Duke Case Finally Over

You think the Duke players will get an apology from those in this article, written last May:

Duke University officials, from the campus police to the highest administrative levels, failed to grasp the seriousness of an accusation that white lacrosse players raped a black woman at a party in March and did not respond quickly enough, said an outside report released yesterday.

My favorite part:

The report also criticized administration officials as being too heavily influenced by Durham police reports that the woman "kept changing her story and was not credible" and that "this will blow over." The review added that the university should have conducted its own investigation.

[…]“Dr. Chambers, who was chancellor of North Carolina Central University from 1993 to 2001, said in the news conference that one aspect that most disturbed him was that Duke officials had not looked deeper into the accusations.”

Gosh!  You mean they shouldn’t have been influenced by a "victim" who continually changed her story over and over and over again? 

I agree with Dr. Chambers in one respect, the accusations should indeed have been looked at deeper.  That way we would have discovered that the accuser was a fraud much quicker.

The man who rushed to convict and condemn these young men, Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong should be vilified from coast to coast..  He put these men through hell all to get his political bones. 

All along, the three Duke lacrosse players proclaimed they were innocent of charges they sexually assaulted a stripper. They were railroaded, they insisted, by a prosecutor who refused to believe them and ignored the facts.

It took more than a year, but on Wednesday, North Carolina’s top prosecutor finally agreed with them.

Attorney General Roy Cooper declared them innocent of all charges and delivered a blistering assessment of a district attorney he blamed for a “tragic rush to accuse.”
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“We’re just as innocent today as we were back then,” said one of the players, David Evans. “Nothing has changed. The facts don’t change.”

Evans, Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty declared a bitter victory in a hotel press conference that looked a bit like a team’s end-of-the-season awards dinner, only with their lawyers joining them behind the table instead of their coaches.

“It’s been 395 days since this nightmare began. And finally today it’s coming to a closure,” said Evans, his voice breaking at one point.

The three young men and their lawyers accused the news media and the public of disregarding the presumption of innocence and portraying them as thugs in the weeks following the March 2006 party that led to the allegations.

The accuser, Crystal Mangum (this blog has a great bio on her), started all of this for money.   The DA proceeded with this witchhunt to get more money, more power.

Mangum and Nifong, one and the same in my book.

And then we have Al Sharpton in the mix.  He’s in the mix with the Imus story denying his "redemption" to a man who made a mistake.  In the Duke rape case Sharpton stated last April that without a doubt, the accuser was telling the truth:

SCARBOROUGH: Thanks a lot, Dan, MSNBC’s Dan Abrams.  Now with all the alibis coming out from the defense side, is the prosecution’s case already crumbling? Earlier I spoke to former presidential candidate Al Sharpton and asked him if groups in Durham like the NAACP still believe the accuser. 

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REV. AL SHARPTON: The leadership that I spoke to feel that she is telling the truth and they feel that beyond a shadow of a doubt, something happened and clearly the prosecutor must believe that. You are not talking now about an investigation that has not already resulted with indictments.  You now have the elected prosecutor of that county saying that he believes a crime was committed and he’s going to take at least two, maybe more to trial.

Yeah.

And now look at his followup answer:

SCARBOROUGH: Talk about this drip, drip, drip of evidence against the accuser. 

SHARPTON: Well first of all, I think the problem that you have is that here is a young lady who was in the United States Navy,  was married, mother of two, going to Central University there, North Carolina Central.  It’s going to be kind of hard to say even if she was the worst person and clearly she is not, someone that comes out of the Navy with that back ground, that you therefore have the right to violate her.  And we now saying we live in a nation that based on who you are, you have the right to be raped or not? I mean I think it’s absurd. 

Wha-wha-what! 

Who EVER said that a women deserves to be raped because of her background?  No one you idiot! Will he now apologize to these innocent young men for race baiting?  For his unquestioned belief in the accuser?  For his condemnation of these innocent men?

I have a feeling we will be waiting a long time for any such apology.

UPDATE

Guess we have some Global Warming zealots giving interviews about this case:

But for some at Duke, the possibility of dropped charges left as many questions as answers — and a feeling that the full truth of what happened that night in the house on North Buchanan Boulevard may never be known, in part because the investigation was mishandled.

"Since we haven’t gone through a normal legal process, we don’t know what really happened," said Duke biology professor Sheryl Broverman. "The fact the charges were dropped doesn’t mean nothing happened. It just means information wasn’t collected appropriately enough to go forward."

Broverman said she couldn’t say one way or the other whether the players sexually assaulted the exotic dancer — and that the investigation did little to clarify that. "For me, it just means we’ll never know," she said.

Um…yeah.

So a criminal investigation was conducted which exonerated the young men.  That is what a criminal investigation does, it shows us whether a crime happened or not.  The evidence showed there was no crime, the witness statements showed there was no crime, and the accusers own statements contradicted her timeline:

Cooper, who took over the case in January after Nifong was charged with ethics violations that could get him disbarred, said his own investigation into a stripper’s claim that she was sexually assaulted at a team party found nothing to corroborate her story, and “led us to the conclusion that no attack occurred.”

What else do you need? (Btw…I called them Global Warming zealots because they will believe nothing unless it agree’s with their own preconceived notion of the truth)

And get this.  This report details how upset Duke is that if the charges are not true then it still means the boys were bad.  Why?  Because they drank and partied.  Damn college kids:

The report also cited an unspecified number of lacrosse players [in the past] who have "disturbed neighbors with loud music and noise, both on and off campus. They have publicly urinated both on campus and off. They have shown disrespect for property. Both the number of [lacrosse] team members implicated in this behavior and the number of alcohol related incidents involving them have been excessive compared to other Duke athletic teams…"

And listen to the Senior Vice President at Duke:

Even if all charges are dropped against the three players, Burness believes other legal hurdles exist for the university. "We’re expecting that there’s probably going to be civil suits from folks trying to get money out of us, that comes with the turf."

Burness said there is a segment of the population that has asked him if Duke will apologize to the players if their legal problems disappear. "I said," Burness replied, "for what?"

Wow.

Other’s Blogging:

• Durham In Wonderland
• Cop The Truth
• Hyscience
• Eaglespeak
• Ace of Spades HQ
• Moonbattery
• David Drake
• The News Buckit
• Slublog
• Big Lizards
• The Bullwinkle Blog
• Gateway Pundit
• Captain’s Quarters
• Patterico’s Pontifications
• Joust The Facts
• Right Thoughts

Curt

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