With the filing of ethics charges against Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong last week, the assault charges against Duke lacrosse players may finally be spiraling to an end.
Even without those charges creating a conflict of interest that made it likely that Nifong would have to recuse himself, there were other indications of how this sorry saga may end. Nifong told The New York Times that he would drop the case if the accuser couldn’t identify the three defendants and be 100 percent certain the defendants were the men she says assaulted her.
Given that he dropped the rape charges when she suddenly decided that, contrary to her earlier claims to the police, she couldn’t say with that same certainty that she had indeed been raped, the way now seems clear for her to testify in February that she doubts that the three defendants are the same three men she believes assaulted her a year earlier. His interview with the Times may even have instructed the accuser about what she could say for the case to be dismissed.
If the case is dismissed shortly, what can we expect from all those who were so ready to brand the Duke lacrosse team as a group of racist rapists? Will the 88 professors who published an ad praising the protestors who weren’t waiting for due process and already labeling the lacrosse players rapists apologize for their rush to judgment? Probably not.
I expect we’ll hear instead calls for healing. The players will be urged to get on with their lives and not to focus on suing Durham or the D.A. They’ll be reminded that Durham is not a wealthy county and can’t afford an expensive civil suit.
Those who were quick to say that this story was emblematic of racism at elite colleges will say that the lesson is still true, even though this one specific story was a hoax. Wahneema Lubiano, the Duke professor of African and American Studies who led the group of 88 who published that ad, wrote back in May that, no matter the outcome, the whole story exposed deeper truths about racism on Duke’s campus. Expect that storyline to be repeated if the charges are all dropped. The song of “fake but accurate” will be sung again.
Sadly, we didn’t learn from the Tawana Brawley hoax that we should pause when a story seems to fit a stereotypical version of racism. The storyline of rich, privileged white boys raping a poor black girl seemed so apt that some people embraced it without waiting to evaluate the evidence.
Lynne Duke, a Washington Post staff writer, wrote in May that “the Duke case is in some ways reminiscent of a black woman’s vulnerability to a white man during the days of slavery, reconstruction and Jim Crow, when sex was used as a tool of racial domination.”
Well, no. Perhaps it’s just a sordid story of a woman making up a story about being raped and a white prosecutor using that story to win an election.
For some, the facts don’t even matter. Newsweek reported in April that one student at North Carolina Central University where the accuser attended school wanted the players to be prosecuted “whether it happened or not. It would be justice for things that happened in the past.”
Our justice system deserves better than a “fake, but accurate” approach to prosecution. We don’t prosecute people just because they fit a stereotype. It was attitudes like that which resulted in the injustices that the NCCU student wanted addressed in the first place. In this case, turnabout is not fair play.
Instead, when a story seems to fit our stereotypes, law officers, school officials, the media and the public needed to be more skeptical. And those who were so quick to use this story to talk about racism because they believed a black woman accusing white athletes must be telling the truth might first want to remove the beam in their own eyes.
Everyone, including those activists, should be concerned about the precedents that Nifong has set and the civil liberties of future defendants. If Nifong can twist procedure and lie to the court about evidence in a case with so much publicity, what might be happening in the cases that are not so high profile with defendants who can’t afford expensive lawyers?
That a prosecutor could carry on a baseless case for what seems like political reasons exposes a need for more checks on local prosecutors. Will the next woman in this community who comes forward to say that she was brutally attacked have a harder time persuading authorities and getting public sympathy because of the lies of one striptease dancer and one district attorney who wanted to get reelected? These are results of this case that should worry all of us.
Betsy Newmark is a member of The Examiner Blog Board of Contributors and blogs at betsyspage.blogspot.com.
