Both of the comment threads dealing with the case have featured comments suggesting that conservatives rushed to judgment as well — only on the opposite side because the accuser was a black woman and the accused were white males who were perceived as wealthy.
This seems to misrepresent the pattern of early dissent in the lacrosse case. A few conservatives did criticize Nifong at a relatively early stage (Sean Hannity, Wendy McElroy, La Shawn Barber).
But by far the most passionate — and persuasive — early critic was Jeralyn Merritt at TalkLeft, whose posts saw through Nifong's case even before the first two indictments. The first searing moral critique of Nifong's behavior came from an African-American sportswriter, Jason Whitlock. And the key local public opposition to Nifong came from a liberal Duke Law professor, Jim Coleman.
This case, obviously, came to attract considerable conservative interest — as, indeed, it should have. Prominent liberal organizations, such as the New York Times or the state NAACP, took stances that bolstered prosecutorial misconduct, contradicting their stated general principles. But the idea that the opposition to Nifong originated from some type of conservative cabal is, to me, misguided.
(For the record, I'm a Democrat who's supporting Barack Obama for president and who vehemently favors gay marriage, choice, and fair taxation policies.)
All Related Posts (on one page) | Some Related Posts:
- A Corrupt Legal Culture
- Nifong's Enablers
- Explaining Brodhead...
- The Group of 88
- "Conservatives" and the Lacrosse Case
- Nifong: The Banality of Evil
- Nifong Before Lacrosse
Why? Well, because I'm prejudiced, that's why. Whenever someone says "athlete", "rapper", or "choir director" I immediately think of a black person. Likewise, if you said "dancer", "pianist", or "scout leader" I would think of a white person. As should be readily apparent, these aren't even mostly accurate. They're just the peculiar prejudices I have. You have some, too.
For the record, I'm a Republican supporting Barack Obama for President who doesn't support gay marriage for lack of a compelling argument, entirely supports choice because the alternative is simply unconscionable, and finds the idea of "fair" taxation intractably complicated.
The simple reason for the first was the the guys were innocent and it was obvious. The simple reason for the second was the the radiclibs WANTED the guys to be guilty. THey HATED the guys. As you can see if you check out the blogs as the case came undone.
You seem to assume because she wrote on gender issues for Fox that made her a conservative. She regularly lamented privately that writing for Fox was stifling because she was limited in the issues she could write about. In other words she couldn’t write about the issues which would challenge the presumptions of conservatives. But her positions were not unknown.
Here's why I think you are likely to become more conservative on other issues in the future:
Even someone with your analytical skills and work habits has to rely on trusted sources for issues in which you just don't have time to develop a deep expertise.
But the Duke case really turns things on its head, doesn't it? Tell us, did you trust the New York Times more before the Duke case than you do now? How about the mainstream media in general? And do you think that the way they covered the Duke case is just an anomaly-- that on most other politically charged issues, they didn't distort the facts? Do you trust the New York Times on the Iraq war? On their depictions of Roberts and Alito? On their reports of the utility of abstinence-education? Do you trust them more than (to use a very controversial example) Fox News? If so, why?
I've never heard of Wendy McElroy and know nothing about her political persuasion, but assuming you're correct, doesn't that further support Professor Johnson's position that a number of liberal commentators were critical of Nifong's actions from an early point in the case?
is there anyone who supports unfair taxation policies?
http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php
Well, there are lots of people who support taxation policies I consider unfair.
Re nancy Grace, I can't recall ever hearing her say anythign I considered particularly "conservative", in part because I don't consider "if someone is willing to prosecute, that's good enough, they're guilty" to be a "conservative" position. but considering her own problems with prosecutorial misconduct, I'm not surprised she was more on Nifong's side.
Wendy McElroy is the editor of ifeminist.com. She describes herself as an anarchist and she regularly attacks the "cult of victimhood", especially as part of feminist mythology - but does not limit her attacks on victimhood to feminists.. She was also a rape victim. However, she is especially harsh on false allegations of sexual harassment or assault. I don't think she fits either the label of conservative or liberal.
She was one of the first to question whether the prosecution was politically motivate. See,
"Did Justice or Politics Drive Arrests in Duke Lacrosse Case?" www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,192206,00.html
However, her questioning wasn't based on ideology. Rather, she questioned the prosecution based on the faulty identification limited to pictures of white Duke Lacrosse players, the DNA test results, and other factual problems in the case.
