Fantastic Lies -- 10 Appalling Moments From The Duke Lacrosse Case

From Mary Katherine Ham at The Federalist:

5. When NYT’s Public Editor Explained the Media’s Inability to Cover This Fairly
New York Times Public Editor Dan Okrent diagnosed the media coverage of the case in the documentary as journalists excited to find all their pet social-justice issues in one story.

“It was white over black, it was male over female, it was rich over poor, educated over uneducated. All the things that we know happen in the world coming together in one place and journalists, they start to quiver with a thrill when something like this happens,” Okrent said.

6. When Social Justice Protesters Didn’t Understand Due Process
One of the most frequently spotted protest signs in Durham in the wake of the Duke lacrosse case indictments was “Get a Conscience, Not a Lawyer.” The signs were a reference to the alleged “wall of silence” the players had employed to protect the team.

The residents of the house where the party occurred had been cooperative with a search warrant. The entire team submitted to DNA samples. But they were accused by police, Nifong, and media of being obstructive because team members denied accusations and acquired lawyers to get them through the process, as anyone accused of a crime should do.

A poster featuring all of the lacrosse team members’ pictures was distributed widely on campus and around town with the headline, “Please Come Forward.” There was, it turns out, nothing to come forward about.
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8. When a Coach Stood By His Players and Lost His Job
Coach Mike Pressler had been coaching Duke’s lacrosse time for more than 15 years. During that time, the team had made many NCAA tournament appearances and an appearance in the championship game in 2005. When the story broke about the party and alleged assault, he stood by his team, arguing the season should not be canceled until evidence emerged. They had been expected to be national championship contenders.

The university fired Pressler. He went on to settle with Duke for wrongful termination. He is now the head coach at Bryant University and coached the national men’s lacrosse team in 2010.

“I was actually advised to distance myself from them and at that time that was like blasphemy,” Pressler said in the documentary.

9. When a Young Lawyer Had a Perry Mason Moment That Revealed a Conspiracy
Nifong had a private DNA lab process samples after the state’s public lab came up empty, producing conclusions more favorable to Nifong’s case.

“I was pretty curious to know, how could our state crime lab and this private lab come up with two pretty fundamentally different conclusions,” said attorney Brad Bannon.

Nifong handed over 2,500 pages of raw, technical DNA data to the defense. Bannon bought a book on Amazon about forensic DNA and went to work. He discovered unidentified DNA for numerous men in and on Mangum and her clothing that hadn’t been reported. He found notes indicating lab director Brian Meehan’s DNA was also present.

“So a Ph.D doing everything he can not to contaminate the DNA leaves more DNA in this rape kit than the entire Duke lacrosse team put together,” Cooney said.

At a hearing nine months after the party, Nifong tried to take the defense by surprise, presenting Meehan as his DNA expert before they had prepared to cross-examine him. The defense team decided to have Bannon question him on the spot.

“It became fairly clear about 10-15 minutes into it that the expert realized that Brad [Bannon] knew what the hell he was talking about,” Cooney said.

The defense team confronted Meehan with whether he had agreed with Nifong to withhold some DNA results: “There’s only one answer to this question, and that answer being yes. Because we did not report the reference profiles of those specimens and we did talk about not reporting those,” Meehan said.

There was applause in the courtroom.

10. When the Falsely Accused Players Showed More Maturity Than Their Professors and the Media
All of the accused players are involved with the Innocence Project, which uses DNA evidence to overturn wrongful convictions. Said Reade Seligmann, upon his exoneration:

“This entire experience has opened my eyes to a tragic world of injustice I never knew existed. If police officers and a district attorney can systematically railroad us with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, I can’t imagine what they’d do to people who do not have the resources to defend themselves.”

Smart kid.

To this day, most of the Duke faculty and leadership who prejudged the lacrosse players remain in their positions and have never apologized. Media figures who apologized or retracted are few and far between. Instead, most coverage offered grudging reporting on the dismissal of charges.

Remember, the faculty at Duke, who were part of the railroading of these players are TYPICAL of the faculties of most universities. The same ones who are backing the use of Title IX to expel men from school. The same one, who push the lie of 1 - 5 women are sexually assaulted. One like, now former Professor, Melissa Click of Missouri.

