Durham-in-Wonderland

Poynter & The Serial Fabricator

2012-02-07T00:01:00.009-05:00

I recently did a post at Minding the Campus examining how the media responded to the Times’ Patrick Witt article—a piece of “journalism” that’s looking worse by the day, and which the Times public editor has now repudiated.

The most extraordinary (and counterintuitive) critique came from Poynter’s Kelly McBride—who faulted the Times, which had bent over backwards to frame the case against Witt as negatively as possible, for not doing enough to ensure that Witt’s accuser’s story was represented. To bolster her line of argument, McBride turned to adjunct law professor Wendy Murphy, who had distinguished herself in the lacrosse case for her willingness to fabricate, fabricate again, and fabricate some more.

Poynter describes its mission as promoting “excellence and integrity in the practice of craft.” The organization claims that “we teach . . . ethical decision-making,” with teaching “focused on the highest standards of journalistic value.” How could this type of organization turn to a serial fabricator such as Murphy?

In an e-mail, I provided McBride with a list of many (but not all) of Murphy’s public, factual inaccuracies (as well as her various unsubstantiated opinions and denigrations of due process). McBride replied that she saw no problem at all in her use of Murphy as either a source or a seminar instructor. She even seemed willing to rationalize Murphy’s difficulties with the truth, describing the list in the following manner: “Some of those statements are her opinions. Some of them are statements she made based on her expertise in the subject area. Some of them are taken out of context.” I invited McBride to identify any of the factual errors as items “taken out of context”; she did not reply.

No one would expect McBride to be an expert on Murphy’s record in the lacrosse case (although the media’s failures, and Murphy’s role in them, was explored at great length in the American Journalism Review, which presumably is on every Poynter faculty member’s regular reading list). But it seems as if Murphy’s serial fabrications mattered not to McBride, who affirmed that even after hearing of them, she’d eagerly invite Murphy back to teach at Poynter.

McBride’s response confirms observations from Alex Pareene, who described Murphy’s career as showing that “there are, in the mass media, absolutely no consequences for blatant, constant lying,” and Radley Balko, who came away from his own experience of Murphy inventing facts to ask, “At some point you have to wonder, is it even possible to be too shameless for cable news?” It seems that as long as Murphy still gets quoted by the media and retains the backing of like-minded figures within the “victims’ rights” movement, two alleged Murphy qualifications mentioned by McBride, she’ll receive Poynter’s seal of approval—factual inaccuracies and wildly intemperate, unsubstantiated opinions be damned. Would Poynter be as cavalier if women or minority groups had been the targets of Murphy’s bile?

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Between April 5, 2006 and December 31, 2006, Murphy made no fewer than 18 factually inaccurate statements in her TV commentary about the lacrosse case. She made at least eight more factually inaccurate statements about the case in December 21, 2006 and January 9, 2007 “talking points” forwarded by “victims’ rights” groups, plus at least one factual error in a late 2006 USA Today op-ed. Twenty-seven outright errors of fact on a single case is quite a tally. And that list, of course, doesn’t include Murphy’s misleading statements that were phrased in the form of questions or speculation, or her use of unsubstantiated rumors.

Facts are facts, and McBride’s insinuation that “context” could somehow transform Murphy’s factual errors into “facts” is absurd. But context does matter in interpreting factual errors. That Murphy’s factual errors weren’t random but almost always tilted against the lacrosse players suggests she wasn’t simply amazingly sloppy (a problem that in and of itself would seem to disqualify someone as a Poynter source or seminar instructor). Instead, Murphy’s fabrications bolstered her preconceived views, suggesting deliberateness to her fabrications.

In this respect, and despite McBride’s implication, the broader context of Murphy’s remarks was even more damning than the myriad factual inaccuracies taken alone. Beyond factually inaccurate descriptions of North Carolina legal procedures or some defense motions, each time in such a way to reinforce the ultimately-disbarred Mike Nifong’s position, Murphy’s serial fabrications tended to fall into one of three general categories:

(1) The April 4, 2006 photo array, which provided the only specific evidence used to indict the three falsely accused players and which Nifong had ordered the DPD to confine to members of the lacrosse team, did not violate DPD procedures, because many lacrosse players didn’t attend the party, and therefore these non-attendees could be deemed fillers. Confirmation for this “fact” came from a neutral source on the criminal case, Duke president Richard Brodhead.

Here was the Poynter source/seminar instructor on May 2, 2006: “According to Durham president, the president of the university, he said March 22 in a press release, many players weren’t there that night. Well, what does that tell us? It tells us the defense motion [on the lineup] is a bunch of nonsense, because if many players weren’t there, it’s a darned good chance if this was a hoax that she could have gotten it wrong.” Murphy returned to the theme in a December 21 e-mail: “The line-ups were not unlawful. According to the president of Duke, ‘many’ players were not at the party—and many NON-players WERE.” [Emphasis added in both instances; capitalization in original.]

Murphy’s description of Durham’s lineup procedures was wrong: Nifong had publicly identified as suspects all 46 white lacrosse players, the only people included in the April 4 photo array, and the Durham Police Department procedures required photos of five non-suspects for each photo of a suspect. Wouldn’t a lawyer understand the definition of a non-suspect?

