Knight by that time was in the hospital, suffering from exhaustion and hepatitis.
Conceding ground to the protesters hurt both Tisdale -- the Ford Motor Co.'s vice president of labor relations -- and Knight professionally, Griffith said. Knight stepped down a year later, and was replaced by former N.C. Gov. Terry Sanford.
Sanford in turn pushed for changes at Duke that wound up raising its academic profile, among them a reduction in the influence wielded at the school by the Duke Endowment.
Before 1968, Duke was a "Southern, regional school," Boger said. After, "it became a more national, socially reflective institution."
The sit-in likely was more symptom than cause, as it grew of the broader changes that were rippling through the South," Boger said.
"Dr. King was leading an effort to change the region. To the region's great good fortune, it did," Boger said, noting that cities like Charlotte would likely have missed out on the wave of business development that defines them today had the state's "old school racial relations" continued much longer.
H-S:
Lacrosse cabbie gives up on taxis
By Ray Gronberg : The Herald-Sun
Apr 5, 2008
DURHAM -- A taxi company co-owned by a figure in the Duke University lacrosse case has turned in its city-issued permits in the wake of a run-in with administrators and a regulatory board.
Moezeldin Elmostafa said Friday evening that his company, On Time Taxi & Transportation, gave up its three taxi permits last week because it wants to focus on shuttle and limousine services that aren't as tightly regulated by the city.
The taxi business -- which the city views as being different from shuttle services -- "is too much of a headache," he said.
The company's decision followed a November move by the city to revoke the three permits, in response to complaints from other taxi operators who alleged the firm was unfairly competing with them for the business of Duke students.
A city administrator agreed with the complaint, and so in December did the members of Durham's Passenger Vehicle for Hire Commission. They held that officials should strip the company of its right to operate three taxis in the city.
Elmostafa's company appealed the ruling to the City Council, and was going to receive partial support from administrators who doubted the chances of sustaining a move against the company in court.
City Manager Patrick Baker had recommended that elected officials ask the Passenger Vehicle for Hire Commission to reconsider its decision.
He reasoned that the enforcement of the city's tax regulations has been uneven enough through the years that a judge might not see a move against the company as being fair.
In addition, officials felt revocation of the permits "may have been a harsh penalty" for the alleged violation, said Mark Ahrendsen, the city's transportation manager.
But any move against the company is fraught with risk for the city because of Elmostafa's role in the Duke lacrosse case. He was an alibi witness for Reade Seligmann, one of three lacrosse players falsely accused two years ago of rape.
Elmostafa was going to testify, with backing from photos and receipts, that Seligmann and another lacrosse player, Robert Wellington, were in his vehicle on the way to an ATM, a restaurant and their dorm when the rape supposedly occurred.
His potential testimony became controversial as soon as his name surfaced when police responded by arresting him on a 3-year-old shoplifting warrant. A lawyer for the cabbie, Tom Loflin, labeled the move an act of retaliation.
The shoplifting charge went to trial, and Elmostafa was found not guilty of helping a woman steal merchandise from Northgate Mall.
The city is now facing three federal civil-rights lawsuits in connection with its handling of the lacrosse case. Elmostafa isn't a party to any of them, but all three echo Loflin's original claim and count it among the city's misdeeds.
Ahrendsen said Elmostafa's role in the lacrosse case was "something we were aware of" but that "really didn't have a bearing on our initial action" on the permits.
Elmostafa agreed.
"I don't think there's a relation to the lacrosse case," he said when asked Friday if he thought officials were targeting him over that continuing controversy. "This is going in a different direction."
The permit dispute stems from the fact that in the city's eyes, Elmostafa's company was both a taxi operator and a shuttle service.
Under Durham law, shuttles can only take people on a "pre-arranged trip," meaning that clients have to call for a pick-up and that the ride has a fixed price, Ahrendsen said.
Taxis use meters to charge by the mile, or by the minute of waiting time, and have the right to loiter at the curb outside hotels, motels and other places.
Only the vehicles for which On Time had city taxi medallions had the right to wait at the curb for business at Duke, but some of the company's competitors felt it was playing fast and loose with the rules by allowing drivers of its 12 shuttles to join in.
An Ahrendsen subordinate, Gracie Chamblee, said in a memo that she caught three On Time shuttle drivers doing just that on Nov. 21, as students were leaving for the Thanksgiving holiday.
Ahrendsen said taxi companies don't like shuttle operators because they don't "go through the same regulatory process as taxis" and don't have the same financial burdens.
Many economists, however, see permit systems like Durham's as being little more than a racket designed to stifle competition. The most famous medallion system, New York City's, dates from the Depression and was expressly designed to reduce the number of taxis on the road.