Ten Years Later, the Duke Lacrosse Case Still Reverberates.

From K.C. Johnson via H/T at Instapundit:

But perhaps the most chilling line in the Group of 88 statement was also its most banal—a notice at the bottom of the page, listing the 15 Duke academic departments and programs that chose to “sign onto this ad.” That such a wide swath of the Duke academic community officially affiliated with an inflammatory statement sent a powerful message in spring 2006.

It turned out that, with the exception of the African-American Studies Program, none of the academic departments had formally taken a vote to endorse affiliating with the statement. Yet this breach of standard academic protocol appears to have had no consequences at Duke.

An unwillingness to engage in any critical self-reflection is the foremost legacy of how the academy responded to the lacrosse case, at Duke and beyond.

Duke spent tens of millions of dollars in settlement costs and legal fees for the lawsuits filed by the lacrosse players. (Some of that money unsuccessfully attempted to force me to reveal confidential e-mail exchanges with my sources.) It’s easy to see why Duke was so eager to settle the lawsuits before all discovery material became public. Early filings in the case attached a handful of administrators’ e-mails, including an April 2006 missive from president Richard Brodhead, musing that the movie Primal Fear might be an appropriate lens through which to view the case.

In that film, a character played by Ed Norton convinces his lawyers he was wrongfully accused, only to accidentally confess his guilt in the closing scene. One can only imagine what the full archive of Brodhead’s 2006 e-mails would have revealed.

Since the ending of the lacrosse case, Duke’s trustees have conferred on Brodhead two new five-year terms as president.

Well, if you’re wondering where the “burn it all to the ground” sentiments in American politics come from, stuff like this is one source. The pervasive rot in America’s political and intellectual ruling classes is evident, it’s easy to see why some people may conclude that it’s irreversible by ordinary means. I don’t feel that way yet, but the wake-up call has been sounded, and the ruling class has hit the snooze button repeatedly. Eventually, they’re going to have to take that pillow off their head.

Academia is more corrupt than government service. There is no penalty for ebing wrong or making bad choices. IF anything, one gets promoted. What is more significant, Duke University is considered one of the best colleges in the country, if not the world, yet the SJW's that teach classes there are among to most insular, uniform group thinking bunch of ideologues, who are in a newsroom.

Where is the diversity among these people?

The Hunt for a Good Bad Guy

From Taki's Magazine via H/T from Instapundit:

There is a severe rape drought going on in the West; not the violent sexual assault as is broadly defined by the law but a particular kind of rape. We want wealthy white males with blond hair high-fiving each other as they torture some poor girl who was just trying to get an education. The Middle East is resplendent with these scenarios, but the guy usually has a funny hat on instead of Richie Rich hair.
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There is a lot of currency behind the Duke lacrosse rapist ideal. Through Title IX, the government offers financial rewards to schools for digging up sexual offenders in varsity jackets. Rapists give feminists something to fight for in a culture where women have little to complain about. This means when a woman lies about frat boys, or carries a mattress around, or simply says someone resembles a rapist, the ax falls hard.
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Which brings me to this week’s rape de semaine. Daryush Valizadeh is a “pickup artist” (a.k.a. PUA) who spares us his ridiculous foreign name by using the moniker Roosh V. He tours the world giving small groups of men simple tips such as: Get in shape, be interesting, start the conversation simple, etc. As far as I’m concerned he’s a hippie love guru trying to rebuild the male-female relationship after decades of sabotage. We live in a stifled environment where groups of men have entirely given up on women and replaced them with porn. They call it a “sexodus” and groups such as MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) are “Refusing to bow, serve and kneel for the opportunity to be treated like a disposable utility.” This isn’t good for the human race. As Joe Strummer used to say, “Without people, you’re nothing.”

