Closing Comments

When I first started writing about the lacrosse case, at a joint historians’ blog called Cliopatria, I did so in reaction to the Group of 88 statement. Then (and now) I considered the statement an indefensible betrayal by professors of their own school’s students, an action that contradicted many of the basic values on which American higher education rests.

Absent the Group statement, I doubt I would have noticed the case at all—in spring 2006, I didn’t even know that Duke had a lacrosse team, much less know any of its members. But as I remained interested in the case, the editor of Cliopatria suggested I spin off into a focused blog. When I did so, in August 2006, I envisioned a six-week effort, which would perhaps provide background for people interested in the case from the 60 Minutes broadcast, which I had heard was scheduled for early October. Instead, a flurry of events—the delay of the broadcast, then the November 2006 election, the Meehan hearing, the Nifong ethics charges, the culmination of the criminal case, and the two Nifong hearings—sustained the blog on a daily basis (the blog had more than 1000 posts during its first 14 months) through September 2007.

I stopped daily posts in fall 2007, and since then have averaged only about a post a week. I extended the blog to follow the civil cases, which struck me as likely to establish important precedents. (They did so, though in ways that trouble me—suggesting that in the 4^th Circuit colleges have no obligation to enforce the student bulletin or faculty handbook, at least in cases where disfavored groups of students are targeted by powerful faculty interests on campus; and victims have no grounds for a federal civil rights lawsuit when prosecutors and police conspire to frame innocent people, provided the police are internally candid about their lack of evidence and the prosecutor obtains a grand jury indictment.) The civil cases dragged on for much longer than I had anticipated, largely due to Durham’s high-risk, but ultimately high-reward, strategy of filing multiple interlocutory appeals to avoid any discovery.

This delay, ironically, meant that the blog remained active during two unanticipated but important events.

The first came when Duke employed the civil suit discovery process to try and obtainmy private correspondence with confidential sources for the book and blog. For reasons neither the university nor its attorneys ever explained, I was the only person who covered the case to receive such a subpoena; even UPI co-author Stuart Taylor wasn’t targeted by Duke. Thanks to excellent representation from my attorney, Patrick Strawbridge, and assistance from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, I resisted the subpoena. A limited setback before a Maine magistrate judge evaporated in the courtroom of Maine district court judge Brock Hornby, who peppered the Duke attorneys with questions, eliciting the extraordinary statement that Duke would be happy for its professors to live under the same standards the university expected of me. (Unsurprisingly, no member of the Brodhead administration ever informed Duke faculty members of this new policy, which would decimate the freedom to research controversial topics at Duke.) In the aftermath of the hearing, and after the Carrington settlement, Duke withdrew its subpoena before Hornby could render a decision. The magistrate judge’s decision subsequently was vacated.

The second significant event occurred with publication of the revisionist book by William D. Cohan. In his up-is-down opus, Cohan portrayed Mike Nifong as victim, “crucified” by the efforts of an amorphous conspiracy that included defense attorneys, the State Bar, some members of the media, Judge Osmond Smith, the Disciplinary Hearing Commission, families of the lacrosse players, senior prosecutors in the North Carolina attorney general’s office, and Northeastern lawyers whose identities he declined to reveal. Cohan reached this startling conclusion not by interviewing any members of the alleged conspiracy, but instead by speaking to Nifong at length, and then uncritically accepting the version of events offered by his chief source, a convicted liar. The result: a book praised by many of the papers who got the story wrong at the start, and sharply criticized by virtually every reviewer who knew anything about what occurred in Durham.

With the Carrington and Evans lawsuits having concluded, and with the Cohan book consigned (to borrow Judge John E. Jones, III’s recent usage of Ronald Reagan’s famous line) to the “ash heap of history,” it seems like an appropriate time to bring the blog to a close.

Before doing so, however, allow me to offer three general reflections:

The Academy

Higher education is perhaps the only product in which Americans spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars without having any clear sense of what they are purchasing. Few parents, alumni, legislators, or prospective students spend much (if any) time exploring the scholarship or syllabi offered by professors at the school of their choice; they devote even less effort to understanding hiring patterns or pedagogical changes that have driven the contemporary academy to an ideological extreme on issues of race, class, and gender. At most, there seems to be a general—incorrect—impression that while colleges have the occasional “tenured radical” who lacks real influence on campus, most professors fall well within the ideological mainstream.

But while most outsiders have neither the time nor the inclination to challenge faculty on scholarly or curricular matters, the lacrosse case was different. Here, the relevant facts were public knowledge. The event was high-profile, and the more evidence that emerged, the less likely it appeared that a crime occurred. At the least, it was clear by 1 May 2006 that at least one innocent Duke student (Reade Seligmann) had been indicted.

And yet for dozens of Duke faculty, this evidence appeared irrelevant. Eighty-eight of them rushed to judgment, signing a statement (whose production violated Duke regulations in multiple ways) affirming that something had “happened” to false accuser Crystal Mangum, and thanking protesters (“for not waiting”) who had, among other things, urged the castration of the lacrosse captains and blanketed the campus with “wanted” posters. As the case to which they attached their public reputations imploded, Group members doubled down, with most issuing a second statement promising they would never apologize for their actions. (Only three Group members ever said they were sorry for signing the statement, and two of that number subsequently retracted those apologies.) For months, the Duke administration was either in agreement with the faculty extremists or cowed by them—or some combination of both.

The lacrosse case provided a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the mindset of an elite university—and the look was a troubling one. There is no evidence of any accountability at Duke: the university has the same leadership and the same hiring patterns it had in 2006. Several members of the Group of 88 have gone on to more prestigious positions, their efforts to exploit their students’ distress causing them no problem in the contemporary academy.

Nifong

In this respect, Duke isn’t exceptional: if the lacrosse case had occurred at another elite university, something like the Group of 88 probably would have formed there, as well. (Hypothetical Groups at other schools might not have been quite as large—the effects of ex-president Keohane and ex-provost Chafe on maximizing race/class/gender hires did have some additional effect.) Nifong, on the other hand, was unusual.

Prosecutorial misconduct is a blight on the American justice system, but few prosecutors violate quite as many ethical rules in a single case as did the disgraced former DA. Of course, Durham’s particular circumstances accounted at least to some degree for the extent of Nifong’s perfidy: he had to violate ethical guidelines to create “evidence” of a “crime” that never occurred; and then he had to violate more ethical guidelines to create “evidence” to point to the “perpetrators” of this non-existent crime.

It’s worth remembering, however: lots of people seemed quite untroubled with Nifong’s actions. He did, after all, win the primary election—the day after Durham voters saw on their TV screens a video of Reade Seligmann at an ATM machine at the time Nifong claimed a rape was occurring. And he did win the general election—even after Durham voters were exposed to massive evidence of his ethical improprieties, thanks to reporting from the N&O and 60 Minutes. Moreover, Nifong almost managed to bring the case to trial. The State Bar vote to go ahead with the prosecution before the end of the case passed only by one vote, with the chair of the relevant committee casting the tie-breaking ballot. If not for the brilliant cross-examination from Jim Cooney and Brad Bannon, plus the inability of Dr. Brian Meehan to carry off the conspiracy, would the Bar have acted when it did?