Durham law allows officials to issue up to 180 taxi permits, but at most recent count it had given out only 139. Local taxi operators have asked administrators not to issue more than that, Ahrendsen said.
H-S:
Alleva leaving Duke to take same job at LSU
By Bryan Strickland : The Herald-Sun
Apr 5, 2008
DURHAM -- Joe Alleva resigned as Duke's athletics director on Friday and accepted the same title at Louisiana State University, ending a relationship with Duke that spanned more than three decades.
Alleva is expected to assume some of his responsibilities at LSU immediately, namely helping with the hiring of a men's basketball coach, but he still will fulfill some duties at Duke for an undetermined period of time, according to Duke associate athletics director for communications Jon Jackson.
Alleva will fully take over in Baton Rouge after current LSU athletics director Skip Bertman steps down on June 30.
Duke officials weren't yet ready Friday to announce if they would name an interim AD.
"After deliberating with my family and several colleagues here at Duke, I have decided to accept the director of athletics position at Louisiana State University," Alleva said in a statement. He couldn't be reached for further comment.
"For over 30 years, I have committed myself to Duke University, and for the past 10, I have been fortunate to lead one of the nation's best departments of athletics. I am appreciative of my time at Duke, and even more grateful for the relationships I have forged while working here, particularly in the department of athletics. I hope that Duke continues to enjoy the success it has maintained for so many years."
Duke senior associate athletics director Chris Kennedy, who has known Alleva for all 32 years and who works out of the adjacent office at Cameron Indoor Stadium, said he didn't see this coming. Alleva and five other candidates interviewed for the LSU job Tuesday.
"We've had a lot of talks in the last 48 hours, and I worked really hard to try to get him to stay," Kennedy said. "I think he's done an unbelievable job."
Not everyone felt that way.
Indications are that even after Alleva received a five-year reappointment following a performance review last August, he still wasn't confident in his future with the school.
While Duke athletics has established itself as one of the country's most well-rounded departments in terms of on-field and classroom success during Alleva's tenure, on-field issues with football and off-field issues with lacrosse have dogged him.
On the football front, Alleva fired head coach Fred Goldsmith and subsequently hired Carl Franks and then Ted Roof, who had no head coaching experience between them and compiled a 13-90 record combined.
In December -- after firing Roof -- Alleva hired David Cutcliffe, considered an offensive visionary who has enjoyed significant success as a head coach at Mississippi and an assistant at Tennessee.
"If you pick out every decade of Duke athletics and analyze them, this has been the diamond. The only thing has been the football thing," Kennedy said. "And one of Joe's legacies, I think, will be that at the end here, he's found a guy that's going to be able to fix football -- the one thing where we've come up a little bit short."
On the lacrosse front, no one in the Duke administration was spared in the public outcry that followed the eventual dismissal of sexual-assault allegations lodged against three players two years ago.
The perceived culprits included Alleva.
"The perception absolutely is not fair," Kennedy said. "... He suffered from that, and he suffered from that unjustly."
Alleva didn't help such perceptions when, shortly after the lacrosse story broke, he was injured and his son, J.D. Alleva, was cited for driving while impaired in a boating accident. Alcohol abuse among athletes was one of multiple hot-button topics during the height of the lacrosse case.
Otherwise, Alleva's tenure was marked mainly by successes.
Entering the current school year, Duke had won six of its nine NCAA championships (five in women's golf) and had produced 147 of its 250 All-Americas and 12 of its 17 national players of the year under Alleva's leadership.
Four times in Alleva's first nine years as AD, Duke finished in the top 10 of the NCAA Directors' Cup, which measures on-field performance for all varsity sports.
In 2007, for the third straight year, Duke ranked first among Division I schools in the National Collegiate Scouting Association Power Rankings, which combines a school's Directors' Cup ranking, its athletics graduation rate and its academic rank in U.S. News & World Report.
That was all made possible in part by the nearly $200 million in gifts that helped fund more than $85 million in facility improvements and additions over Alleva's tenure. Annual giving to the Iron Dukes has increased 50 percent since 2000, including a record $11 million in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2007.
Alleva, 54, came to Duke in 1976 in a non-athletic business and finance position, after playing quarterback for Lehigh and earning his MBA there. He joined the athletics staff in 1980 and was promoted to associate athletics director in 1987, serving as right-hand man for former AD Tom Butters before Butters retired in 1997.
Six months after Butters left, Alleva took over as athletics director -- 10 years and one month ago.
If I were the parent of a Duke student (which thankfully I am not) who lived out of state and needed to fly home for vacations, I would only use Mr. Elmostafa's services. It was obvious from the beginning that he was a man of principle....such people need to be supported in their endeavors.