Encouraging traditional gender roles is a dangerous trend for the rape alarmists. So when Roosh announced he was doing talks in Toronto and Montreal this week, the feminazis committed to shut it down. They cited an article he wrote back in February called “How to Stop Rape” wherein he said we should “make rape legal if done on private property.” His point being women would be a lot less heedless about inviting men over and false accusations would also end if this amendment came to pass. His proposal was about as serious as one of Jonathan Swift’s, but the message is correct. Women have such hubris these days that they are endangering themselves. Getting wasted in public is reckless for a woman no matter how much we “teach men not to rape.” Passing out on a crowded beach may not be asking for it, but it’s pretty close. This is what an intellectual discussion does. It posits an outlandish hypothesis that provokes you into confronting a dark truth. He could have said, “If we forbade black men from ever being around white women, rape cases would plummet.” This is an impossible scenario no sane person would want to implement, but it’s also a great way to showcase the shocking statistics behind interracial rape.

The last thing feminism can tolerate is men REFUSING to bow down.

Cheers to Roosh giving them the flutters and read the whole thing.

Rape Culture Theory Ensnares Innocent Men

From Legal Insurrection:

No one wants a woman blamed for being sexually assaulted because she wore a skimpy outfit. Likewise, many fear a sexually assaulted woman will be blamed because of her drunkenness. It is common thinking that because no one should ever be sexually assaulted, no blame should ever be put on them.

Under the new sexual assault definition, though, a consenting woman can later claim (and have a charge initiated because) there was really no consent because she was too drunk.

So if the male doesn't call her after ward or simply gets her mad at him. These new proposed rules allow the woman to change her mind about consent, after the fact. She can make a sexual assault accusation out of spite.

Booth noted that incidences in which the woman is drunk beyond her ability to consent are the ones that “encompass the bulk” of the sexual assault cases she sees.

Studies have shown that the majority of unwanted sexual encounters experienced by collegiate women occurred when they were intoxicated. Yet the roundtable panelists adamantly rejected the suggestion that sexual assault prevention education should encourage reduced alcohol consumption. ..................

In fact, take the case of Lewis McLeod. He is suing Duke University for expelling him for what he and the local police say was a false allegation of sexual assault.

Attending the trial, John H. Tucker of Raleigh-Durham’s Indyweek reported, dean Sue Wasiolek was asked in court whether both parties would be considered guilty of rape and thereby expelled if they engaged in sex while both were intoxicated to “incapacity.”

This is the same "Dean Sue" the false accused Duke Lacrosse players were told to trust after the false rape allegation.

The dean responded, “Assuming it is a male and female, it is the responsibility in the case of the male to gain consent before proceeding with sex.”

In the new climate of sexual assault pseudolaw, the female apparently has no responsibility other than to say yes, which can be revoked anytime, including after the sex is over.

Let that sink in. The dean responded, “Assuming it is a male and female, it is the responsibility in the case of the male to gain consent before proceeding with sex.”

The woman does have ANY responsibility in this scenario. The dean responded, “Assuming it is a male and female, it is the responsibility in the case of the male to gain consent before proceeding with sex.”

And the Feminist wonder why men don't take them seriously. The dean responded, “Assuming it is a male and female, it is the responsibility in the case of the male to gain consent before proceeding with sex.”

It seems as if the new system is designed to destroy as many men as possible. The dean responded, “Assuming it is a male and female, it is the responsibility in the case of the male to gain consent before proceeding with sex.”

Title IX civil right lawsuit for discriminating against men! ! ! ! !

What Does a Social DIsaster Sound Like? - The Duke Men's Lacrosse Team winning it's 3rd National Championship in the last 5 years

This blog is primarily about politics and current events, rarely about sports.  But the Duke Lacrosse team is one of the few times where politics, national events, and sports collide.  I have been playing the "fastest game on two feet" for over 30 years and the first time I saw a Division 1 college game was in 1983 when Johns Hopkins was playing Syracuse for the National Championship.  The Johns Hopkins Bluejays beat Syracuse in an exciting game during Memorial Day weekend in 1983 and I have been a Bluejays fans every since.

But there are two other team I will root for during the NCAA playoffs, the Duke Blue Devils and the Bryant Bulldogs.  Why?  Simple.  The Duke Lacrosse team and 3 of their players were nearly destroyed by a false rape charge in 2006 by a mentally unbalance black stripper.  There have been many cases of college athletes committing sexual assault and it does happen too often, but his case seemed fishy from the start.