Despite his apologists’ best efforts to rehabilitate his reputation, Nifong’s behavior might have had one salutary effect: he now personifies the position of rogue prosecutor. Journalists, legal commentators, and the public at large now have a reference point when they hear defense attorneys speak of the importance of due process, or caution against prosecutors violating ethical norms. And DA’s inclined to ignore ethics to advance their political careers will (hopefully, at least) recall Nifong’s fate.

Media

Excellent coverage of this case came from some quarters of the traditional media—from the 2006-2008 staff of the Duke Chronicle; from Joe Neff at the N&O; and nationally from 60 Minutes and ABC’s Law and Justice Unit. But the terrible traditional coverage—from the New York Times, the Herald-Sun, op-ed commentators such as Selena Roberts and Eugene Robinson, and other outlets in the early stages of the case—was terrible indeed.

The bad work suffered from two problems that reinforced each other. The first comes from the media’s general ideological biases. While not as left-wing as the typical elite school’s faculty, the media obviously leans left, especially on issues of race and gender; and in spring 2006, the facts offered by Nifong seemed for too many too good to be false. So rather than challenging Nifong’s presentation of the case, the Times, the H-S, and politically correct commentators and authors served as de facto stenographers for the prosecutor, uncritically passing along whatever version of events he happened to be offering at the time.

The second general problem exposed by the case was the media’s poor coverage of procedure and procedural issues. It’s no coincidence that the best reporter on this case—Neff—was comfortable with procedure, and that the worst—Duff Wilson and self-described “serious investigative journalist” William D. Cohan—appeared clueless on procedural matters.

For the media as a whole, covering procedure can be difficult—it’s often technical, and it doesn’t exactly sell newspapers. But as the lacrosse case demonstrated, explaining the role of procedure in policy and legal matters is a critical role that journalists play in society. And while there’s been some progress in this regard (consider, for instance, the Washington Post partnering in its blogs with Volokh Conspiracy or Radley Balko), as a whole, the media tends to do a poor job at illustrating procedural matters. Jim Fallows’ laments about the mainstream newspapers’ frequent failures to explain the Senate’s filibuster process is a good example of the broader problem.

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DIW was a blog of a particular time and place. If the lacrosse case had occurred a few years earlier, the blog likely never could have been launched. In the initial months, I relied heavily on primary source material posted by others (the N&O and WRAL for discovery documents; the State of North Carolina for various ethics and election items; Duke and electronic resources for academic matters). As recently as the late 1990s, this type of material often was not available online, so initially covering the case from New York or Maine (as I did, most of the time) would not have been possible—meaning that I never would have developed the local sources whose willingness to answer questions from me (and not infrequently provide me with tips) helped the blog to break stories.

If the lacrosse case occurred today, on the other hand, the blog’s reach almost certainly would have diminished; the blog’s biggest readership days (over 100,000 each day) occurred during the live-blogs of the Nifong ethics proceedings; most of that information would now be communicated via twitter, not through live-blogs, which have become passé.

It might well be—as any number of commentators have contended—that blogs, at least of this type, will be much less common in the future. (I’ll still be writing on higher-ed matters, at the Manhattan Institute’s Minding the Campus, and readers can follow me on twitter; obviously my academic work is still on my homepage.) That said, many of the strengths of a blog—namely, the sense of community from readers and commenters—aren’t easily replicable on twitter or in other forms. Moreover, the structure of the blog certainly aided me; over the course of the case, I learned a lot about criminal procedure, legal ethics, the nature of journalism, and North Carolina issues, courtesy of exchanges with readers, commenters, and other bloggers.

To DIW’s readers and commenters, my thanks.

Readership Note

Earlier today, the blog surpassed the 6,000,000 mark for visits. It currently has just under 9.1 million page views. The overwhelming percentage of that total came in 2006 and 2007 (when posts were, at least, daily), but the blog still averages around 7,500 reads per week.

I should observe that the “definitive, magisterial” account of the case lists DIW readership at 100,000—leaving author Cohan off by a factor of 60 on visits and over 90 on page views. Although this item is insignificant when compared to the book’s serious errors, Cohan has never explained why he chose to use an incorrect figure, or why he did not contact me to ascertain the correct figure before publishing.

As always, thank you for visiting the blog.

Penn State Followup

A few weeks ago, disgraced former Penn State president Graham Spanier launched something of a media blitz. His attorney held a press conference denouncing the Freeh Report (while conveniently saying that Spanier, who wasn’t present, would answer the tough questions about the report’s factual findings). Spanier did an interview with the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, who declined to press Spanier on the critical piece of evidence uncovered by Freeh—an e-mail from Spanier admitting that the decision not to report Jerry Sandusky to police might leave the university “vulnerable” in the future. A follow-up Spanier interview with ABC mostly revolved around the unconvincing argument that because he was the victim of physical abuse as a child, it was inconceivable that he wouldn’t have reported the allegations against Sandusky to authorities.

I wrote about Spanier’s unconvincing defense at Minding the Campus; and, as DIW readers know, have been interested in the similarities and differences between how Penn State responded to the Sandusky scandal and how Duke’s administration responded to the lacrosse case. Stuart and I penned a WSJ op-ed looking at how Penn State, for good or ill, authorized a comprehensive inquiry into what went wrong and why—in contrast to Duke’s decision to have two “diversity”-obsessed advocates of the status quo “investigate” and produce a “report” on the administration’s response to the lacrosse case.

It’s hard to imagine that Penn State’s (or any school’s) faculty could do anything comparably embarrassing to the Group of 88 statement (and the Group’s subsequent rationalizations and refusals to apologize). But it’s also hard to imagine what 30 former and current faculty leaders at the school could have been thinking when they produced a recent letter that exhibited a sense of epistemic closure that would rival the Group of 88 in its bunker.

After what comes across as a token expression of outrage and sadness on behalf of Sandusky’s victims, the PSU profs quickly get onto the real victims—people who work at Penn State, victims of the “current hyperbolic media environment.” (The professors couldn’t find space to identify a single example of this “hyperbolic media environment.”)

Of the Freeh Report, the letter concedes its “investigation appears to have been reasonably thorough, given that it could not subpoena testimony.” (Ironically, a document released by Spanier’s attorney criticized Freeh for relying on subpoenaed testimony from ex-assistant coach Mike McQueary, rather than defying prosecutors’ requests and interviewing McQueary himself.)

But . . . “as a document in which evidence, facts, and logical argument are marshaled to support conclusions and recommendations, the Freeh Report fails badly. On a foundation of scant evidence, the report adds layers of conjecture and supposition to create a portrait of fault, complicity, and malfeasance that could well be at odds with the truth.”

In what ways is the Freeh Report’s evidence scant? Who knows? Is the document truthful or not? Who knows? Far be it from Penn State faculty members to examine the evidence presented in the report and demonstrate items in the report that are factually inaccurate.

Such work, it seems , isn’t necessary—because “as scientists and scholars, we can say with conviction that the Freeh Report fails on its own merits as the indictment of the University that some [who?] have taken it to be. Evidence that would compel such an indictment is simply not there.” The evidence for this sweeping assertion? The “scientists and scholars” present none. Perhaps they ran out of ink.