Although I can understand Mr. Elmostafa's reluctance to connect the treatment he is now receiving from the license board with that he received when he made it clear he wa not going to change his story regarding Reade Seligmann since he has to live in Durham, I am hard-pressed not to see that there is some relationship between the two.
Hopefully someone in the Bluegrass state will ask Ashley the hard questions when he appears in Louisville this coming week. The timing of his talk (late afternoon) makes it difficult to get there in time.
Certainly an appropriate topic for discussion at a public policy institute ...
Has the potential to be very interesting...........
If it'll be available online, I'd greatly appreciate knowing where and when.
How in the hell, yes, how in the hell, can you "drop" something that never existed . . . well, yes the charges did exist . . . never mind that the "charge" never existed in reality or that it was not real except in the minds of some very bigoted and ignorant people . . . maliousious and ambitious people, but then, . . . well, . . . er, what . . . that is to say how is this reality removed from any reality that moves forward? How is this horror erased from the reputation of these young men, and now . . . now that one understands that there is every reason to continue to sue these arrogant, malicious controlling people, to sue them until the conundrum that is the difficulty of putting reputations right and putting young men back together is resolved and made right and their reputations made whole will it be resolved. I wish Bob Ashely had enough sense to know this, but to expect him to understand this appears to be too much.This story is less about the lacrosse team than it is about the arrogant ignoranc extremism of the Group of 88 and the main stream media.
If anyone here believes they will be allowed a platform to ask probing questions or get an honest reply from Ashley at this event all I can say is, "Don't Tase Me Bro".
Seriously, I never underestimate the MSMs ability to pervert history and re-write it in a way favorable to themselves and their political bias. The Duke Lacrosse revisionist magical mystery tour has been going on for some time and now it's the MSM's turn to help the group of 88 rewrite history. I wouldn't be surprised if Wendy and Nancy also joined the tour.
I think Ashley's talk is a good thing and I bet the Plantiff's attorney's do also. Bob is so stupid, I bet he says more slanderous,untrue things that will make the highlights of another legal action by the LAX players. Stay tuned, this guy is going to hang himself and he is even bringing his own rope this time.
1:52 - Probably right about Ashley. It will be interesting to see how it is written up in the Lexington Courier. My hope is that his comments undercut the action on the part of the defendants to shup down the websiteabout the Duke case. That would be poetic justice.
K.C.,
After all this, I am surprised that you have not given up your teetotaling ways and have been driven to drink. I mean, you just cannot make up this stuff.
Had UPI been a novel, you and Stuart would have been turned away, as no publisher would have believed such a story could be remotely possible!
Is Ashley looking for a new state of residence?
If so, he's going about it the right way: appear in places where his past/present dimness won't be noticed, and his audience too dumb to care. (Even Duhh might be wising up?)
Maybe Debrah can keep up with real estate, to see if his house in on the market.
I find it offensive in the extreme that various 'players' in the Duke lacrosse burning aka the Duke lacrosse frame are able to parlay their infamous involvement into favorable notariety.
This is the moral equivalent of Jack-the-Ripper going on tour to discuss expedited surgery in extreme conditions.
I'm a faculty member at UK with close ties to both Duke and UNC so I followed "The Case" with great interest. When this presentation was announced I contacted the people responsible for inviting Mr. Ashley pointing out among other things the extreme inappropriateness of referring to the hoax as an “alleged rape case” after Mr. Cooper's unprecedented statements that the accused were in fact innocent. I have also pointed out that perhaps the most useful thing the UK community could learn from Mr Ashley’s presentation would be to avoid the faculty organized demagoguery were, god forbid, something similar to occur on our campus.
TO Mac--
Ashley is perhaps at the H-S for the duration.
Each week, he does a little column, usually talking about himself and his family...which I call his "diary entries" and I have told him this in an email which I CC to the other members of his staff.
LOL!!!
I also told him that he was the one responsible for running that paper into the ground, as I knew he was the one who signed off on those libelous op-eds about the lacrosse players when the case first got started.
That's when he emailed me back and said....."If you continue to abuse my staff, we will be less likely to work with you in the future."
LOL!!! I laughed until I cried.
He's such a nutcase.
Apparently, his kid is a freshman at UNC-CH and Ashley no doubt plans to stay with the H-S until he retires.
The reason he is going to Kentucky to put on a show is that he worked there for a long time with another Paxton-owned newspaper.
He wants to play the "big news guy" on the "cutting edge" of reporting a national story.
He'll be able to pull it off because his audience will be bigger hicks than he is.
...On April 9, the editor of the Herald-Sun comes to UK to present “The Kaleidoscopic Narratives of the Duke Lacrosse Case.”
::
Well, there is always hope.
Perhaps Mr. Ashley will name names of those responsible for creating and then broadcasting the 1970's era stereotypical narrative about white male athletes on the campus of Duke University.
