Something else to be aware of. North Carolina’s ethics rules (in line with the Supreme Court’s Brady jurisprudence) requires the prosecution to timely turn over to the defense any possibly-exculpatory material the prosecution discovers.
To a hack prosecutor, this can be a disincentive to do much investigation beyond cherry picking whatever few initial facts help “his” case (actually, it is the People’s case, and should not be brought if not meritorious, but unfortunately, egos and electoral ambition often get involved), because he would then “just be doing the defense’s job for them.”
It’s much harder for a defendant to prove prosecutorial misconduct by virtue of sloppy, inadequate, or tendentious investigation than it is to prove misconduct by virtue of a thorough investigation that reveals information calling the prosecution’s theory into question that is suppressed/not turned over to defendant. Perverse incentives if the prosecutor is not primarily concerned with determining what actually happened as opposed to getting politically-popular indictments/convictions.
She (reportedly – according to a defense attorney) “identified them by scratches on their bodies.” (Scratches that did not leave any DNA under her fingernails). “The face isn’t familiar, but the torso rings a bell.”
BTW, if we haven’t discussed it, these two guys were suspended from school (not like they’d have been doing much of a job of studying for finals anyhow, I suppose). Man, I hope Nifong knows what he’s doing.
Although I’m sure the chances of their winning are slim, could the lacrosse players file a civil suit against the D.A. if they could prove that he did all of this as a promotional gimmick.
If it proves to be a false allegation, sure, they can sue him and the allegate-or. Some of the elements of (say) a malicious prosecution claim are set forth in:
They wouldn’t have to (and wouldn’t be able to) prove he cooked this up as a “promotional gimmick,” per se. As stupid as he may be, he’s not stupid enough (?) to file a charge he positively knew to be baseless or to manufacture evidence for it. If the story proves baseless, the allegation against Nifong would be more along the lines that he “legitimately” received a lurid, statistically improbable tale with little hard evidence backing it on its face, and didn’t care too much to do any additional investigation to see if it checked out or could be independently substantiated (or, independently discredited) before filing super-serious charges against two people. I suspect they might also have constitutional claims on the searches, as well as ethics grievances (no money for those) for his public statements and alleged contacts with represented parties.
Again according to the defense, he called the cab at 12:14. The pictures show them dancing happily at 12:02. So if the defense information is correct (we don’t know yet, but as I’ve noted, even weaselly defense lawyers don’t often lie about such specific factual claims that can be falsified), the entire brutal rape was crammed into 12 minutes. Or maybe he called when he was raping her, that happens a lot too.
I had an eye-opening conversation at dinner last night. Someone (not me) raised the Duke case and I mentioned that it was an example of just how much discretion prosecutors had to use (or abuse). One woman opined that “yes, but it would be wrong not to indict in any allegation of rape – the facts can be sorted out at trial, but what woman would ever report rape if she thought the attacker might not be indicted?”
I was stunned to see nods around the table. First, the comparatively high rate of false rape allegations (at least according to the cites in this thread) suggests that some women, at least, have no discomfort in reporting even imaginary rapes. Second, they weren’t familiar with (and kind of just blinked at) the articles I mentioned citing the false-report prevalence; one of them trotted out the reliable 'Everyone knows that women would never lie about rape" dogma. Third, they had no statistics for just how serious a problem underreporting of rape was, or would be in a regime in which dubious rape complaints were not automatically indicted.
I accept that there is probably some problem of underreporting of rape. I also suspect that awareness of this problem is far greater than awareness of the false-report problem, and that a reasoned balancing of these two problems (taking into account the reality that underreporting doesn’t threaten to send anyone to jail as false reports do) is precluded by ideology of the “Tawana told the truth”/“Women would never lie” variety.
Bond for these two rapists was, of course, set at $400,000. Rape being eight times more serious than, um, murder, in the eyes of Durham prosecutors/judges. (Or, the risk of rapists fleeing being eight times greater).
Well, a 2% false allegation rate is probably too low, but I’ve been googling and haven’t found much to support your statement that the false allegation rate is 50% (from the one college study you cited).
Some cites I found (I have added my emphasis in bold:
Here is a link to the statistical tables from the Department of Justice, through 2002, and the table index for rape and the table 91 on reporting to police. There is a PDF file for 2003, that states that only 38.5% of rapes are reported to police, with 198,850 victimizations. There are also sub-categories for attempted rape and sexual assault, but that table doesn’t list the definitions for those terms.
So basically in the United States, rape does have a higher false allegation rate compared to other crimes (8% versus 2%) - but according to the FBI is not nearly as high as your earlier cite of 50%.
And the underreporting rate for rape has been fairly consistent with about 38-39% of cases being reported.
Bail amounts are also based on the suspects ability to pay and risk of flight, etc. Its not just based on the crime. Since the kids are from very wealthy familes, the bail had to be higher in order to assure they show up at court.
The 50% study I mentioned was, indeed, only based on reports at college campuses, but I did think that had some relevance to this college allegation. While that one was frankly astonishing and troubling, the FBI numbers are not at all reassuring though lower.
Well, I agree that I wouldn’t call it reassuring. 8% of men accused being falsely rape is unsettling, and it must be awful to be in that position.
However, it does mean that 92% of accusations are truthful and not malicious. This is reassuring to me.
I don’t find it surprising that rape has a higher false allegation rate than, say, break and enter or larceny. Rape and accusations of rape pack a high emotional punch, so if a woman were malicious enough to want to falsely accuse a male of a crime, something shocking like incendiary like rape would be a good way to go. (Not really good of course, but “good” for her bad purposes).