The “scientists and scholars” seem particularly perturbed with the Freeh Report’s (and the NCAA’s) remarks about Penn State culture. “Not only are these assertions about the Penn State culture unproven,” they thunder, “but we declare them to be false.”

The evidence for this sweeping assertion? Their own personal experience. “As faculty members with a cumulative tenure at Penn State in the hundreds of years, and as former Faculty Senate chairs with intimate knowledge of the University stretching back for decades, these assertions do not describe the culture with which we are so very familiar. None of us has ever been pressured or even asked to change a grade for an athlete, nor have we heard of any cases where that has occurred . . . Some of us have privately witnessed swift and unyielding administrative actions against small transgressions, actions taken expressly to preserve academic and institutional integrity.”

The “scientists and scholars” apparently didn’t notice the interference by the former football coach in the disciplinary process—in instances far more significant than “small transgressions”—that were revealed in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Do the professors “declare” those “to be false,” as well?

The professors’ letter is an embarrassment to their institution. As “scientists and scholars,” they should know better.

Bitter-Enders

[Update, Sunday, 6.32pm: After an overwhelming number of trustees expressed support for the Penn State president, renegade Trustee McCombie, at a meeting of the Penn State board, announced that he will no longer pursue his appeal of the consent degree. Neither he nor the other most outspoken renegade trustee, Anthony Lubrano, revealed any of the factual errors that they claim exist in the Freeh Report.]

[Update, Wednesday, 1.45pm: Two additional items for the bitter-ender file. ESPN reports that a handful of former Penn State football players will appeal the sanctions, in part on grounds (you guessed it!) that elements of the Freeh Report were “clearly erroneous.” The letter offers no guidance on how, or in what manner, the findings were “clearly erroneous.”

In addition to his communication with the NCAA, renegade trustee McCombie, meanwhile, has also penned a letter to his fellow trustees, asking them (“for the glory,” as he ended his missive) to join his anti-accountability crusade. “I do not do this,” wrote he, “seeking a predetermined result nor do I claim to know what the final answers will be.”

That would be the same Trustee McCombie who told the NCAA that he did know what the final answers would be--namely, that the Freeh Report “contains findings and conclusions that are contrary to the evidence and/or unsupported by credible evidence.” Whether his fellow trustees will respond to a colleague who plays so fast and loose with the truth remains to be seen.]

In our WSJ op-ed, Stuart and I noted that—thanks largely to the Freeh Report—Penn State had responded to administrative failure far more effectively than had Duke handled its response to the lacrosse case. Yet, we argued, a potential problem remained, in which “Penn State may be doomed to follow Duke's unfortunate example. Duke's appeasing of its faculty extremists symbolized its failed response to the lacrosse case. Penn State, similarly, has shown little willingness to deal with its bitter-enders—those among the campus community who prefer to hide their eyes and ears from the evidence and cling to the belief that the late Coach Joe Paterno was somehow mistreated. Such views exist even among the board of trustees, two of whose recently elected members, Anthony Lubrano and Ryan McCombie, campaigned on a platform demanding that the board apologize to the Paterno family.”

Events of recent days confirmed our pessimism. First, the Paterno family announced a desire to appeal the various NCAA sanctions against Penn State. (No member of the Paterno family is currently employed by Penn State, and the university continues to honor the terms of the sweetheart 2011 contract negotiated between the late football coach and ousted Penn State president Graham Spanier.) Beyond expressing rage at the condemnation of a “great educator, philanthropist and coach,” the family targeted the Freeh Report:

As will become evident in a thorough and impartial review, the NCAA acted hastily and without any regard for due process. Furthermore, the NCAA and Penn State’s Board Chair and President entirely ignored the fact that the Freeh Report, on which these extraordinary penalties are based, is deeply flawed because it is incomplete [in unidentified ways], rife with [unidentified, it seems] unsupported opinions and unquestionably [at least, it seems, according to the Paternos] one-sided.  [emphasis added]

The NCAA immediately rejected the appeal on grounds that a consent decree can’t be appealed. And even if such an agreement could be appealed, it hardly seems likely that a family of someone who no longer works for Penn State would have grounds for action.

Then, yesterday, ESPN reported that a renegade group of trustees, headed by the apology-demanding Ryan McCombie, had informed the NCAA that they intended to appeal the sanctions. The McCombie group complains that Penn State president Rodney Erickson kept them in the dark about his negotiations with the NCAA, and lacked authority to enter into an agreement with the NCAA—which, if true, would be grounds for the board to dismiss Erickson.

But after raising what could very well be a legitimate governance issue, the renegade trustees’ letter veered into the absurd. Here’s an excerpt:

The NCAA decree is fundamentally unfair in that the Freeh Report, on which it is predicated, contains findings and conclusions that are contrary to the evidence and/or unsupported by credible evidence [in ways that, it seems, must remain unidentified]. The Report failed to consider evidence or afford certain [unidentified, it seems] individuals an opportunity to be heard, failed to acknowledge the absence of [unidentified, it seems] important and material evidence, and reached [unidentified, it seems] conclusions based on assumption, conjecture, and misplaced characterizations that are contrary to the [unidentified, it seems] available facts and evidence.

ESPN added that if—as is expected—the NCAA rules either the consent decree can’t be appealed or that a renegade band of trustees lacks standing to appeal, the McCombie group will file a federal lawsuit.

The two documents’ descriptions of the Freeh Report were nothing short of wishful thinking. The Paternos’ letter asserted that the report is—not “likely is,” not “could be,” but “is”—incomplete and “rife with unsupported opinions.” Yet, in what could only be deemed a highly peculiar public relations strategy, the letter (just like all of the family’s other public statements about the Freeh Report) neglected to pass along even one of these “unsupported opinions” of which the Freeh Report supposedly is “rife.” Why, do you suppose, that is?

Likewise with the McCombie letter, which maintained that the report contained findings and conclusions that are—not “probably are,” not “could be,” but “are”—“contrary to the evidence and/or unsupported by credible evidence.” Yet the renegade trustees’ letter couldn’t find space to identify even one conclusion of the Freeh Report that was “contrary to the evidence,” or even one finding that was “unsupported by credible evidence.” Why, do you suppose, that is?

We’ve seen, of course, this type of thinking in the Duke case, with the bitter-enders among the Group of 88 and their supporters. The Group statement, apologist Charlie Piot claimed, wasn’t about the lacrosse case at all—even though the e-mail soliciting signatures described the ad as “about the lacrosse team incident.” Or, Group member William Chafe wildly asserted, “Bloggers who have targeted the ‘Group of 88’” were guilty of “sending us e-mails and making phone calls wishing our deaths and calling us ‘Jew b-’ and ‘n-b-’.” Yet when pressed, Chafe couldn’t identify which of the dozen or so “bloggers critical of the Group of 88” had engaged in such behavior.

Like the Paterno family and the renegade trustees on the Freeh Report, for bitter-enders like Chafe and Piot, the “facts” simply had to fit their preconceived notions.

As demonstrated most recently in the promotion of Paula McClain, Duke effectively surrendered to the Group of 88. Will Penn State likewise be drawn low by its bitter-enders?

Seligmann Talk

For DIW readers in Atlanta, Reade Seligmann will be giving a talk tomorrow about the case. Details here.