Then perhaps we can refer to that narrative as the big Kaleidoscopic lie and Mr. Ashley will reveal why he believed all of that nonsense.
Any members of the G88 come to mind who are 'culturally' stuck back in the 1970's?
::
GP
Hooray, 9:13AM!! We have someone on the case. Do you suppose the presentation will be taped? Although the invitation to Bob Ashley is appalling, whatever the man says will be fascinating.
Observer
"The perception absolutely is not fair," Kennedy said. "... He [Alleva] suffered from that, and he suffered from that unjustly."
Now that's just funny.
If we have learned that there is no limit to the cover higher education is willing to give to those who continually mouth the approved script.
Seriously, higher education continues to make a joke of itself. Nuance and understanding are not a valid defense for hosting malevolent idiots.
"Kaleidoscopic Narratives..." - Ashley's title for his little talk actually fits, even though it falsely implies that a wide spectrum of narratives about this case were equally tenable, based on a hard look at the available evidence.
This is the lie that one expects from those who were so damnably wrong for so damned long:Geez, who knew? Really, what else can they say, short of insisting that they were actually right, and the whole complete exoneration thing was simply another example of the huge conspiracy against the poor/females/blacks/sex-workers/Durhamites/whoever?
One assumes that Mr. Kaleidoscope Ashley will not claim that, even though many of his readers would line up at his tent to pay their dimes for such a show.
Still, if Ashley is unlikely to explain why only a race-class-gender metanarrative completely repudiated by the facts was attractive to the H-S, he really doesn't have to. Some things are prefectly clear.
No, the kaleidoscope image fits because when Ashley was peering down his mirrored tube, watching those pretty coloured objects spin, the rich white males chasing the poor black maiden around and around in a circle... Ashley must have been aware that his newspaper was holding a gullible public spellbound with a magic-lantern show that was much better, much more exciting, somehow truer, than reality. And that, I think, is how he sees the job of editing a newspaper.
I wish I were stunned or even surprised, unfortunately I am not.
Will these boys ever get an even break,there was NO rape.
Ashley is part of the Durham problem.
Another reason why we need to see resolution in the civil courts!
Here's a column from today's H-S.
I have occasionally skimmed what this woman had to say and attributed her banality---which eclipses that of N&O's Ruth Sheehan---to just that.
However, with this new hire, it's obvious that Ashley has brought yet another race-obsessed dullard to the mix.
Every time something happens to anyone of color, people like this woman exaggerate and try to make martyrs of all criminals in the black community.
Those of all races have been found to be innocent after spending years in prison. Very troubling, indeed.
However, if only a few intelligent people would concentrate on the prolific crime in their communities instead of using each event as a scorecard, then everyone might benefit from a decrease in real crime.
Naturally, this dullard just had to whip out the Duke lacrosse case. In Durham, they will be doing this for the next century.
This from Dawn Baumgartner Vaughn:
Racism, prison, injustice
Apr 7, 2008
Another African-American man in North Carolina was released days ago from prison after serving time for a crime he didn't commit. Murder charges against Glen Chapman were dropped and he walked out of Central Prison in Raleigh, 14 years after the innocent man was sent there. What's wrong with this picture?
Before I cry racism, I'll point out that one of Chapman's trial attorneys admitted to consuming enough alcohol during the trial to make a skunk drunk. But it wasn't just Chapman's lawyer who led him to spend nearly 14 years on death row -- it was an investigator who lied and withheld evidence. Only the investigator at the time, Dennis Rhoney, knows why he did what he did. The rest of us can only guess. But I find it interesting that the more these cases come to light, there seem to be more African-American men than white men.
I suppose I'm naturally suspicious. I know judicial bias isn't just in the South, but it sure seems to crop up here a lot. I don't know Rhoney's race. Maybe it was ineptitude, personal reasons, negligence or a slew of other possibilities that make someone do something like that. But you still wonder. Last week a UNC student lied about being robbed on campus and blamed an African-American man for it. What a load of you-know-what.
Racism is a sickening phenomenon in this country, one I was only peripherally aware of until I went to college in southwestern Virginia after living the previous seven years in the Washington, D.C., area. It was in the Southern tip of the Old Dominion that I was confronted with my first rebel flag, the Confederate battle flag, as a decoration. I was horrified. More shocking was that other people regarded it as something that just was. I lived at Fort Bragg and in Augusta, Ga., as a kid but I guess I never noticed it until I was grown and knew what it represented. Don't give me that garbage about heritage. It is a flag carried into battle to break up our country. It is the flag trotted out by the KKK during the civil-rights movement to remind the African-Americans of Dixie. I see it around here now, on the outskirts of town or on cars driving along Interstate 40. When I see a rebel flag, I associate it with an ignorant person, and stirrings of anger rumble inside me.