I don't believe that the facts concerning her support the assertion "that conservatives rushed to judgment as well — only on the opposite side because the accuser was a black woman and the accused were white males who were perceived as wealthy." Rather, she questioned the evidence, and the fact that the more that became known about the facts, the more allegations smelled.
If you have facts to support the rather sweeping indictments of "conservatives" in your comment, please provide them.
Life on your planet must be soothing. Especcially with that war you supported going so well.
Stop digging. Seriously (unless you want to be a Duke humanities professor). What planet do you live on?
I think it's better to use more descriptive terms (i.e., "I favor tax hikes on the rich" or "tax cuts for the middle class"), and leave the spin to the politicians.
Except maybe the particular people who classify Nancy Grace as a conservative. They're just kooky.
In addition, conservatives are less likely to be blind to some of the unseemly facts that no one likes to talk about (ie. there are almost no white on black gang rapes).
But for me there is one detail that i have never seen mentioned elsewhere -- I would think that three men simultaneously, forcefully raping a woman in each orifice would be very hard ..er.. logistically (think about it). Especially in a small bathroom in the manner described. I mean these guys are not professional porn stars.. Am I the only one who has had this thought?
The real issue is people who think Duke lacrosse is the symbol of our true problems and Tulia is the random anomoly, and not vice versa.
Are there really adults who don't realize how thoughtless adults tend to be? ;)
Prominent liberal organizations, such as the New York Times or the state NAACP, took stances that bolstered prosecutorial misconduct
</blockquote>
Do tell.
----
Not at all. Thought it about it for hours on end...such is my commitment to justice.
Really? I thought about for a few seconds before changing the scenario a bit...3 girls and 1 guy is much more interesting (to me at least).
You raise a great point that was my first inkling that something was wrong with the public story on the Duke rape hoax.
I have been an associate dean at two law schools (and handled some student disciplinary matters at one of them). The idea that most of 30 students witnessed enough to know or suspect that a rape occurred and who were the likely culprits and that NONE of the 30 odd student witnesses would break down and tell the truth to the police is just not plausible in my experience. As I heard the story at the time, a room full of guys was supposed to have seen at least the rape victim being pulled into the bathroom.
With a very tight sports team, the initial response for a day or two might have been to close ranks and protect the probably guilty on the LAX team. And a majority of LAX players might even have held to that position for months.
But within a week of the party, some loving parents would get ahold of their sons and insist that they (1) tell the truth, (2) not cover up a probable rape, (3) aid the rape victim, and (4) not ruin their careers and reputations protecting guilty teammates who didn't deserve protection. The parents would insist that their sons not ruin their lives doing the wrong thing out of misplaced loyalty.
If 30 ambitious and innocent young men indeed knew who might be involved in a brutal gang rape (even if they might not have seen the gruesome details), in the face of family pressure at least one student (and probably a half dozen) would have folded within a week of a genuine rape and identified the likely rapists.
The idea that 3 or 4 rapists would keep their mouths shut was plausible. The idea that 30 Duke students innocent of rape would also stonewsall the police for more than a day or two in the face of incredible pressure seemed staggeringly unlikely to me.
When it came out that Duke faculty members actually believed that dozens of their own students were covering up a rape that the students witnessed part of (but didn't actually commit themselves), I wondered if the Duke faculty understood their own students as human beings or whether the faculty's prejudices and stereotypes made them blind to the ways that ordinary students at Duke would think and act.
It was my experiemce with ambitious young men and women in universities that led me to believe that probably EITHER (1) a rape never occurred OR (2) a woman was indeed raped but that only one or two non-rapists at most had any inkling that a rape occurred or who was involved. Before the DNA evidence came in exonerating the Duke LAX team in April 2006, the latter possibility seemed more likely to me (that a rape occurred but that it was different than the public story).
Jim Lindgren
Granted "almost", and granted Tawana Brawley; what do you make of Logan, West Virginia?
Logan seems to fit quite nicely with "almost". I don't believe anybody said "never, not in a million years,".
It also appears from the pictures that the family hasn't done much traveling in several generations. I wonder if there have been any mysterious disappearances of farm animals around there. Probably. Then they got together and, with their combined IQ, figured out how to capture a human.
You will note I referred to "blogs". I looked. I looked at a great many blogs. I searched under various combinations of --rape, duke, lacrosse, feminists, reaction, innocent, not guilty--which is how I came to my conclusion. Even if the radiclibs accepted, however grudgingly, the fact of the criminal charges being dropped, the guys were still scum, subhuman, rotten human beings, assholes. From which I come to the tentative conclusion that it wasn't about rape at all, but about class and gender.