Catalino Hat Trick Propels Maryland

Maryland upset Duke, 9-4, in this evening's national semi-final; the list of the Terps' top stars included senior Grant Catalino, who scored three goals, including goal that broke the game open in the third quarter, when Maryland led 5-3.

The last name should be somewhat familiar to those who followed the lacrosse case closely. Grant is the younger brother of Mike Catalino--a freshman on the 2006 Duke team who revealed his enormously high-quality character after Crystal Mangum voiced her false accusations. In fall 2006, Mike played a leadership role in trying to register Duke students to vote (despite the opposition of the Duke administration), and then gave considerable time to the Recall Nifong-Vote Cheek effort. In short, he did exactly what professors (outside of the Group of 88, of course) would have wanted from the unindicted lacrosse players--work for positive change within the system.

Congratulations to the Catalino family, which (with Duke's win last year) now has the potential to have sons on back-to-back national championship squads.

Updates

In the latest edition of Days of Precious’ Lives, Crystal Mangum’s estranged ex-boyfriend walked into the DA’s office and claimed that he—not the false accuser—had set clothes on fire the nigh police were summoned to their residence. His excuse for his turnabout? “I wasn't on my medication . . . I acted out on the voices I was hearing.”

Whether the ex-boyfriend was hearing voices earlier this year or is hearing voices now, this was quite an environment into which Mangum inserted her children.

Judge Marcia Morey has received a promotion, to chief district judge of Durham County. The move doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the county’s commitment to justice, since this is the same Judge Morey who testified on Mike Nifong’s behalf in the disgraced ex-prosecutor’s criminal contempt trial. On the stand, Judge Morey offered a novel argument. To quote the N&O:

An unusual moment came before Nifong's testimony, when a judge testified that she expected lawyers to be more honest during trial than during pretrial hearings.

A prosecutor asked the judge, Marcia Morey, whether a lawyer would be following his duty to be candid if he assured a judge that a report was complete when the lawyer knew it to be incomplete.

It depended on whether the case had reached trial, Morey said.

“I do think it makes a difference,” Morey said. “Are you are at a trial stage, are you at a pretrial conference.”

Finally, former U.S. Attorney Anna Mills Wagoner has resigned her post to run for a judgeship. She should be pressed on why she refused to conduct a criminal investigation of Nifong and the DPD; and whether she would pursue a policy of cronyism on the bench.

Hat tips: M.L.

Twitter

For those interested: while DIW posts are now rare, as the case lurches forward in the civil system, all of my posts (here, at Minding the Campus, and at Cliopatria) can be accessed through my twitter feed.

Today's New York Post

Has an excellent article on Collin Finnerty, now in his final season at Loyola. Read it here.

Updates

A few updates.

Crystal Mangum’s bail, for charges of attempted murder, arson, and child endangerment, was reduced to $250,000. As one of the most astute observers of the case commented to me privately, a notable aspect of this affair is that, by filing severe charges against her, the Durham Police Department is no longer willing to afford Mangum the special treatment she so consistently received in the lacrosse case.

Mangum’s patron and “co-author,” Vincent Clark, appears to have noticed this as well: he sniffed to WRAL that “we hope that the courts will adjudicate this case with fairness and without bias.” (In the mind of Clark, it looks as if Nifong's decision to violate rules on behalf of Mangum constitutes the system acting fairly.) Clark also wildly suggested that Mangum had suffered from unidentified “past injustices.”

In Newsweek on-line, Susannah Meadows, who covered the case extensively, correctly observes, “I am sorry to say that I wasn't at all surprised by the most recent events.” Mangum, of course, has a long history of mental illness. And, as Meadows observes, “There were so many different versions of events that her statements took on an air of absurdity. She came off as more pathetic than conniving” (quite unlike, for instance, Nifong).

Meadows also contends that “though the case ended, the sadness that the scandal incidentally exposed remains unresolved. Remember that racial slur? When the two black strippers left the lacrosse party in a huff, a white freshman on the lacrosse team yelled out to them, ‘Thank your grandpa for my nice cotton shirt!; Case or no case, the epithet still hangs in the air.”

Indeed it does. So, too, does the Group of 88’s statement. But unlike the student who uttered the racial epithet, the Group of 88 has, if anything, only tightened its vise over Duke’s humanities and (some) social sciences departments in the wake of the affair.

Two instances of false or dismissed rape allegations. The New York Post brings the story of a woman sent to prison for lying about a rape—a lie that led to an innocent man being sentenced to 20 years in jail. It’s inconceivable to me that Mangum could have been convicted of such an offense—she could have claimed mental illness, or she could have suggested that, as the DPD and the county’s “minister of justice” believed her, the story she told was credible. But the sentence is a reminder of just how unusual it is for false accusers—in a crime where the word of a false accuser can be enough to merit a decades-long sentence—to be prosecuted for their lies.

On another front, the Sacred Heart lacrosse case, which prompted several publications to write, as fact, that the “victim” was a “girl”? It turns out that, legally, there was no “victim” at all. All charges have been dropped.

Finally, I’ve little doubt that only the truest of true believers, scattered hacks who want to rehabilitate Mike Nifong, and those with high tolerance for what Dave Evans once termed “fantastic lies” monitor the “justice4nifong” site. I count myself in the latter category.

That said, the site remains the closest thing we have to the unvarnished thinking of Nifong. The committee members that nominally supervise the site consist of Nifong’s closest followers, and have admitted that they’re in contact with Nifong himself.

With that in mind, it’s been interesting to see a sudden, even abrupt, change in the “Nifong party line” over the last couple of weeks. The previous party line amounted to: Mike Nifong’s an ethical guy, a rape probably occurred, the lacrosse players are awful racists, and the State Bar mistreated him. These beliefs still animate the site. But nonetheless, sometime between a post on February 7, 2010 and February 16, 2010, the party line shifted.

The site escalated its personal attacks on the State Bar prosecutors. It magnified its claim that Nifong didn’t benefit from the case politically. More intriguingly, it suddenly started homing in on Rae Evans, to an extent far greater than previously. And, again, to a much greater extent than before, it suddenly started highlighting an alleged plot between CBS News(!) and the special prosecutors/AG’s office.

I’m not aware of anything that occurred in the case between February 7, 2010 and February 16, 2010 to cause Nifong and his acolytes to suddenly focus on demonizing Rae Evans and CBS News, or to suddenly challenge, in minute detail, the DHC’s conclusion that political concerns motivated Nifong.

The new party line, alas, is no more convincing than the old party line was, and would persuade only those in Nifong’s closest circle and the hacks who accept Nifong’s rationalizations as credible.

Mangum Arrested (Updated)

The N&O, WRAL, and ABC-11 have reported that false accuser Crystal Mangum was arrested early this morning. She has been charged with a series of crimes, including attempted first-degree murder, five counts of arson, and three counts of child endangerment. (The Herald-Sun, on the other hand, suggests she was not charged with attempted murder.) In an interview with ABC News, Mike Nifong "initially said he doubted press reports about Mangum's arrest, saying he found news reports 'to be of questionable value.'"