Sometimes I think subtle racism is more of a threat to our nation than overt racism. Overt racists aren't hiding. They're proud of their hate and don't care what anyone else thinks. They are easily identifiable. It's the people who think they're not racist who are scary. They're the ones who don't say the "n" word themselves, but also don't flinch when they hear it said by others. They're the ones who make cringe-worthy stereotypical comments. They're the ones who tell you they have black friends, so it makes them OK. They're the ones who are not outraged when it turns out yet another African-American was wrongly imprisoned. They're the ones who are, however, outraged that three white Duke students were accused of a crime they didn't commit. They're the ones who don't realize that if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
At least now we're finding out about these innocent African-American men sent to prison. How many more don't we know about?
I sometimes skim a few posts at John in Carolina since it seems there's an obsession with Obama lately.
Apparently, the long-banned poster is still at his old habit and is showing up over there using a photo of R&B singer Toni Braxton in his profile.
LOL!!!
The insanity continues.
I just checked the N&O Editors' Blog and no one posted a thing about the anniversary of the vigilante poster they libelously printed back in 2006.
Some of you make a big deal about an issue and then do nothing.
If that "anniversary" was so important to bring to the forum, then why remain silent?
Do any of you really wonder why nothing in the media ever changes?
Well, do ya?
Is someone else always supposed to be the one to spring into action?
This found on the N&O Bull's Eye blog:
Trinity Park "Hard Hat Home Tour"
It's not your average tour.
Ten homes in Durham's Trinity Park neighborhood will be open to the public from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, April 13. They won't exactly offer a warm welcome, but rather a harsh reality. The reality? Renovating a historic home ain't that easy; it takes beaucoup de work.
The houses are still works in progress. The $10 tour (Advance tickets available at Regulator Bookshop and Stone Bros. & Byrd) was created to show just how much effort goes into remodeling historic homes.
Also on the tour are SOME of the "party houses" that Duke University recently bought and resold for owner occupancy. (Those of the "flaming mattress" out the window type, not the "lacrosse house" type.)
Check tomorrow's Durham News for more information on a few of the houses.
This is so funny.
Referencing the comic duo of Penn and Teller.
Penn and Tell Her
Isn't Kentucky where the word toothbrush comes from?
KC, you need help man. Get a life.
H-S:
It's good to see that Monica Chen has become a full-time reporter. Such a nice girl.
Duke announces $50M gift
By Monica Chen : The Herald-Sun
Apr 8, 2008
DURHAM -- Duke University Medical Center is renewing its commitment to children, education and health care with the help of a $50 million gift from The Duke Endowment on Monday, the single largest gift in the history of the medical school.
Of that, $35 million will go toward a new School of Medicine Education Center, with modern spaces that will allow students studying to be doctors, nurses and physicians to work together.
The other $15 million will improve the McGovern-Davison Children's Health Center, linking outpatient and inpatient facilities, boosting the number of beds from 153 to 225-250 and improving family visitation areas.
The gift was announced Monday to trustees of the endowment and university officials in the lobby of the children's hospital, where speakers emphasized that the gift covers three of founder James Buchanan "Buck" Duke's concerns: education, health care, and in particular, children's health.
Duke President Richard Brodhead said the gift is in keeping with Duke Medical Center's role as a "place of powerful medical research, and as a place with the highest medical care, for the sickest of society and for the most vulnerable in society."
Some details on the new Education Center and expanded pediatric care weren't available Monday, but Joseph St. Geme, chairman of the Department of Pediatrics, said all of the additional 75 to 100 or so beds will be for inpatient facilities in the main hospital.
The hospital has yet to file for a certificate of need with the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services for the beds, St. Geme said. The gift will also go toward improving training, research and making visitation areas more family-friendly.
"The focus is on developing a state-of-the-art inpatient facility," he said.
As part of the plan for the new Education Center, Duke officials are also modernizing classroom space so medical, nursing and physician assistant students can study and work together.
The location of the new center has not been finalized. Plans include classrooms, lecture halls and gathering areas with moveable walls and seating so groups of up to 500 people can be accommodated in one place.
"When you're working in the hospital, you're working with these other departments. But you don't get that in medical school," said Nancy Andrews, the new dean of the School of Medicine. "Courses these students have together have been difficult to site. Our peer schools across the country have very modern tools, and we wanted to remind people that we're here for our students."
The Education Center could also include office space for admissions and educational staff, study and lounge areas for students, a cafâ??© and bookstore and possibly a fitness center.
Andrews, who is also a professor in the Departments of Pharmacology & Cancer Biology and Pediatrics, began working as dean on Oct. 1. She is the first female dean of a top 10 medical school in the U.S.
Duke was sixth on U.S. News & World Report's 2008 ranking of medical schools.
