Prosecutors Gone Wild
The Duke lacrosse rape case—although the prosecution disintegrated and the DA was hustled off to jail—remains something of a cause célèbre. A number of blogs have kept up the drumbeat of indignation, and there are now three books out on the travesty. For all the commentary, however, I argue in this piece I wrote for The Nation that the wrong lessons are being drawn. The rottenness at the heart of this wrongful indictment is not political correctness run amuck, as most pundits are claiming, but prosecutorial power run rampant.
March 5th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Bottom line: If you were a white college student from New England whose father was raised by a black family (making your putative grandparents black); or a white college student from New England whose father built a hospital in Africa and supported black education–what sort of fair hearing could you expect if you were falsely accused of raping a poor black woman in the South?
For the answer, see Durham, 2006.
(Being white and Yankee were all that mattered in that case; the evidence was irrelevant.)