This case will work its way through the system, and it is premature to suggest guilt or innocence at this stage. Perhaps Mangum’s new boyfriend (whom she allegedly assaulted and attempted to kill) and one of her children (who apparently called 911) were lying about what occurred; perhaps the police report was flawed. And as the police investigation is continuing, perhaps new information will come to light about the incident.

That said, a few items about the arrest that have some relevance to the lacrosse case:

1) At this point, only a handful of people—chiefly the cranks at the “justice4nifong” website and the hacks who take seriously the site’s rantings—cling to the fiction that Mike Nifong was basically an ethical guy, a prosecutor who pursued the lacrosse case in good faith and had probable cause to do so. For this handful of true-believers and their followers, whitewashing Mangum’s character is critical—the image of her is generally of an “honors student” and “working mom” who had no incentive to lie. Such an approach, of course, requires ignoring Mangum’s 2002 arrest, her habit of leveling major, unsubstantiated accusations against people even before the case, and the fact that she showed up to her meeting with the special prosecutors under the influence of various prescription drugs. Despite that background, it’s going to be hard for even the truest of true believers to continue to hail Mangum’s good character if anything like the incident as reported is true.

2) Given that Mangum was charged with three counts of child endangerment, this incident should prompt some questions for North Carolina’s Department of Child Protective Services. Before the lacrosse case broke, it’s easy to understand how someone like Mangum (who at that point had two children) could have slipped through the cracks. But the case brought to light some disturbing patterns of conduct—Mangum’s 2002 arrest; her seemingly very serious mental health problems; her showing up for her special prosecutor’s interview under the influence of various drugs; and perhaps most troublingly her spring 2006 behavior before the lacrosse party, as attested by her closest associates (Yolanda Haynes, Jarriel Johnson, “Fats” Thomas),which included her using her “drivers” to look after her children and her frequently being away from home for the entire evening servicing her clients.

Did CPS look into the condition of Mangum’s children before she was formally charged with child endangerment? If so, what was the result of their investigation?

3) As of this writing (12.24pm), the New York Times (which saw fit to run dozens of articles and columns on the lacrosse case) hasn’t mentioned the arrest. The arrest puts the Times in a bind: even after the Attorney General declared her a false accuser, the Times refused to identify Mangum, apparently on the grounds that publicly identifying someone who made a false accusation of rape would deter real victims from coming forward. No Times reporter has ever used Mangum’s name in the newspaper. (One subsequent article from the AP that appeared in a Times brief did do so.) So will the Times cover the arrest, or continue to shield Mangum’s identity from its readers?

[At 5.15pm, the Times provided its answer: it picked up the AP wire story [AP has used Mangum's name since the innocence declaration] rather than have one its own reporters cover the story.]

4) Wendy Murphy might finally get her wish. In a wild column, the extremist commentator suggested that the unreleased section of the discovery file might show how the “seasoned prosecutor” Nifong had a case all along. Of course, the only unreleased section of the file was the roughly 1000 pages of Mangum’s mental health records, which Nifong possessed throughout the case and which Judge Smith gave to the defense, under seal, late in the case. (Murphy’s suggestion that this material would show Nifong’s good faith or that perhaps he had a case is, of course, preposterous—this material almost certainly would show that Mangum was an even more unreliable accuser than the public came to realize.)

If Mangum’s current case manages to make it to trial, an obvious line of defense would be mental impairment—which means that Mangum’s mental health history could come into evidence.

News & Notes

Few journalists performed as poorly in the lacrosse case as Samiha Khanna. Virtually every statement in her N&O interview with false accuser Crystal Mangum turned out to be wrong. Khanna seemed not to have even bothered to do a basic reporting task—checking her interviewee’s name in the N&O database—which would have uncovered not only Mangum’s criminal conviction but would have proved that Mangum had lied to Khanna in claiming that she was a newcomer to the world of exotic dancing.

Perhaps most problematically, Khanna conceded that she was approaching the case through a far-left ideological prism: "I think Tim Tyson taught readers Sunday about a history not many were aware had occurred. Durham is a place of many new residents, people who may not have the institutional knowledge of the university's history in the community. We are trying to explore these notions as we follow up on the story in the coming weeks. In response to your specific question about Mr. Tyson’s piece—I haven’t seen an equivalent piece in other publications. Many people have spoken out about a history of sex crimes on college campuses, but not issues of race and gender on the Duke campus specifically. These are keys to thorough follow-up stories that we are working to document." [emphases added] Liestoppers correctly termed Khanna’s reporting on the case “irresponsible and willfully misleading.”

Khanna was downsized from the N&O in 2008 and spent nearly a year outside the journalism industry (as a “public relations specialist”). That’s no surprise: with the financial difficulties that journalism is currently experiencing, good reporters are having trouble getting jobs—to say nothing of figures such as Khanna.

Incredibly, however, she’s back working as a reporter—though at an entity where the sort of ideological bias she demonstrated in the lacrosse case is a job requirement. Khanna is now a beat reporter for The Independent, which formed a critical element of the Nifong base of “true believers.” Khanna’s brand of “journalism” is exactly what people expect from the Indy.

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Jesse Jackson managed to insert himself back into case-related news last week. In an interview with the Greensboro newspaper, Jackson gave his take on the case:

“The good news is those boys’ parents paid to get the proper legal representation and get them vindicated. So often, young black youth and youth who are poor, don’t have legal protection. That’s why you have 2.3 million Americans in prison.”

That’s a very different interpretation than Jackson originally offered. First, of course, Jackson stated that his organization’s donors would pay Mangum’s college tuition, even if (as ultimately occurred) it was proved that Mangum had lied. Second, he published a column riddled with false assertions: that “this was the first time [Crystal Mangum] had been hired to dance for a party”; that “the one African American on the team wasn’t there”; that “we know that the two women were abused”; that “the Duke players are maintaining a code of silence”; that “it shouldn’t take the brutalizing of a mother of two” to “lead colleges across the country to hold searching discussions about racial and sexual stereotypes, exposing the myths that entrap so many.”

And a year after writing those words, the Rev. Jackson maintained, “I didn’t make a mistake.”

Of course he didn’t. And now he’s on the scene to preach “the good news.”

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A couple of follow-up items from the comment thread regarding other experiences with the Duke fundraising arm:

I’ve had a similar experience to that of “ES Class of 1990.” For 3 years now I’ve responded to solicitations from Duke by saying that the funds I would otherwise give are “on hold” until the civil suits are resolved, because I believe the university should not be spending donor money on legal fees supporting the defense of various administrators who were not acting in the best interest of the institution and who made serious (and entirely avoidable) mistakes in judgment. This year, the student who placed the call had “talking points” about how the annual fund could not be spent on legal fees. (As if the annual fund couldn’t be spent on other things that could then free up funds from other accounts to pay legal fees!) In any event, Duke annual giving is prepared to encounter resistance from alumni who are questioning whether the institution is deserving of their largess given the current state of leadership.

Another:

The telephone exchanges I’ve had with Duke students dialing for dollars, once or twice annually, have been nearly identical to the one reported by ES Class of 1990.

Generally, the talking points for cheerful, optimistic, true blue Dukies seem to be along the line: The lacrosse affair was a long time ago, it was an unfortunate isolated incident not indicative of what’s great about our wonderful university, President Brodhead made an eloquent apology (have you seen the video?), and all that’s behind us now.