Previously, the largest gift to the medical center was from billionaire real estate developer David Murdock, who gave $35 million in September to support biomedical research at the N.C. Research Campus in Kannapolis.
In 2005, The Duke Endowment gave Duke University $75 million for student financial aid.
James Buchanan Duke's original $40 million gift in 1924 expanded Trinity College into Duke University and created The Duke Endowment. Adjusted for inflation, that initial $40 million would be worth more than $495 million today.
Upon Duke's death less than a year later, his will provided The Duke Endowment with another $67 million.
H-S:
Lawyers decry effort to block publicity on lacrosse suit
By Ray Gronberg : The Herald-Sun
Apr 8, 2008
DURHAM -- City officials give "new meaning to the concept of gall" by working with Duke University to block efforts to publicize one of the federal civil-rights lawsuits against them, lawyers for the lacrosse players who filed it say.
The city government is in "large measure" responsible for "the tsunami of negative national media publicity and commentary that engulfed" the Duke men's lacrosse team in the spring of 2006 after an exotic dancer levied false rape allegations against three players, the lawyers for 38 team members said in a new court filing.
Monday's filing continued the legal maneuvering that began in late February when Duke asked U.S. District Judge James Beaty Jr. to rule that the players' legal team violated legal ethics by using a Web site, news conference and news release to publicize the lawsuit.
City officials submitted a parallel request last month, contending that the players crossed the line by saying officials circulated lies about the team to advance their own careers and gratify their own prejudices and ideological agendas.
Both the city and Duke contend that allowing the publicity campaign to continue would bias potential jurors against them.
But the players' legal team says they're shielded by N.C. State Bar rules that allow them to repeat to reporters and other watchers the claims made in formal court filings.
They also say the bar lets them comment to counter adverse and prejudicial publicity initiated by others.
There was no shortage of such publicity in the spring of 2006, they said, noting that the N.C. State Bar disciplinary panel that disbarred former District Attorney Mike Nifong found numerous examples attributable to Nifong alone.
Moreover, the bar has recognized that the public has a legitimate interest in civil cases like this that touch on matters of broad concern, the lawyers said Monday.
"Surely few matters are of greater public concern than the conduct of government and its agents in the investigation and prosecution of alleged crimes -- particularly where, as here, the state's attorney general [was] compelled to take over a local government's criminal prosecution and ... then castigated local law enforcement officials for appalling abuses of power," they added.
That comment referred to N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper, whose office took over the prosecution of former Duke players David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann early in 2007.
Cooper and his staff subsequently concluded that Evans, Finnerty and Seligmann were innocent and that local authorities had rushed to judgment.
The contributing factors they identified included a botched and against-policy photo lineup administered by Durham Police Department detectives, and the failure of local authorities to question the exotic dancer about the many inconsistencies in their story.
"In the rush to condemn, a community and a state lost the ability to see clearly," Cooper said last year after announcing his decision.
Beaty has scheduled a hearing next week on the twin requests from Duke and the city. It's scheduled for April 15 and will occur in Winston-Salem.
H-S:
This is an example of what you read of the happenings in Durham all the time. Each crime occurring in the black community.
Yet officials in Durham put their efforts into trying to muzzle reports coming out about their role in the Lacrosse Hoax.
How many other gun-toting criminals "on probation" are roaming the streets?
Yet they spend their time on such things as watching to see if lacrosse players take a leak on the grass in Trinity Park or some other trivial matter.
3 indicted on murder charges in Durham
By John Stevenson : The Herald-Sun
Apr 8, 2008
DURHAM -- Three homicide indictments were returned by the county grand jury Monday, including one against a teenager accused of gunning down a Northern High School student last month and another against an 85-year-old man charged with killing his wife.
The younger defendant is Cory Anthony Jiggetts, 19, and the elderly suspect is Warren Haywood Moore.
Monday's other murder indictment was against Kenneth Lamont Lunsford III.
Jiggetts is suspected in the fatal shooting last month of Skye Moniqua Lee, 18, who was the mother of his 10-month-old son.
The victim was slain in her Keystone Place apartment.
Police described the crime as a domestic-violence incident and said the young child was unharmed.
At the time of the shooting, Jiggetts was serving a two-year probationary sentence for multiple breaking-and-entering and larceny convictions, according to the state Department of Correction Web site.
Court records indicate that Jiggetts and Lee apparently had a rocky relationship.
For example, Jiggetts was arrested in December for allegedly assaulting Lee -- who was three months pregnant at the time -- and he also was cited on Feb. 11 for trespassing at a residential complex where the woman and her family then lived.
In the December attack, a warrant alleged that Jiggetts shoved Lee, kicked her twice in the side while dragging her, threw a shoe in her face and punched her on the head with his fist.