One of the things, which still disturbs me to this day,  is the activism of the Professors immediately assuming the players guilt and using the case as proof of patriarchy and white privilege on campus.   The case had the explosive combination of race, sex, and money all rolled into one nice package.

Another thing that sill bothers me to this day, after the State Attorney General declared the players INNOCENT  of all charges, there has been no formal apology from the Duke, the Administration, not the Professors, who declared the players guilty.  Unless you consider the settlement with the players and apology.

The reason I cheer for the Bryant Bulldogs is Coach Mike Pressler.  He was the ONLY person fired from Duke regarding the False Rape Hoax.  No professor was fired for presuming the players guilt.  No members of the Administration was fired for their handling of the case.  The only person fired was the Coach of the innocent players.  The Rape Hoax nearly destroyed the man's career and life.  I applaud Bryant University for taking a chance on him and they are seeing the fruit of their efforts.  Bryant made the NCAA Tournament last year and the beat the #2 seated team this year for their 1st tournament win ever.

Please email Karla FC Holloway (karla.holloway@duke.edu) and Wahneema Lubiano (wah@duke.edu) to let them know about the victory. Both these women were prime sponsors of the "What Does a Social Disaster Sound Like?" ad when the Rape Hoax was first getting attention.

The Many Ways in Which The New Book About the Duke Lacrosse Case is Wrong

From Stuart Taylor of the New Republic:

The most striking thing about William D. Cohan's revisionist, guilt-implying new book on the Duke lacrosse rape fraud is what's not in it.

The best-selling, highly successful author's 621-page The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of Our Great Universities adds not a single piece of significant new evidence to that which convinced then–North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper and virtually all other serious analysts by mid-2007 that the lacrosse players were innocent of any sexual assault on anyone.

This not not s surprise, since the players are innocent.

False Accusations in a military sexual assault case

From the New York Times via Instapundit:

Chief Serbia testified that he asked her, “Were you raped?” and she replied, “No.”

Text messages and journal entries suggest the affair was loving, passionate and consensual, the defense asserts. One of her diary entries read, “My biggest fear is that there is still something there in his marriage.” In another entry, the captain wrote, “I’m so in love with him and the idea of always being with him that I forget about large factors that would prevent that.”

Meanwhile, there’s reason to suspect that the military was more interested in producing a scalp as evidence that it was taking sexual assault seriously than in doing justice. Christina Hoff Sommers is comparing this to the Duke Lacrosse false-rape case.

I wonder if the Regime's False War on Women's meme has anything to do with this?

Should false rape accusers be sued?

The short answer is yes.

From Roxanne Jones at CNN:

In 2012, according to the FBI, nearly 87,000 "forcible rapes" were reported. That's down 7% from the number of rapes reported in 2008. Law enforcement agencies estimate that the number of false rape accusations ranges from 2% to 8% annually, or between 2,000 and 7,000 cases each year.
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In 2002, Brian Banks was one of those unfortunate statistics. He was just 17 when a classmate, Wanetta Gibson, 15, falsely accused him of raping her at school. Banks, then a top football talent, spent more than five years in prison and five years on probation for rape and kidnapping.

He was exonerated after he got his accuser to admit on tape that she lied about the rape. Banks later explained that his attorney had advised him to take a plea bargain and avoid a jury trial because "... I was a big black teenager, and no jury would believe anything I said."

The Long Beach Unified School District sued his accuser, and she has been ordered to repay the $750,000 she was awarded in a lawsuit against the district.

And those women should be prosecuted as well. One could argue that if Crystal Mangum, the false Duke Lacrosse Rape "victim", was prosecuted, she would have been in jail. Instead she was free to stab her boyfriend to death.

Duke Lacrosse Case — The Latest Outrage

From the American Thinker Blog:

In a nauseating editorial this week in the Raleigh News and Observer, Duke University president Richard Brodhead is depicted as "used to working at elite levels," which allegedly qualified him to receive one of the four 2013 Academic Leadership Awards bestowed by the left-leaning Carnegie Corporation to "exceptional leaders in higher education."
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The scenario reads like this: although the three Lacrosse players ended up victims of a cabal of third rate radical professors, an incompetent and politically motivated prosecutor, and their fellow travelers in the Duke University and Durham, NC community, the bien pensants of the Left have orchestrated the permanent record in order to stain the lacrosse players in the court of public opinion despite their innocence and victimization. To Brodhead and his accomplices, the incident was an example of the ongoing class warfare by rich white males against guiltless minorities they prefer to believe is rampant.

