Posted on 04/13/2007 6:05:45 AM PDT by canuck_conservative
Twenty years ago, a black, 15- year-old girl named Tawana Brawley was found in a garbage bag near her Wappingers Falls, N.Y., home. She claimed she'd been abducted, raped and sodomized by six white men over a period of four days, some of them local police officers. The details of the case were sufficiently lurid to guarantee the case became a national sensation. Her body was smeared with feces. Racist slurs had been written on her torso. And her clothing was torn and burned. The case seemed like something out of the KKK era. Reverend Al Sharpton, then merely an ambitious local firebrand, jumped on the case, specifically accusing New York prosecutor Steven Pagones of being one of the rapists.
Ms. Brawley's accusations turned out not only to be a fabrication, but an obvious fabrication: At the time of her alleged abduction and rape, she was partying with classmates. And a witness reported seeing Ms. Brawley climb into the garbage bag herself. When the gig was up, Brawley (who now goes by the afro-Islamic name of Maryam Muhammad) skipped town, along with the US$300,000 "defence fund" that had been raised for her.
Two decades later, history has repeated itself. Like Tawana Brawley, the Durham, N.C., stripper who last year accused three Duke University lacrosse players of gang rape was presented in the media as the ultimate victim: a single black mom from the wrong side of the tracks, trying to make ends meet by giving up her dignity in front of drunken rich kids. Much of America seemed to want this trio to be guilty: As with Ms. Brawley, the episode was such a perfect example of the racism, classism and sexism that allegedly infests America, especially that part of America that lives in the suburbs and sends its well-fed kids to prestigious schools. Two of the accused students were suspended. The lacrosse team's season was canceled. The coach resigned.
Durham, N.C., prosecutor Michael Nifong certainly wanted the charges to be true. From the start, he made hysterical statements to the media, claiming certainty that lacrosse team "hooligans" were guilty. ("There's no doubt in my mind that she was raped and assaulted at this location," Mr. Nifong said.) But as with Tawana Brawley, the case didn't stand up: A second stripper at the party said she hadn't seen anything criminal. Cellphone and bank machine records contradicted the stripper's story, which itself changed radically several times. Her body did contain DNA traces of various men -- but none of those men were Duke University lacrosse players.
We now know that the whole thing was a witch hunt. On Wednesday, North Carolina Attorney- General Roy Cooper declared the trio innocent of all charges. In so doing, he smacked down Mr. Nifong as a "rogue prosecutor" who put his faith in "faulty and unreliable" accusations. No doubt, these words will be read back to Mr. Nifong over and over as he faces ethics charges related to his appalling handling of the case.
Some of the affected families have said they may sue. No one could blame them for doing so. The accused went through more than a year of national vilification, all the while fretting that they could go to jail for decades for crimes they didn't commit. (To give Mr. Nifong his due, however, he did apologize to the three falsely accused Duke students yesterday. Reverend Sharpton, by contrast, refuses to apologize to Steven Pagones to this day.)
The lessons here go beyond North Carolina, and beyond Mr. Nifong's own scandalously poor legal judgment: As with Tawana Brawley, the Durham stripper affair shows what happens when race politics overpower the presumption of innocence. With Ms. Brawley, a merit-less case rumbled into the grand jury phase because Al Sharpton and others like him decided it was a good platform from which to whip up their own political profiles and bona fides within the black community. In Durham, N.C., likewise, it is interesting to note that Mr. Nifong (who is white) made his decision to charge the Duke lacrosse team trio just weeks before a crucial party primary that cemented his re-election as district attorney. (Not surprisingly, Mr. Nifong got most of the black vote.)
But more than that, the case stands as a cautionary tale about what happens when onlookers -- whether journalists, activists or ambitious political figures -- treat people's lives as self-serving racial props. There will always be people, of every racial description, who have no scruples about making false criminal allegations. They shouldn't be supported just because their story fits into some preconceived notion of societal victimization.
© National Post 2007
Man, they must be smoking some good weed north of the border if this clown thinks Nifong will ever suffer any consequences.
He is a Democrat, and as such, he can do whatever he wants, especially to rich white kids.
When is the last time a Democrat was held accountable for anything?
If he were a Republican, the Dems would hold him up as the poster-boy for the culture of corruption. No one in the GOP in NC or DC will even mention the crook's party affiliation. Someone might call them mean-spirited or something.