Investigators said Lee did not appear to be pregnant when she was murdered.
In another homicide case that went to the grand jury Monday, Moore is accused of shooting his wife -- 84-year-old Nezzie Carter-Moore -- in the face and chest with a .38-caliber handgun on New Year's Eve.
The victim didn't die until March 28. She was a retired Jordan High School guidance counselor.
Moore claimed he opened fire on his wife because she was practicing voodoo and had cast a spell on him, according to published reports attributed to Durham police investigators.
Moore originally was charged in the case with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, inflicting serious injury. The accusation was upgraded to murder after his wife died.
Finally, the 21-year-old Lunsford is accused of killing Jalil Hakeem Stokes on Christmas Day.
When police responded to what appeared to be a traffic accident on the Durham Freeway near the Chapel Hill Street exit, they found that Stokes had been shot. The victim was pronounced dead a short time later at Duke University Hospital.
Lunsford was on probation for a drug crime at the time of the slaying.
In fact, the Department of Correction Web site indicates he has been sentenced to probation six times but never went to prison. He was convicted of two drug crimes, carrying a concealed weapon, assaulting a female and two counts of property damage.
One of the narcotics offenses was a misdemeanor and the other a felony.
In all, the county grand jury returned 112 bills of indictment Monday.
Indictments move felony cases from District Court to Superior Court, where they can be tried or plea-bargained.
H-S letter:
Durham has to get a handle on crime problem
Hardly anything is more tragic than a person incarcerated for a crime he did not commit. No one can ever bring back those missed years. That is the prime reason I do not believe in the death penalty, because we make mistakes in the crime control and judicial systems.
Yet, there is always a "but" to this scenario: People do commit crimes. Unfortunately, black males between the ages of 15-29 commit the majority of these crimes. If Dawn Baumgartner Vaughan looks at the Metro section daily, what would she see in the crime log? Black crime. Typically, black-on-black crime.
Why the law-abiding black community and the rest of us aren't raising hell about this continued onslaught of lawlessness is indefensible. Every day people have conversations about what they cannot do or where they cannot go due to the bad sections of our town. We should be free to roam wherever we desire. It is high time the criminal element in our city understands thuggish behavior will not be tolerated. Yes, fair trials for all, but fair and just punishment too.
If we truly believe in justice for all, we'll try mightily to eliminate the brutality exhibited by the people actually committing offenses against everyday citizens minding their own business.
Mike A. Hall
Durham
April 8, 2008
No matter where you are on the political map, read Thomas Sowell's latest.
Eve Carson, the graduate student and the thousands murdered are a lot more tragic than false incarceration. At least those falsly convicted have a life to come back too. Priorities
This just further validates my decision to switch to the N&O. Plus, the ink doesn't come off on my hands.
Anon at 5:15
"Eve Carson, the graduate student and the thousands murdered are a lot more tragic than false incarceration. At least those falsly convicted have a life to come back too. Priorities."
So it is wrong for one to choose the particular injustice that one desires to fight?
Duke Prof
At David Thompson's excellent blog, today's entry is The Sound of Wringing. It concerns a Guardian (UK) columnist's discovery that the use of the word "hoodie" tars the user as a Racist.
Thompson quotes Tom Paine on this issue. Paine's comments seem just as applicable to many of those who drove the Hoax/Frame forward, not least Bob Ashley:
--- begin quote ---
A pitiful substitute for thought
We laughed at the obsessives on our University campus who could explain everything in terms of race, class or sexual orientation. University was such an exhilarating experience after the squalid anti-intellectualism of our comprehensive schools that we could not take seriously those who preferred such formulae to thought. Most hilarious of all were leftist students from privileged backgrounds who, on any logical application of their own formulae, were the enemy. They simply decided that holding with greater intensity the views that cast them as such would exonerate them. Indeed, in a classic piece of doublethink, heterosexual whites from wealthy backgrounds seemed to think themselves more virtuous for being leftist witch-hunters of racists and homophobes.
How we chortled at the way such people saw such issues where there were patently none. How we chuckled at the way losers cast themselves as heroes for possessing random attributes, rather than for the content of their characters. They were no different from their "enemies" who were supposed to believe themselves superior for possessing other random attributes. They were perpetrators of identical fallacies; walking refutations of their own pretended logic.
[snip]
We should not have laughed. While those of us who were there to learn left University to get on with our lives, the class/race/sex retards stayed on as academics or left to go into politics, journalism or both. They would do anything to escape the need to think, it seems.
--- end quote ---
Well, it's 4 PM and time for Ashley's little fantasy tour.
Hope someone is there to give a full report.
There is an article up on this on the U Ky student newspaper site. www.kykernel.com
They use the same software to publish online as the Chronicle. Tried to comment on it, but it doesn't show up so I am guessing they have comment censors.
