The amount of justice in a dismissal will have a lot to do with how it’s presented. This can range from “We don’t believe our case is strong enough to secure a conviction” to “We find no evidence that any crime was committed - we apologize unreservedly for unethical and illegal actions that caused a massive miscarriage of justice.”
The former will allow the remaining faithful (there still are some) to continue to believe that a heinous crime will go unpunished for reasons related to sex, race and privilege. The latter will make it clear (to most) that this whole thing never should have happened.
Poster A: Position X
Poster B: I believe you’re right.
Poster A: No, goddamnit, I’m right!
Poster B: Fuck you, you’re right!
Poster A: Eat shit, asshole, because there is no way I’m wrong!
Poster B: … ad infinitum …
A big problem with this is the fact that in order to go to trial a DA is supposed to have probable cause to believe a crime was committed by the accused. It has widely been held that the accuser “deserves her day in court” but this is wrong - an accused deserves a day in court - an accuser is (quite properly) required to get past the hurdle of probable cause.
Unless the prosecution has sufficient evidence of the guilt of the accused, a trial is a sham, and they are involved in subornation of perjury if they call witnesses to testify.
And, contra, I hear you, but I am in no way sanguine that a Durham jury (drawn from the venire that elected Dumbfuck Nifong) would have arrived at the proper verdict or refrained from sending an F-U to the Ofay by sending these guys up the river. No, instead, I will anticipate (without much hope) the televised show trials of LW Crystal and Dumbfuck Mike.
Fuck off! What I said, and if you had any sort of reading comprehension skills at all you might have understood, is that what we have here is a violent agreement.
Yes, and I’d like to see the self-serving, race-baiting “black leadership,” the largly-black community that insisted on the whore’s veracity, and Duke’s elitist liberal class-baiting professoriat that insisted on the players’ guilt and held it up as an example of their class-warfare delusions, all eat humble pie. However, I have no doubt that they will simply slip away, avoid responsibility, and (in the case of the black leadership and the professoriat) re-arise to stone the next accusation by a Tawana Brawley.
It IS a good thing that the charges have been dropped, what you said though was that “justice has been done” which is laughable. If i torture you for a whole year and then i stop that doesn’t mean justice has been done, when Nifong and the whore are behind bars you can start praising the justice system.
I think this is a start to seeing justice done for these young men. For it to get to trial would mean that the DA (not Nfong, who had his own agenda) thought he had enought evidence to convict. Since there was no evidence to convict, this is the best possible legal outcome.
I sincerely hope LWCM is brought up on charges for making a false statement. I doubt seriously her legal bills would top $5 million, but I would like to see her have to hock her future to pay a lawyer to defend what she has done. Oh, I’m sorry - she would probably be entitled to a public defender. Or Jesse Jackson would defend her; I wonder if he still wants to fund her college education?
The thing that pisses me off the most about LHCM is that I have been the victim of a sexual assault. False accusations make it much harder for the real victims to be taken seriously.
If I believed in Hell I would wish her to rot there - as it is I can only hope Karma will do her in.
I sincerely hope Nfong is disbarred and loses every asset he will ever have to these guys. Just because their parents were “well off” doesn’t mean they had a couple of million just lying around to hand to a team of lawyers.
If I were a student at Duke I would have transferred long ago. I hope they end up handing a significant chunk of their endowment to these young men. Some of the professors at that school are an embarassment to human beings, let alone teachers.
Well, they could always garnish her wages and have the two-bit whore pay them back a quarter at a time!
I don’t think I ever expressed a strong opinion on this matter one way or the other, and I’m not too terribly interested in researching it now. Would someone “in the know” fill me in on what supposedly happened at the party? or do we know? My understanding is that they guys were accused of rape and that those charges were dropped. Is it understood that lacrosse players had sex with the stripper at the party but that the sex was consensual, involved players other than the ones identified, or that no sex took place? What did the stripper lie about - that sex took place, who it was with, whether it was consensual…?
I guess I’m wavering as to how sympathetic I am for these “blameless good kids.” Yeah, if you didn’t rape someone you shouldn’t have to defend yourself against a charge of rape. But I admit I would have more sympathy for some kid who was working his way through school and was studying in the library or working on the night in question, instead of some rich kid who was boozing it up and banging a whore at a party. Of course this reflects my personal prejudices and not what I desire of our legal system. But I’m curious nonetheless.