Crystal Mangum, the "stripper" whose word Brodhead believed over his own students, is now serving 14 to 18 years for second degree murder for killing her boyfriend, prosecuted by the same Durham district attorney's office that fabricated evidence against the players. The Durham prosecutors have not continued to cover up their horrible mistakes in the pursuit of the untrue charges against the lacrosse students by going soft on their false accuser.

But Duke University continues to mask over the inexcusable actions by Richard Brodhead, bringing shame and degradation to the school. Brodhead was never reprimanded, and he certainly was not fired from his $1.8 million a year job. Nor did he have the character or gumption to resign in disgrace. Rather, the Duke board issued statements praising Brodhead while paying out several millions in damages to the boys.

I wish the players would have demanded the settlement be made public or gone to trial. I would have loved to hear Broadhead's and members of the Gang of 88's depositions to justify their collective, disgusting behavior.

Duke Rape Accuser Got 160 TV News Stories on Accusation, 3 on Murder Conviction

From CNSNews.com

When Crystal Mangum falsely accused several Duke lacrosse players of rape in 2006, there were 160 major television news stories in the first five days after the players were arrested, but in 2013, when Mangum was convicted of murder and sentenced to 14 years in prison, there were only 3 major television news stories, a difference in coverage of 5,233%.

When the Duke lacrosse-rape story broke in March/April 2006, it was huge news, garnering massive, widespread coverage by the networks ABC, CBS, and NBC, as well as by FOX, CNN and MSNBC, and the print press, such as USA Today, New York Times and Washington Post.

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Those 160 major television news outlets included ABC’s World News Tonight, Nightline, Good Morning America, the CBS Evening News, the Today show, NBC Nightly News, CNN Live, Fox News, MSNBC’s Scarborough Country and Countdown, and myriad other TV news programs. - See more at: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/michael-w-chapman/duke-rape-accuser-got-160-tv-news-stories-accusation-3-murder#sthash.gYG6xyyj.dpuf

Last Friday, Nov. 22, Crystal Mangum, the false Duke-rape accuser, was convicted by a jury of second-degree murder – she had stabbed her boyfriend – and sentenced to 14 years in prison. In the five days since, Nov. 22-26, a Nexis news search of the words Crystal Mangum, murder, Duke, and lacrosse in "All English Language News" reveals there were 48 total news stories but only 3 major television news reports – one on Fox and two on CNN.

The big television networks – ABC, CBS, and NBC – and the liberal MSNBC and NPR did not report on Mangum’s murder conviction.

The difference in coverage is noteworthy: 160 stories vs. 3 stories in the first five days of each event. That’s a ratio of 53 to 1, and a difference in coverage of 5,233%.

The television news industry (and NPR) gave 5,233% more coverage to the dubious allegations against the three lacrosse players -- which were proven to be completely false and politically charged -- than they gave the jury-tried murder conviction of Crystal Mangum, the false accuser.

What can one say about the Drive-By_Media. This is why they are dying out and will soon be out of business.

Aftermath of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Hoax

From Roger Kimball of PJ Media:

And then there was the Duke faculty. As Vincent Carroll, writing in the Rocky Mountain News, noted, “the most astonishing fact, hands down, was and remains the squalid behavior of the community of scholars at Duke itself. For months nearly the entire faculty fell into one of two camps: those who demanded the verdict first and the trial later, and those whose silence enabled their vigilante colleagues to set the tone.”

Particularly egregious was the behavior of the “Group of 88,” a congeries of faculty activists and fellow-travelers who signed “What Does a Social Disaster Sound Like?,” a full-page manifesto published in April 2006 in the Duke student newspaper. The statement, which purported to be “listening” to students on campus, mingled anonymous student comments with racialist agitprop. “Regardless of the results of the police investigation,” ran part of the introductory comment, “what is apparent every day now is the anger and fear of many students who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism.” There followed a mosaic of histrionic proclamations: “We want the absence of terror,” one student is supposed to have said. “But we don’t really know what that means.” “This is not a different experience for us here at Duke University. We go to class with racist classmates, we go to gym with people who are racists . . .”

