Authored by William L. Anderson via the Mises Institute,
Twenty years ago this month, the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case exploded on the Duke University campus, with three members of the university’s lacrosse team falsely accused of raping and assaulting a black stripper.It took more than a year to exonerate those young men, but only after the false charges had ruined lives and exposed elite higher education in the US.
As one who wrote nearly 100 articles on this case and who was interviewed on talk shows, along with working with some of the attorneys and families involved in the case,I saw it from the inside. I reported onprosecutors who liedand knowingly filed false charges and suborned perjury to cover their lies,police who liedat every turn of what turned out to be a sham investigation, andmembers of the Duke University faculty and administration who took part in framing innocent peoplefor a crime that did not happen. And hovering over all of the wreckage was a combination of national and local media whose reporters—with some heroic exceptions—followed a false narrative until it drove them right over a cliff.
There is a standard narrative that the media and others want us to imagine: three young men were falsely accused of terrible crimes, but after diligent investigations by the authorities and good-faith efforts by others, the lacrosse players were exonerated while the malefactors were punished. In the end, the system worked.
That narrative is a lie, and over these next few weeks, I will deal with the different aspects of the case, from the police and prosecution to the Duke faculty and administration and to the media. There are numerous villains in this story and very few “good guys.” Furthermore, other than a mild punishment given to the lead prosecutor who committed numerous felonies during his reign of terror, none of the others who participated in pushing this false case faced any sanctions at all and many of the worst actors found themselves gaining even more power and wealth after the saga ended.
Far from being a situation in which the justice system “worked,”the Duke Lacrosse Case was theproverbial canaryin the coal mine, a warning as to just how badly the system would veer off course when one of its members decided to lie with impunity. And it wasn’t just the justice system that showed its utter corruption. Duke’s foray into what now is called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) would be a driving force in forcing attorneys for the players to do something unprecedented in US educational and justice history: attorneys filing a request for a change of venue because the university’s faculty and administration had behaved like a lynch mob.
And even after the lies in the case were exposed, nothing changed. Just seven years after the players were declared “innocent”Rolling Stonemagazine, which had already disgraced itself in its coverage of the lacrosse case, published a story alleging rape and assault at the University of Virginia called “A Rape on Campus”—a story that was a complete fabrication and ultimately cost the magazine millions of dollars insettlementsagainstpeoplewho were libeled and even wascondemnedby the left-wingColumbia Journalism Review.
Of course, the national media at first accepted theRolling Stonepiece as gospel truth just as it swallowed whole the Duke Lacrosse account. In both stories, the facts quickly established that both situations were built on lies, but the narratives that mainstream journalists follow rarely bow to the facts and the so-called “Newspaper of Record,” theNew York Times, was probably the worst offender in the Duke case, with the possible exception of the localDurham Herald Sun.
The blogosphere and other internet outlets were a different story. While mainstream journalists (with the exception of the late Ed Bradley of CBS News’ “60 Minutes”) were siding with the prosecution and the Duke faculty, a number of bloggers and writers, led byKC Johnson—a Harvard-educated history professor at Brooklyn College whose blogDurham-in-Wonderlandtook the case apart time and again—exposing one lie after another.If anything, the Duke Lacrosse Case demonstrated the power of the internet and bloggers who were more than able to match wits with the most powerful journalists in the world and shoot down their false claims.
Today’s account will outline the fundamentals of the case. After all, it happened 20 years ago, and most people have either forgotten it or never heard of it in the first place. But this story is worth remembering for no other reason than it showed how dishonest police and prosecutors can frame innocent people in broad daylight and it proved that the worst of the academic world was now running the elite universities, and there was no stopping the rot. As written earlier, it was higher education’s canary in the coal mine—and the canary is still dying if not already dead.
Source: ZeroHedge News