Alum8284
4/8/08 Anonymous:
Do you really think that someone who is falsely convicted has much of a life to come back to? The loss of life is always tragic - but killing someone's spirit (which is what a false conviction does) is taking a life as well. The priority should be a legal system in which criminals are kept locked up until such time that they have come to see the error of their ways and have made those changes in their way of thinking such that criminal activity will be abhorrent to their mindset. At the same time, crimes should be fully investigated according to the letter of the law and without regard to the race, religion, wealth, or region of the country from which the accuser or the accused lives.
KY Kernel has an article up on the speech.
Editor: Paper should have seen truth in Duke case earlier
http://www.kykernel.com/media/storage/paper305/news/2008/04/10/CampusNews/Editor.Paper.Should.Have.Seen.Truth.In.Duke.Case.Earlier-3315262.shtml
I don't see anything on the H-S website about Ashley's little trip to UK.
No doubt, we know what his Sunday "diary entry" will be about this week.
LOL!
Comment submitted to the Kentucky Kernel's article Editor: Paper should have seen truth in Duke case earlier, but seemingly not approved (or at least, not yet) --
"'Hindsight is a wonderful thing,' Ashley said."
Since Durham is nearly 500 miles from Lexington, Ashley can be excused for trying to excuse his paper's role in promoting the Duke Lacrosse Rape Hoax/Frame as some deficiency in hindsight. After all, what's the likelihood that many of the 100 members of the audience would know the case well enough to call him on that?
Readers who are curious about the truth of the matter could do worse than looking at KC Johnson's remarks concerning the Durham Herald-Sun's performance. Google counts about 261 entries touching on the subject at the blog "Durham in Wonderland":
http://tinyurl.com/4478x9
Pick a post or two at random, read it, then return to this account of Ashley's self-indulgent preening.
A hard-hitting Journalist who might have done a smidgen better, with benefit of hindsight?
Perhaps not so much.
The Kentucky Kernel
The Rural Blog on Ashley
amac said at 12:27 PM, 4/9/08:
We laughed at the obsessives on our University campus who could explain everything in terms of race, class or sexual orientation. ... Indeed, in a classic piece of doublethink, heterosexual whites from wealthy backgrounds seemed to think themselves more virtuous for being leftist witch-hunters of racists and homophobes.
How we chortled at the way such people saw such issues where there were patently none. How we chuckled at the way losers cast themselves as heroes....
We should not have laughed. While those of us who were there to learn left University to get on with our lives, the class/race/sex retards stayed on as academics or left to go into politics, journalism or both. They would do anything to escape the need to think, it seems.
I have made exactly this point several times: We owe an apology -- those of us who attended college in the Sixties and Seventies -- to the college students of today. We knew, as fellow students, the race/sex/class morons who now populate the Hate Studies departments. "Tom Paine" precisely describes our view of those tweebs at the time: We laughed at them. We assured ourselves that such idiots could never do any harm -- because they were so self-evidently anti-rational. We pictured them finishing college and then living with their parents until they died of drug or alcohol abuse. What we could not have imagined is that our Universities would hire these mental and moral defectives -- who would then hire each other in a circle-jerk/daisy-chain which would finally produce, in its most representative form, the Group of 88.
RRH
The KC dah-ling must give his analysis of what Ashley said at UK.
It's so incredible that Ashley should expect people to believe that he and his staff could not see that there was no case very early on.
***************************************
Also, I need to touch on something else.
Anti-Obama forces are now calling him "elitist" for some comments he made about small-town working America.
He was responding to a questioner in San Francisco who asked him why he was having a difficult time getting the support of the working-class Pennsylvania voters.
We've all heard his answer played over and over again.
And I'd like to know----What's so bad about it?
What is so untrue about it?
There's nothing close to the behavior and the resentment and the frustration in small-town America that exists inside the blighted inner cities; however, in some instances, similar attitudes exist.
If you want someone who can do some damage, just get on the wrong side of a roly-poly-redneck-gun-toting "Christian".
Some of those people are bitter and dangerous.
Nothing on the scale of the urban concrete jungles, but something close.
IMO, what Obama said is true.
He just needs to admit that his own wife---with all her good fortune (mostly courtesy of affirmative action and gender-based programs...because degrees in African-American Studies and Sociology do not usually create access into Harvard Law School and her current salary of over $300,000)---holds onto a load of uncalled-for-bitterness herself.
The only difference is that those low-wage workers in the small towns do not have affirmative action on which to depend for "status" in their world.
Obama was right; however, big Hillary is exploiting this latest "issue" all that she can.
I suppose she has to create a diversion away from the ongoing embarrassing lies she and Billy-Jeff have been caught in this week.
Yet again.
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