BTW. I may have missed it, but I found no feminists, blogger or commenter, saying, "Thank God the woman wasn't raped."
She was a nothing to them. Just a stage prop.
Best way to not look like a jerk is not act like a jerk. Libs ought to think about that, instead of complaining they're being unfairly judged. I think they're being fairly judged. We mostly want mercy rather than justice. Because we'd rather not change our ways. Same's true of libs. Rather be taken for nice, rational people without giving up their actual behaviors. Win-win isn't always possible and this is one of those cases.
I'm sure that there are lots of cases where conservatives rush to judgement and don't recognize a dodgy situation because on the surface it appears to support their prejudices.
But this isn't one of them.
This time it's the liberals and leftists who failed in that particular way. And pretty spectacularly so, when members of the NAACP, ACLU and Innocence Project were all willing to side with a dishonest DA in the face of what to most non-ideological people appeared to be common-sense warning bells, just because his targets were middle-class white males.
Someday the conservatives will screw up in an equally major and umabiguous way, at which point, GIT EM!!! Until then, take your lumps and fix yourselves.
In this case, the guys were innocent. See, there's a difference. I have seen JM on television, and, visiting her site, wondered if the defense mentality hates victims of crime because they're so inconvenient.
But, as I said, initially the commenters were loonies who, quite literally, hated the laxers, cared naught for the evidence, and it is a tribute to JM's attitude that it became more reasonable.
While this may be an interesting point in other contexts, I don't think it should've been used to evaluate Mangum's claims.
Once we start talking about crimes, we're off where what's "normal" doesn't take place anymore. Almost by definition, things that are happening are rare.
(Plus, it becomes self-reinforcing. "X was raped by Y? Well, that almost never happens, don't bother with that.")
Investigating a possible gang rape, even a statistically very rare one, is entirely proper. What's improper is keeping the thing going after you realize it's bunk.
Don't confuse TalkLeft, Jeralyn's BLOG of which KC writes, with the TalkLeft forums. JM never did get the forum under control - it was destroyed by the trolls she allowed to remain there.
But the issues weren't the likelihood, rather they were what Dan said, the DA continuing to go forward, and the rush to judgement, and the painting of this as racial when even if it had happened it might not have been racial at all.
But the point is, the howlers are out there and the facts are the last thing to interest them.
But I do think at least some conservatives rushed to attack the black 'victim.' I remember listening to Michael Savage and he was calling the 'victim' a slut and a liar and so on and so forth. It turns out she was, at least, a liar (or maybe mentally unstable if not intentionally lying) but there was no way he could have known that that early on. Maybe Savage had done some original reporting and had a source telling him these things, but I highly doubt it. He only criticizes others reporting; he never does or pays for any of his own.
At the end of the day, the case is sad but I am just happy that three innocent people did not go to prison for this. The system totally failed, but thank God they're free men, now talking about civil judgments and clearing their names, rather than hoping to get out of prison.
From Media Matters, April 11
I surely won't describe his words as polite or even decent. (I wouldn't invite him to my house for dinner after heading that.) But he spoke after what should have been the eye-opening moment for everyone, when the DNA cleared the players after Nifong said the DNA would clear the innocent.
Dan, I partially agree with you. Certainly, the statistical rarity of white-on-black gang rape should not have been used as some sort of final determinant on the validity of Mangum's claims (and sad to say, I have seen a very few people trying to use it in that way.) And ignoring what doesn't fit our pattern of the world, whether it's a pattern we came to see through statistics or some other way, is a flaw of human perception we must work to overcome.
I do feel, however, that it would have been legitimate to note it as a cause for closer examination of Mangum's claims, just as any statistically unlikely circumstance is a legitimate reason to examine more closely. In this case there were so many warning signs, so much more blatant, that it might seem trivial to place any weight upon this one -- except for the actions of the Group of 88, who went ahead and constructed a whole "metanarrative" on shaky foundations according to which young white men from well-off backgrounds automatically "hop[e] to consume something that they fe[el] that a black woman uniquely possesse[s]". Such a metanarrative neatly "explains" the high prevalence of white-on-black gang rape -- and whenever a theory "explains" the opposite of the evidence as well or better than it explains the actual evidence, it's a sign that the theory and perhaps the theorist need to be looked at with a quite skeptical eye.
> have been used as some sort of final determinant
Or, indeed, as anything at all. Statistically rare things happen ALL THE TIME. The chance that I personally would post this exact message on this exact date at this exact time is so small as to be productively labeled "impossible", but it has indeed happened.