I usually ask about the status of the ongoing lawsuits, and why have several members of the Group of 88 professors been rewarded with positions of leadership and increased responsibility.

That’s where the conversations abruptly end.

Updates, Including Bob Steel's Latest

If I were looking for the identity of someone least likely to be named trustee for a major hospital, former Duke BOT chairman Bob Steel would be high on the list. Leaving aside Steel's ill-fated performance at Wachovia, Duke under Steel's leadership paid out millions of dollars in settlements and legal fees from lawsuits stimulated, in large part, by the dubious conduct at Duke University Hospital.

And yet, as Dr. Roy Poses reports at the fine blog Health Care Renewal, the Hospital for Special Surgery has just appointed none other than . . . Bob Steel . . . as its newest trustee.

Poses concludes, correctly if sadly, "Mr Steel's unlikely career trajectory shows how once someone becomes a member of the superclass, the new power elite that spans business, government, and academics, that person is likely to continue to wield power no matter how poor his or her track-record, to the detriment of nearly everyone else."

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Over the past few years, we all have learned just how intensely some in the higher education community believe—indeed, given their ideology, have to believe—that sexual assault is widespread on today’s college campuses.

Sometimes, these figures follow the approach of the “clarifying” faculty in the lacrosse case, simply issuing public statements declaring that sexual assault is “prevalent” on the Duke campus even though the university’s own figures indicated that 0.1 percent of Duke females had been victims of sexual assault. (And, of course, the “clarifying” faculty did everything they could to downplay the rape of someone like former Duke student Katie Rouse, since that attack didn’t fit into their worldview.)

At other times, these figures follow the approach of the Duke women’s center, and champion new judicial procedures that will tilt the judicial playing field blatantly in the accuser’s favor, apparently from a belief that as women don’t lie about being raped, those women who claim to have been raped should be ensured of a conviction.

And then there’s the case of Jennifer Beeman, the former director of the Campus Violence Prevention Program at University of California-Davis. The number of rapes that have occurred at Davis didn’t fit Beeman’s ideological preconceptions. So in 2005, 2006, and 2007, she simply inflated the figures. And the Sacramento Bee discovered that Beeman was doing it for some time—and used her made-up figures as the basis for which to apply for federal grants.

Incredibly, when Beeman’s 2005-7 inflated figures were first brought to the University’s attention, Davis’ response was to suggest that her made-up figures were proof of her having created a “nationally recognized … model program for its outreach efforts and services for survivors.”

Only in academia.

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The Durham Police Department is again under fire, and, as in the lacrosse case, again seems to believe that its own rules and regulations do not apply to its officers.

The North Carolina SBI is investigating a scandal regarding the Police Department billing the city for excessive overtime.

Will the usual suspects blame the inquiry on wealthy outsiders?

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I supported AG Roy Cooper’s decision not to prosecute false accuser Crystal Mangum, largely because there’s no way he could have gotten a conviction. Magnum could have claimed that she was psychologically unable to tell the truth (and had 1000 pages of files to back her up); or she could have claimed that as the city’s police force and county’s “minister of justice” believed her, that should qualify as reasonable doubt to beat charges of her filing a false police report.

It’s much harder, on the other hand, to support the decision of Nassau County DA Kathleen Rice not to prosecute the Hofstra case false accuser, Danmell Ndonye.

In this respect, I agree completely with Newsday’s editorial board, which noted, “Rice justifies her decision not to prosecute because it would have a ‘chilling effect,’ making actual victims fearful to come forward. That concern is misplaced. Historically, police and prosecutors have been hostile to women who made rape charges, but the consensus now in law enforcement is that these cases should be fully and aggressively prosecuted. For legitimate claims to be taken seriously, however, society must also know that phony ones will be punished. That’s what will make the voice of every true victim even stronger. Instead, Rice’s resolution risks creating the perception that there isn't much downside to making up a story that could have sent someone to jail for 25 years.”

Hat tips: M.S., D.P.

Updates

I’ll have a more substantive post up Wednesday; for today, however, a few loose ends:

[Update, 12.29pm Tuesday: An excellent post, using material gleaned from the recent civil case filings, from sceptical at Liestoppers regarding the pernicious role in the case played by former SANE nurse-in-training Tara Levicy. The post is well worth reading in its entirety.]

1.) For those interested, I have an article at Minding the Campus looking at the transformation of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) from an organization committed to upholding academic freedom into a group whose leadership is obsessed with protecting the majority viewpoint in the contemporary academy.

2.) As has been widely noted, an appeals court ruled that Mike Pressler’s suit against Duke could go forward, though the ruling was on procedural grounds and doesn’t indicate much one way or the other regarding the substance of the case.

3.) The lacrosse case helped to illustrate the unintended, and largely negative, consequences on college campuses of denying people who can vote and serve in the military the right to consume alcohol. The problem, of course, isn’t just as Duke—as this depressing tale from Haverford reveals.

4.) A chilling article from the New Yorker, on how Texas almost certainly put to death an innocent man.

Six* Items

[update, 4.33pm, two additional items:

1.) Courtesy of Harvey Silverglate, this depressing column from Rodney Balko, on the lingering effects of prosecutorial misconduct in the 1980s witch-hunt day care/"child molestation" trials (where Wendy Murphy got her start as a prosecutor!).

The book that had the most impact on my analysis of the lacrosse case was Dorothy Rabinowitz's No Crueler Tyrannies. As in the hoaxes that Rabinowitz exposed, the lacrosse case featured the presumption of guilt, the lack of evidence was simply presumed to mean the defendants must be guilty, and the purpose of the trial became (to paraphrase Pres. Brodhead) giving the defendants their one chance to "be proved innocent."

2.) A mindboggling dissent filed by Justice Scalia this week, in a death penalty case:

This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged ‘actual innocence’ is constitutionally cognizable.

The statement was all the more troubling coming from Scalia, who has shown occasional libertarian instincts on civil liberties issues.]

Forbes is the latest national publication to produce a college ranking list, and I doubt that this item will make Duke alumni mailings. Duke is ranked 104^th, behind Hendrix College (Arkansas), Berea College (Kentucky), St. Mary’s College (California) and conservative favorite Hillsdale College in Michigan.

The lead reader comment: “Unfortunately, though I greatly valued my Duke experience, I would not recommend Duke now to any high school senior. The takeover of the faculty by hateful race/class/gender extremists, as personified by the Group of 88, has essentially destroyed the university.”

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Ranked below Duke, however, is Cornell University.* This semester, graduate students in Cornell’s African-American Studies Department get to work with a new director of graduate studies—Group of 88 extremist Grant Farred. Farred is best remembered as the 88’er who denounced Duke students as racist for registering to vote in Durham; and who published a book with the preposterous thesis that Houston Rockets center Yao Ming was “the most profound threat to American empire.”

Imagine how fairly Director of Graduate Studies Farred would deal with a student whose dissertation, say, cast a skeptical eye toward the use of racial preferences in education or in the workplace.