Well, there was no DNA evidence tying the accused to the accuser, which lends weight to the “no sex” supposition rather than the “consensual sex” one. But as to the “more sympathy” line, I suppose I don’t think “he was asking for it” is good justification for being dragged through a false rape accusation.
What a lot of quotes. Well, you know what I mean. :smack:
They hired the girls to dance. The girls showed up, danced for a bit, then left. Then LWCM reported that she had be held captive in a bathroom and been raped and sodomized by 3 of the Lax players, something she made up out of whole cloth. As a result, and in spite of the fact that there was no evidence to support her claims, despite her story changing almost daily and in spit of the fact that no DNA evidence matching any of the Lax players (but lots of DNA from 4 or more other men (LWCM apparently is the poster child for the term “cum dumpster”)), these 3 men were charged with rape, castigated nationally, paid $5 million dollars on lawyers, were subject to lost job opportunities, failed classes and even public calls for their castration… oh, hell, just go to Durahm in Wonderland and read it all yourself. What I’ve posted so far is just the tip of what happened
There’s no reason to call her ‘a Tawana Brawley’ since we know her name.
Crystal Mangum shouldn’t be able to park her lying ass behind any name but her own.
Given the complete and utter lack of DNA from any of the Duke lacrosse players anywhere on Crystal Mangum, it’s pretty evident that she’s lying about everything beyond having danced at that party and exchanging verbal epithets.
They’re guilty of nothing more than perhaps bad taste and potty mouth language.
So your entire opinion is based upon the fact that they were college athletes who hired a stripper for a party?
And to think there were people here who didn’t believe that this false accusation by Crystal Mangum, lying whore, would mar these young men permanently.
All of the white members of the Duke lacrosse team submitted to DNA testing. The tests revealed DNA from a varying number of men (reports I’ve read ranged from 4 to 7) but there were no matches to any of the Duke players.
One of the players who was indicted had ATM records, cell phone records and video footage from the ATM showing he wasn’t even at the house during the time LWCM said she was raped.
The only reason this case went on for as long as it did and went as far as it did was because there was a rogue DA (Mike Nfong) who used the case to increase his vote numbers among the black citizens of Durham - when he had promised the governor he wouldn’t run for election when he was appointed.
Yes, LWCM is a troubled person - and Nfong played her like a harp. I have no sympathy for her, but I hope she gets the help she needs.
The lesson here, to me at least, is yet another reinforcement of the foolishness of participating in these stupid recreational outrage threads. The way these things play out, usually, is that there’s an early report of some bit of nastiness. Everybody jumps to associate themselves with some position or other, based on emotion usually (“how dare they cook and eat kittens!”). Then a few days or weeks go by, and the original story develops a bit; the truth, invariably, is somewhat, or violently, at odds with the initial report. (“Actually, they were serving regular food on plates decorated with kitten pictures.”) Then there’s a big ugly sloshing motion as everybody dodges and weaves and tries to retroactively justify their knee-jerk opinions.
Me, I saw this story developing, and I said to myself: This doesn’t have anything to do with you. It’s story against story. Nobody’s going to know what really happened for weeks or months. And I detached, and quit paying attention. And hey, look at me! I win. I didn’t have an opinion, so I don’t have to eat crow about anything.
But here’s the thing: As far as I’m concerned, everybody who jumped on the bandwagon here is at fault. It doesn’t matter at all that later events proved one side to be right and the other side to be wrong. There wasn’t enough information to make an intelligent judgment. Given what was known at the outset, which is to say almost fucking nothing, it’s just as possible for things to have turned out differently. From then to now, it’s equally likely that those who are now dancing in the virtual aisles might have found themselves in the opposition’s position, either desperately trying to re-spin their earlier assertions after the fact or simply hiding in humiliation. And the exact same observations about “how difficult it is for people to admit when they’re wrong” would be true.
How about this, kids: Don’t rush to premature judgment in the first place. How fucking hard is that?
What do you gain, really, by diving into an ambiguous event and planting your flags that early, other than winning bragging rights down the road on the basis of a factual coin flip? Yay, good for you. Whoop te fucking doo. This time the hooker lied, the jocks were angels, and the prosecutor was a political fuckhead. Give yourself a fucking medal.
The whole thing disgusts me. All of you. You should be ashamed. Scoring boasting points off other people’s tragedies.
This is probably going to get me flamed for days, but fuck it.