Most productive rule on this: You can't use probability on the past.
and after it came out that no duke lacrosse players DNA was "in" or on her, but several OTHER's men semen were inside her.
you may think the term 'slut' to be a bit harsh, and i aint defending savage in general (i think he is purposefully histrionic much like lenny bruce was... he reminds me a lot of bruce)
so, he called the woman a slut and a liar. the first one is obviously true. the 2nd is a matter of opinion, but hardly unsupported by physical evidence.
"Or, indeed, as anything at all. Statistically rare things happen ALL THE TIME. The chance that I personally would post this exact message on this exact date at this exact time is so small as to be productively labeled "impossible", but it has indeed happened. "
otoh, while gang rapes are rare, the fact that a "victim" comes forward and says she was gang raped is not incredible at all. people don't report to the police "hey, i wasn't gang raped". in the same way, cops don't respond to people having a good time at the dinner table. they respond when people have a 'domestic disturbance' and thus, deal with the problems not the happy stuff
however, the fact that this SAME victim claimed many years ago to have been the victim of ANOTHER gang rape, coincidentally by 3 men, AND that case was DROPPED should have sent up MAJOR RED FLAGS . it did to me
that is incredibly improbable, not to mention the fact that the previous case never saw the light of trial is a big "tell"
"the second one is obviously true. the 1st is a matter of opinion..."
Another of William Anderson's op/eds on the "Lacrosse Case," written on 6/1/2006:
I am glad that Mr. Anderson's prediction was indeed wrong.
Sample of William Anderson's writings:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson-arch.html
Here is a sample of Ms. McElroy's writings:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/mcelroy/mcelroy-arch.html
I'm sorry, but that isn't right. The "several OTHER's men semen" was part of the withheld evidence that led to Nifong spending a day in jail; if we had all known about it in April 2006 there wouldn't've been a problem.
It was December 2006 before this evidence came to the attention of the defense team.
if that's true, i stand corrected.
maybe he called her a slut merely because she's a stripper that goes to parties with tons of drunk men and takes her clothes off, then
"
i hear this stuff a lot, especially from feministing, etc.
iow, even if there was no rape (many still say "something bad happened there, even if it wasn't rape by sexual penetration, etc), these were a bunch of drunk men who hired a stripper.
and...?
file under: so what.
it's college. what the heck is wrong with drinking (presumably some men did drink at the party), and hiring a stripper?
and of course, the same people who say we shouldn't judge mangum for BEING a stripper, say that the duke men were so awful for hiring one.
i have no problem with people hiring strippers. and whatever one may think of it morally (if one is against it. im not), it is perfectly legal activity.
So if a businessman has owned a building for ten years and never insured it and then he decides to take out a large insurance policy on it and on the very first night it's insured it gets burned down, you're saying that there is no reason to find the timing suspicious? I mean, statistically improbable events (such as buildings burning down on the very first day that their burning would result in large payments to the owner) happen all the time, so we just need to throw up our hands, say "oh well, there's the laws of probability for you" and not investigate the possibility of arson even a little bit more closely?
Sorry, I must disagree with you. One must use probability very carefully on the past, that is certain. But when there is in fact dispute about what in fact happened at a particular place and time in the past, it's perfectly reasonable to use probability to assess how probable the various scenarios are.
David-
I think the appropriate expression is that "this is the case that proves the rule" or something like that...
I did say "almost" as I am sure that white on black gang rape does happen, but it is very very rare. Besides I am sure that you would agree that besides being white, the alleged rapists in West Virgina don't have too much in common with the Duke Lacrosse players.
Not to mention that _none_ of the 3 indicted students who suffered the most from the incident had _anything_ to do with actually hiring the strippers.
Just as some of the Lacrosse players, demonized widely on campus by the Group of 88 and others, weren't at the party at all.
But remember, "whatever they did is bad enough".
> timing suspicious?
Not because of probability. What is suspicious is the behavior of buying the insurance. The behavior implies foreknowledge.
The distinction may be subtle, but it is critical.
You mean cats.
Nick
For the record, I think you are a fine fellow, anyway. (But I do think you should look for a presidential candidate who has actually accomplished something. And if you take a closer look at Obama, you may find that his stories of his past life are little fanciful, and that he belongs to a church with doctrines some consider racist. To be fair, it is not clear whether he shares those doctrines -- but he does belong to the church.)
As for the Duke case, I consider myself a conservative (a cross country skiing conservative, to be exact) and I did not write early posts on the case because I didn't know enough about it to make a judgment.