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Last week, I noted that if the Bruce Lisker case had occurred in North Carolina (and if Lisker were African-American), the disgraced ex-DA Mike Nifong’s defenders would seize upon it to claim prosecutorial misconduct. In the minds of Nifong defenders, the conviction of people who actually were innocent (at least if they are African-American) is in and of itself evidence of prosecutorial misconduct. Of course, the state’s ethics requirements make no such holding.

As if to prove the point, the Nifong publicity blog “justice4nifong” is up with a post claiming that Wake County prosecutor Tom Ford committed “actions . . . far more egregious than what former Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong was accused of doing in the Duke Lacrosse case.” Those “actions,” from the post, appear to be Ford attempting to negotiate a plea bargain with one of the defendants. No one appears to have claimed that Ford withheld exculpatory evidence; or ordered the police to violate their own procedures; or made dozens of ethically improper public statements; or lied to a judge.

It would, I suppose, be too much to expect defenders of the disgraced Nifong to have any understanding of ethical standards.

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[Updated, 3.57pm]: I have steered clear from the Lombard case. But the contrast between the campus reactions to it and to the lacrosse case is striking, and the subject of a sensational letter in today's Chronicle from two members of the Class of 2008, Hamish Russell and Drew Braucht:

In the wake of Frank Lombard's arrest on child sex charges, it is interesting to evaluate the response of Duke's administration and faculty and the city of Durham. What if President Brodhead, the Trustees, the faculty and the city reacted in the same impetuous way they did the last time a member of the Duke community was accused of such a heinous crime?

Imagine it now: Students take out full page ads condemning the faculty and administrators as a whole; the Trustees suspend all Duke officials from normal work; protests are staged outside of the Allen Building to chant obscenities and taunt any individual attempting to enter; people that previously had no interaction with the administration are suddenly thrust into positions to analyze the "administration subculture on child sex and how it proliferates in the general Duke population."

Based on the precedent set in Spring 2006, in which the lacrosse team and entire student body were systematically maligned, this seems like the rational way to handle controversy and crisis on the Duke campus. And given that no one has admitted any wrongdoing in the wake since (aside from President Brodhead's "heartfelt" address at an obscure Fall 2007 law school event), one is led to assume that no lessons were learned from that ordeal.

In no way do we condone the charges brought before Frank Lombard, and the evidence seems quite condemning. However, this isolated event has again brought to light the hypocrisy and lack of culpability still embedded in the Duke lacrosse scandal, a reality that continues to negatively affect the fabric of the Duke community.

*--modified

Hat tip: J.H., O.S.

More from the Comments Thread

At View-from-Wilimington, Chris Halkides summarizes what I consider unfortunate recent behavior by the blogger John in Carolina--whose work on the lacrosse case I had admired (with the exception of what seems to me his unfair unwillingness to consider the N&O's work after early April 2006 in evaluating the N&O's overall performance in the case).

A couple of factual points on the issues raised in the linked post. I have banned two commenters over the course of the blog--the commenter "polanski," who repeatedly commented under other people's names; and a (true-believer) commenter who repeatedly offered factually inaccurate statements. In both cases, I announced the bans in comment threads. No other commenters have ever been banned at DIW. I should note that I would have gladly shared this information with the blogger John in Carolina had he ever e-mailed me to ask me about it. He never did, and never has, for reasons that remain unclear to me.

Over the course of the blog, I have closed down around two dozen comment threads, when it seemed to me the comments had gotten so far off the topic of the original post that the thread was no longer productive. It hadn't occurred to me when I did so that anyone could interpret my closing down a comment thread as banning the commenters in that thread, but I would like to say that this was never my intention.

Second, a commenter offered the following item in an earlier thread: "For example. one might not expect on a Blog that champions free thinking and the free exchange of ideas...to have one's post held for hours while others are cleared." It is not now, nor has it ever been, my practice to hold comments while clearing others. I clear all comments in the queue when I sign into the blog. That depends, of course, how frequently I sign in--sometimes, it might be 20 minutes, sometimes it might be a lot longer. I apologize to any commenter who thought that my non-timely clearing of his or her comment indicated that I was holding the comment "hours while others are cleared."

I'd like to say that I will do better on that score in the future, but admit that I probably won't: this is a one-person blog; I moderate the comments when I can; and there are (rare) occasions when the comments might go 24 hours without moderation. Such delay (which will be more frequent over the next two weeks, when I will be in Israel for an American Studies Seminar) should be interpreted solely as tardiness on my part, and has nothing to do with how I view the merits of the individual comment.

(Yet Another) Comment re Comments Policy

I continue to be amazed at how, despite my having written more than 1300 posts totaling more than 1.3 million words on the case, a few readers attempt to discern my attitudes not by examining any of those 1.3 million words but instead by ruminating over comments I have or have not cleared--despite the unequivocal wording of the blog's stated comments policy: "My clearing a comment implies neither that I agree nor that I disagree with the comment. My opinion is expressed in my words and my words only."

We saw an example of this pattern a few weeks ago when the blogger who posts under the pseudonym "John in Carolina" slimed me by claiming that I had "banned" a commenter. (To my knowledge, he never retracted the false allegation.) And another example came in this morning, when a reader forwarded me a comment thread from the N&O featuring two pseudonymous commenters (two figures who had spent much of the criminal case functioning as Nifong apologists while always expressing faux outrage as to how anyone could ever claim they were suggesting a rape occurred) speculating as to my motives for clearing a comment.

I write this blog with a presumption that readers have college-level comprehension skills. It saddens me, therefore, that the two pseudonymous commenters from the N&O blog apparently lack such skills, and were unable to understand the comments policy. For them, let me try to summarize the comments policy at an elementary-school comprehension level:

• Posts = KC's Thoughts
• Comments by KC = KC's Thoughts
• Comments by Anyone Else ≠ KC's Thoughts

For others, I will, from here on out, include a reference to the comments policy at the end of each and every post.

Three Updates

[A fourth update, Wed., 12.17pm: Selena Roberts continues her National Mendacity Tour with a stop at Deadspin. She suggests, with her typical disregard for any evidence, that Jason Whitlock's criticism of her is caused by "homophobia."

Roberts states that she is a lesbian in the interview, although I can recall no mention by her of her sexual orientation in her Times column. It's not clear how she would characterize my opposition, then: perhaps I'm head of the Homophobes for Gay Marriage Coalition? Or is she suggesting that lesbian sportswriters should have a special license to rush to judgment, write error-prone columns, and then refuse to issue corrections or apologies?

And here's Roberts playing the victim card:

I also ask Roberts about the voluminous criticism she continues to get from Duke lacrosse supporters. She argues it's her job as a columnist to take hard stances, and she accepts any criticism she gets in return. She also says she wasn't the only one to criticize the Duke program right from the outset (she's right), but that people have made her the face of the enemy.

Well, not exactly. First of all, as one Deadspin commenter notes, "'She argues it's her job as a columnist to take hard stances, and she accepts any criticism she gets in return.' I must have missed her retraction and subsequent apology somewhere." I must have, as well. As someone who has followed this case very closely, not only has Roberts refused to correct the factual errors in her March 31, 2006 column, she has subsequently lied (a word I do not use lightly) about its contents.

Second, I suspect that if Duff Wilson, or Andrew Cohen, or Sal Ruibal, or Samiha Khanna wrote a book relying almost exclusively on anonymous sources commenters would call into question their credibility based on their error-prone reporting on the lacrosse case.