Some of the Group of 88 were common or garden-variety academic liberals—timid souls whose long tenure in the protected purlieus of the university surrounded by adolescents has nurtured their risible sense of self-importance and political enlightenment. But a good percentage were radicals more devoted to political activism than scholarship. Indeed, one scandal that still has not received sufficient publicity is the preposterous pseudo-scholarship purveyed by many trendy academics. A look at the CVs of many members of the Group of 88 provides a case in point, partly shocking, partly embarrassing. It’s 99 percent race-class-gender gibberish embroidered with a toxic dollop of ill-digested lit-crit-speak and infatuation with the dregs of pop culture. “Shuckin’ Off the African-American Native Other: What’s PoMo Got to Do with It?,” Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic, etc. This is scholarship at one of America’s best universities?

One of the central players in the scandal was Houston A. Baker, Jr. A former president of the Modern Language Association, Baker has built his career through a carefully orchestrated fabrication of race scandals and juvenile cultural relativism. (Choosing between Shakespeare and Jacqueline Susann, he once wrote, is “no different from choosing between a hoagy and a pizza,” adding that “I am one whose career is dedicated to the day when we have a disappearance of those standards.”) Soon after the lacrosse scandal broke, Professor Baker called for “immediate dismissals of those principally responsible for the horrors of this spring moment at Duke. Coaches of the lacrosse team, the team itself and its players, and any other agents who silenced or lied about the real nature of events.” He joined the other members of the Group of 88 in signing a “thank you” letter to campus radicals who had distributed a “wanted” poster of the lacrosse players and publicly branded them “rapists.” After the more serious charges against the three students were dropped in December, the mother of another member of the team emailed to ask if he would reconsider his comments. Professor Baker’s response is illuminating:

LIES You are just a provacateur [sic] on a happy New Years [sic] Eve trying to get credit for a scummy bunch of white males! . . .

I really hope whoever sent this stupid farce of an email rots in. . . . umhappy [sic] new year to you . . . and forgive me if your [sic] really are, quite sadly, mother of a “farm animal.”

Houston Baker was the George D. and Susan Fox Beischer Professor of English at Duke. How proud the Beischers must have been! In the aftermath of the Duke scandals, Baker decamped to a distinguished professorship at Vanderbilt University. What does that tell us about the state of American academia?

The true tragedy of what happened at Duke can be summarized with the answer to one question, who was fired after this debacle?

The Lacrosse Coach was the only one fired, no professor, no administrator, no one but the Head Coach, who players were innocent.

Jury finds former Duke Lacrosse accuser Crystal Mangum guilty of second-degree murder

From ABC11 in Raleigh-Durham:

Mangum stabbed boyfriend Reginald Daye with a kitchen knife during an argument in April 2011. Daye died at the hospital 10 days later from complications related to the stabbing.

The Group of 88 were not available to release another ad about this "Social Disaster"

The Best Defense Your Money Can't Buy -- How prosecutors disarm defendants by freezing their assets

From Jacob Sollum at Reason.com:

Today the Supreme Court is considering whether the Kaleys have a constitutional right to challenge the order blocking access to their money before it's too late for them to mount an effective defense. A ruling in their favor would help limit the government's ability to deprive people of their liberty by depriving them of their property.

For people facing criminal charges, freedom not only is not free; it is dauntingly expensive. The Kaleys' lawyers estimate that a trial will cost $500,000 in legal fees and other expenses. The Kaleys had planned to cover the cost with money drawn from a home equity line of credit—until the government took it.

Technically, the government has not taken the money yet; it has merely "restrained" it, along with the rest of the home's value, in anticipation of a post-conviction forfeiture.

Considering how prosecutors, both Federal and State, have been behaving, only only exposed in the Duke Lacrosse, George Zimmerman, and James Rosen cases, this behavior comes as no surprise.

Since Prosecutors have been given immunity, by the courts, maybe it's about time they have some skin in the game. Law Professor Glen Reynold's, of Instapundit fame, has a few suggestions.