Letters to the Editor
-
From a survivor: Sure, false accusations happen!
I have, like, two minutes to dash this off, but just have to say something...
ガガ ガガ ガガ wrote: "[...] And when you are done with that please see if you can find any assault survivors that think that some rape charges may be false accusations."
Here's one! Me: Rape and beating survivor, female, age 37, white, politically liberal. And I, like anyone who paid attention to the details of this case, could tell from the start there was no rape there. Getting raped didn't make me stupid. Please.
If anything, my unfortunate experience and the aftermath gave me special insight into this case. If you're raped by three men, you WILL have not only semen, but hair and skin cells on your body and under your fingernails. It is inevitable. Just days into the investigation it was clear nothing happened here--yet all the people who for sociopolitical reasons *wanted* something to have happened--like Duke haters and knee-jerk liberals who give us thinking liberals a bad name--were glad to put their own spin on each bit of news.
One bit of spin that really infuriated me along the way was hearing people say, "Well, DNA evidence, or the lack of it, doesn't prove anything." Actually, thank god for DNA technologies. DNA puts criminals in prison (like my case) and frees wrongly convicted people. We are all fortunate to have it available.
I got my bachelor's and master's from Duke and live not far away from the school now. I am so disappointed in Duke for not standing up for its students. And if I hear one more "campus cultural initiative" task-force nonsense report, I'm going to barf. Such navel-gazing.
At any rate, I'm glad the guys have been cleared, and that the clearing said so unequivocally that they never should have been charged in the first place. I hope they can find some normalcy in their lives. As for the accuser and Nifong, I hope their senses of guilt are overwhelming. As Attorney General Cooper said, many people owe many people apologies.
This comment is a little slap-dash, but wanted to add my voice, since ガガ ガガ ガガ was looking for just this situation...
-
cleared but not innocent
I have had to research the Duke Case for a book I am writing. One of the accused was arrested for a different attack on a woman when he was home on bail!!! He was again cleared.
The Lacrosse team was one of the most flagrantly mysogynistic and abusive of all the fraternities at Duke. They were infamous for abusing women at their 'parties.' Nifong had this history going into the case. He believed the woman accuser, not out of the goodness of his heart, but because the hospital exam showed serious physical damage. They did not test for the use of a rape drug, but it is now believed one was used which is why her story has changed so much and why the men arrested were so sure they would be found innocent. She knew she had been hurt and abused, she couldn't sit down for days. But it is highly likely that she never could get it quite clear because of the affect of the drug.
As with O.J. these athletes hired the biggest and best legal guns, their enormously wealthy and influential parents bankrolled another legal dream team. They went after Nifong and the evidence collection. And then they dismissed the victim as a mental case.
Before you are so quick to do a mea culpa get your facts clear. What this acquittal means is not enough evidence could be amassed to see that justice was done.
Lin Farley
-
To Ben--
I assumed the boys were guilty, yes, but I think we all make assumptions when a court case comes up. Presumption of innocence is the legal standard, and one I think we all should live by, but we're also all human. I'd like to think if I'd been in a position to judge these boys or temper my reactions to them I wouldn't have put my knee-jerk assumption into my conduct. I hope, anyway.
-
Declared Innocent by Prosecutor's Office
See Yahoo feed on the story, including a statement from the prosecutor's office, which has access to all of the evidence in the case.
Lin Farley, you should educate yourself before you further smear these boys and lend credibility to the woman who made false allegations. The prosecutor's office declared they believe no attack occurred and that the accused are innocent.
...In a blistering assessment of the case, Attorney General Roy Cooper dropped all charges against the players, all but ensuring that only one person in the whole scandal will be held to account: Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong.
"This case shows the enormous consequences of overreaching by a prosecutor," Cooper said.
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....The attorney general said the eyewitness identification procedures were unreliable, no DNA supported the stripper's story, no other witness corroborated it, and the woman contradicted herself.
"Based on the significant inconsistencies between the evidence and the various accounts given by the accusing witness, we believe these three individuals are innocent of these charges," Cooper said. He said the charges resulted from a "tragic rush to accuse and a failure to verify serious allegations."
"I think a lot of people owe a lot of apologies to a lot of people," Cooper said."
-
Links, Lin?
Lin, you've got to provide some backing for your own accusations.
You wrote: "One of the accused was arrested for a different attack on a woman when he was home on bail!!! He was again cleared.' "
Evidence? Links?
You wrote: "He [Nifong] believed the woman accuser, not out of the goodness of his heart, but because the hospital exam showed serious physical damage. They did not test for the use of a rape drug, but it is now believed one was used which is why her story has changed so much and why the men arrested were so sure they would be found innocent."
Actually, there were toxicity tests. All were COMPLETELY CLEAR. The accuser herself admitted she had been abusing the drug Flexeril, and had taken it earlier that day, along with drinking alcohol. There is NO evidence of any rape drug. Where the hell did you get that? And the examination showed only "diffuse edema of the vaginal walls"--the slight swelling all women get after sex. Have you read the SANE report?
In fact, she was strip-dancing again, athletically, 13 days after the attack. You can view the video.
You wrote: "As with O.J. these athletes hired the biggest and best legal guns, their enormously wealthy and influential parents bankrolled another legal dream team."
Actually, their parents re-mortgaged their houses and went many hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. Would I have wanted my parents to do the same for me or my brother? Yes. Wouldn't you, if you were facing life in prison for something you didn't do?
You wrote: "What this acquittal means is not enough evidence could be amassed to see that justice was done."
No, the attorney general, Roy Cooper, clearly stated this was not a case of the state not having quite enough evidence--he said the charges never should have been brought in the first place, that the men were unequivocally innocent of the charges, that Nifong acted as a, quote, rogue prosecutor.
And as for the mental state of the accuser, the first references to that came yesterday with Cooper's gentle, indirect statement that charges against her wouldn't be forthcoming because she appears to believe her many contradictory stories.
AG Cooper became already a star in my book several years ago when he funded an initiative to clear the backlog of thousands of rape kits that were sitting on the shelves in Raleigh unexamined. In this case, he has again stood up for rape victims by making sure the truth came out.
As for your book, I hope it's not a work of nonfiction.
If you want to say there's general mistreatment and sexual mischaracterization of women across many levels of society--from music to athletics on all levels to general culture--I'm with you. But you're going up the wrong tree here.