Third, I agree with Roberts that it's a columnist's job to "take hard stances." But it's also a columnist's job to be factually accurate.]

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1.) For those who missed it, the Duke men's lacrosse team will be heading back to this year's Final Four, after defeating UNC in the quarterfinals. This year's team is the last one in which several key members were at Duke at the time the case began; the list of stars includes Brad Ross, whose ability to show that he never was even in Durham the night of the party played such a key role in demonstrating Crystal Mangum's lying ways.

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2.) In the category of truth is stranger than fiction (at least in Durham, North Carolina): Durham District Court judge Craig Brown--an ethically challenged figure even in the land of the ethically challenged--is penning a book.

Brown is including a chapter on none other than disgraded ex-DA Mike Nifong. His thesis: “The media it seems to me missed the good points. He had quite a lengthy career in Durham County prior to being appointed district attorney.” Sure, suggests a sitting judge, Nifong might have violated myriad ethics rules, and withheld evidence, and lied to a judge, and tried to send three demonstrably innocent people to jail for thirty years to advance his political career. But the media deserves fault for focusing on this behavior and at the expense of the many “good points” from Nifong's time handling the mean streets of Durham Traffic Court.

Brown further told WGME that people had overlooked Nifong's achievements. I think not: those who followed the case have looked long and hard at Nifong's achievements in securing indictments without any evidence, and employing such effective demagoguery that he used an evidence-free case to capture primary and general election victories.

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3.) Nifong was, perhaps the only person alive who got the case more wrong than Group of 88 stalwart Houston Baker. The then-Duke professor penned a public, racist screed days into the case; asserted that Crystal Mangum had been harmed for life; wildly suggested, in writing, that previous lacrosse players had committed previous rapes; and called Patricia Dowd the mother of a "farm animal." Baker is an embarrassment to my profession, a race-baiter who serves as the modern-day equivalent to the white Ole Miss professors who defended segregation in the 1960s.

The Vanderbilt "distinguished professor" was in the news yesterday, lecturing "black intellectuals" for not listening to . . . him. Their refusal to reduce everything to race and racism (which, of course, has a particular appeal to the intellectually lazy, since it provides a custom-made response to every issue) constitutes a "betrayal" of the "race."

The June 2007 settlement was in the best interest of both the falsely accused players and of Duke. But there would have been an element of justice in seeing, had the lawsuit gone forward, Houston Baker being deposed by some of the best lawyers in the country, going line by line through his myriad vile statements about the students whose tuition dollars helped pay his salary.

Old "Friends"

A variety of figures whose performance in the lacrosse case drew widespread condemnation surfaced in the news over the past week—with scant, if any, suggestions that they had learned any lessons from their misbehavior.

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In a race to the bottom for lack of integrity, it’s hard to choose between Selena Roberts and Alex Rodriguez. Now working for Sports Illustrated, Roberts broke the story that Rodriguez had tested positive for steroids in 2003. In an interview about her story with the MLB Network’s Bob Costas, Roberts affirmed that her obligation as a journalist was to “find the truth.” She expanded on this in an interview with ESPN Radio, where, according to Harry Stein, she opined, “What we tried to do is be very specific about what we heard and make sure that we found credible information and reliable people, and that we buttoned up every single hole to make sure to be absolutely right . . . It’s like being in court—once you say something, you can’t just strike it.”

It’s not clear when Roberts adopted this definition of her profession’s aim: her writing on the Duke case demonstrated an aversion to, rather than a quest for, the truth.

Perhaps Roberts’ focus on Rodriguez is fitting justice. Just as Rodriguez’s career will be forever tarnished by his admission that he broke the law over a several-year period, so too will Roberts be forever tarnished by her decision to set aside the standards of her profession to advance a preconceived ideological agenda, use her Times column to spew falsehoods, and then refuse to own up to her errors.

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Selena Roberts looks like a beacon of truth and righteousness, however, when compared to Wendy Murphy. In the lacrosse case, the adjunct law professor compiled a record for untruths second only to that of Mike Nifong. (New England School of Law’s dean did not respond to repeated e-mails asking how he could continue to employ—as a professor of law—a figure who publicly and repeatedly stated outright falsehoods.)

The adjunct law professor was back in the news last week, in an article on “sexting” (teenagers sending nude pictures of themselves or their boyfriends/girlfriends as text messages). The Boston Herald, identifying Murphy as someone “who lectures on sex crimes at the New England School of Law,” reported the adjunct professor as saying that “sexting” almost has become an “epidemic.” Murphy added, “I know it seems heavy-handed to bring child porn charges. Law enforcement is using the only tool it has for what has become a huge problem nationwide.”

The evidence Murphy cited to show that “sexting” has almost become an “epidemic,” and that it “has become a huge problem nationwide”? None. But why let evidence get in the way of a preferred storyline, even if it involves support for charging 13-year-olds with child porn?

The other “expert” quoted in the Herald story was Sari Locker, a self-described “sex educator and TV personality,” whose official website photo is a bit on the . . . revealing . . . side. It’s good to see that Murphy is continuing to keep good company.

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By the end of the lacrosse case, virtually the only publication that treated Murphy seriously was the Wilmington Journal, where Cash Michaels would regularly quote, without skepticism, from Murphy and either NAACP “case monitor” Irving Joyner or North Carolina NAACP head William Barber.

As the highest-profile case of prosecutorial misconduct in modern U.S. history was occurring in his midst, Barber did all he could to prop up the case offered by the perpetrator of that prosecutorial misconduct. Whether it was publishing an error-laden, guilt-presuming 82-point “memorandum of law” or going to the Duke Chapel to continue his organization’s character assault on Duke students, Barber spent more than a year strenuously advancing Mike Nifong’s efforts.

Last week, Barber was honored with the Paul Green Award by, of all, organizations, the North Carolina ACLU.

I share Barber’s opposition to the death penalty, and agree wholeheartedly with the NAACP’s efforts against the practice. That said: How can an organization committed to upholding civil liberties extend an award to a figure whose public conduct in such a high-profile case had exhibited an utter indifference to the importance of civil liberties?

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Finally, Clark University has chosen to honor Karla Holloway. Next week, the Group of 88 extremist will give the keynote address at a Clark University conference entitled, “Evolutionary Momentum in African American Studies — Legacy and Future Direction.”

Holloway’s honor serves as a reminder of a principal academic lesson from the lacrosse case: in an academic environment dominated by peer review, terms like “excellence” or “quality” mean very different things than what non-academics might expect. That an Ivy League institution like Cornell could hire Grant Farred while hailing his scholarly credentials as excellent, or a top-tier liberal arts college like Clark could bring Holloway in to give a keynote address shows how such inherently subjective terms as “excellence” or “quality” are defined in the contemporary academy.

On Other Blogs

Two items not to miss on other blogs:

Bill Anderson calls for ending the practice of civil suit absolute immunity for prosecutorial behavior in light of Nifong's misconduct.

John in Carolina takes the Chronicle to task for a peculiar passage in a recent editorial baldly asserting, on the basis of neither actual evidence nor any original reporting, that the lacrosse case didn't affect Duke fundraising.