He will not suffer at all from this. In the unlikely event he is disbarred, he will be a huge hit on the college lecture circuit making his annual salary in about 4 appearances.
It’s funny how all those people who were in such a frenzy to show how unbigoted they were, were willing to trample the constitutional rights of the accused and those tied to them. This case shows how poor judgement on the part of the Duke lacrosse team can affect so many people. The coach was fired. The team lost an opportunity to compete. The three players will always be tied to this case even though they are innocent because there are people out there that will still believe they did it no matter what the evidence says. In fact, 88 professors at Duke had these players convicted before the facts were in. This may be an even bigger black mark on the university. They forgot that one of the basic foundations of the criminal justice system is a defendant is innocent until proven guilty and secondly, it is the responsibility of the prosecution to prove their guilt. The defendants do not have to prove their innocence. In this case these defendants were found guilty by the press, professors, and the prosecutor. And even though the longer the story ran, the more it looked like they were falsely accused, everyone still believed they were guilty. This sounded more like a criminal prosecution in the old Soviet Union than justice in the USA. If this is an example of what liberalism will give you, color me conservative through and through.
Why wasn't this woman prosecuted for filing a false report and fraud?
Rev Sharpton has shown his real agenda.
The “rev” is all about racism, hate, racism, greed, racism...
The thing that really torches me time after time regardless of the situation, everyone gives credance to this racist, bigoted, waste of human flesh by calling him Reverand. There is nothing reverand about this jerk nor Jesse Jackson. My big toe is about as reverand as they are. They give the term a bad name.
For the same reason that the one in the Duke case is not being prosecuted would be my guess.
Any lesson to be learned from Tawana Brawley is lost on Sharpton.
he is still up to his old shenanigans and making money off it.
AND, Sharpton lost a civil suit brought by Pagones, and has yet to pay up, claiming in a deposition that he doesn’t own anything (yet, his daughter goes to a very expensive private school and he jets around the country constantly).
Nifong should go to jail for this.
His behaviour was criminal - or should be.
Don’t be so sure. Down here on the ground in Durham, The Fong is toxic waste right about now. The so-called “community leaders” are so quiet, you can hear pins drop in the projects, virtually nobody is coming to this guy’s defense. And the backlash against him and Crystal Gail Mangum is *huge*. A lot of people in this area are really, really pissed off at what this whole travesty has made Durham and the entire state of North Carolina look like.
Basically, the “community leaders” are going to throw The Fong under the bus to try and take the heat off Crazy Crystal. And it’ll probably work.
}:-)4
This is a good article.One error however, the accuser was more than a stripper,
she advertised herself as a prostitute on the internet.
The DNA testing confirmed that she was a prostitute.The real issue is hinted at here, the rise of the 21th century Klu Klux Klan
lead by Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson helped by a race-baiting cracker named Nifong.It is not surprising that Nifong was a Democrat running for office.
I thought the guy that owns BET paid the bill for Al ?
They’re still guilty of an arrogant white attitude that thinks it’s ok to pray on poor girls of color from the wrong side of the tracks. IOW, even if they’re not guilty of “this offense,” they still guilty.
(/s for those of you in Rio Linda)
His behaviour was criminal - or should be.
His behavior was transparently unethical. Actually, he slandered the entire Duke Lacrosse Team by publicly accusing them, falsely, of sonewalling ("a blue wall of silence").But we all know that the actual exploiters of the Duke Lacrosse Team were others who picked up on the gambit, and ran with it. The Duke 88, for example. But the real deep pockets exploiters were in the propaganda (so-called "objective") media. Just as in the case of the 60 Minutes "Killian Memos" October surprise hit on President Bush - and as in the case of the post-election commentary on Fox News Channel's calling the '00 election for Bush in the wee hours after the election, Big Journalism systematically promotes itself at the expense of others. Its claim of objectivity is a fraud, and that fraud makes all other frauds it perpetrates doubly - no, trebly as in "triple damages for RICO" - egregious.
The proper target of the legitimate lawsuit which should lie in all these cases is not just an individual like Nifong but broadcast journalism and the FCC for licensing broadcasters and allowing them to pull these stunts with impunity.
They say she’s delusional. Wonder if they’re letting her raise the kid.
BTTT
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