In the event, the most extraordinary element of these two statements came in Murphy’s invention of a Brodhead statement regarding the party’s composition. John Burness, Duke’s then-P.R. head, confirmed that Brodhead made no statement, of any kind, about the case on March 22, 2006; and that Brodhead never claimed, one way or the other, to possess knowledge on who did or did not attend the party. Murphy simply made up a statement to corroborate her preconceived viewpoint.

(2) Considerable evidence actually bolstered the prosecution’s version of events, although defense attorneys or the media concealed some of this evidence.

Murphy looked to bolster false accuser Crystal Mangum’s credibility to pointing out that “Brett and Matt happen to be the real names of two of the captains who lived in that home.” (At least in some of her myriad stories, Mangum had claimed that her attackers were named Adam, Matt, and Brett.) But Murphy’s statement was factually inaccurate: the first names of the captains who lived at the house were Matt, Dave, and Dan, and their names had been widely reported.

In a May 2, 2006 interview, Murphy pointed to hidden evidence (that, in fact, didn’t exist and that the police and Nifong had never claimed existed). Dismissing test results that indicated no DNA matches to any of the lacrosse players, Murphy asserted that “the broomstick DNA has not yet been revealed.” The only problem: there was no “broomstick DNA,” since even the mentally imbalanced Mangum had never claimed an assault by broomstick.

Turning her concealment argument to the lawyers, Murphy suggested that the defense attorneys had “withheld” 1000 pages of documents (sometimes she said the figure was 1200). In fact, Judge Osborn Smith had ordered the pages to be sealed, because they contained Mangum’s psychological records. That ruling had been made in open court, and was widely reported; defense attorneys releasing the records would have placed them in contempt.

When all else failed, Murphy accused the lacrosse players and their attorneys of criminal obstruction, as in her assertion that “all the photographs showing how really fine [Mangum] was when she left scene [photos frequently cited in various defense motions] were doctored, where the date stamp was actually fraudulent.” [Emphasis added in both instances.] Even the utterly corrupt Mike Nifong never challenged the photos’ veracity, and the subsequent AG’s investigation confirmed the photos’ accuracy by cross-checking various other forms of electronic data.

(3) The lacrosse players behaved as if they were guilty; or had profiles that would lead a fair-minded observer to believe they might be guilty.

In one of her first appearances on the case, on April 19, 2006, Murphy reported some basic, and seemingly troublesome, “facts”: “All of them [the lacrosse players] took the Fifth. All of them refused to cooperate. All of them refused to give a DNA sample, until the court produced an order compelling them to do so.”

Each of these three statements was a lie. No player ever invoked the Fifth Amendment, at any point in the case. The three captains who lived in the house where the party occurred cooperated (foolishly, in retrospect) wholly with police, including voluntarily giving DNA samples and offering to take lie-detector tests. A few days before this parade of falsehoods, the Poynter source/seminar instructor had invented a statement by an unidentified neighbor asserting that members of the 2006 lacrosse team had committed “other sexual offenses.” No such statement existed, and no members of the team had committed “other sexual offenses.”

The pattern of Murphy making up “facts” to portray the lacrosse players as behaving suspiciously continued throughout the case. One of the people picked by Mangum, Reade Seligmann, had an unimpeachable electronic alibi (he had called a cab with his cell phone, and then was shown on a time-stamped ATM video more than a mile away from the captains’ house) for the time of the alleged attack. This was a major problem for Nifong, but not for Murphy; in a December 21, 2006 e-mail, she simply altered “facts” to make Seligmann look guilty. She wrote, “In fact, the guy Seligman [sic] who claims his cell phone calls ‘prove’ his innocence actually lends support to the theory that he was the first guy to assault her—which is what she claims—and that it was oral—because he could have assaulted her for the first few minutes—then thought to himself ‘I’ve got to get out of here’—which explains why he frantically and repeatedly called a cab. who frantically calls a cab to see if they’re coming—in a space of five minutes—especially considering that the guy went to an ATM and a pizza place when he left—no real emergency there. Isn’t it convenient that he just happens to be one of the guys she accused?”

This statement had no relationship with the truth. Though Mangum never told the same story twice, she never claimed that one of her attackers left during the attack, nor that any of her attackers had used a telephone, nor did she ever make any clear claim that Seligmann could be identified as “the first guy to assault her.” Seligmann, whose cell-phone records were posted on the web for Murphy to see, didn’t “frantically and repeatedly call[] a cab”; he called the cab once, and the cab came a few minutes later. And before Murphy’s statement, no one had ever claimed that Seligmann went to “a pizza place when he left.”

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Perhaps the most outrageous thing that Murphy said during the lacrosse case was not, because of the way she framed her remark, a demonstrably untrue statement. On May 3, 2006, in an appearance on “CNN Live,” the Poynter source/seminar instructor mused, “I bet one or more of the players was, you know, molested or something as a child.”

An unsubstantiated insinuation, on national TV, that a college student was sexually molested? That’s a disgusting statement—indicative of a coarse mind and a bullying temperament, not “dynamic and thought-provoking,” which is how McBride describes Murphy. Yet McBride, by her own admission, wasn’t surprised to see the Poynter source/seminar instructor make such an assertion. If insinuating child abuse against people* about whom she knew nothing isn’t enough for disqualify Murphy in McBride’s eyes, what would constitute going too far? And how, possibly, could a figure who made such a remark provide instruction “focused on the highest standards of journalistic value” that would promote “excellence and integrity in the practice of craft”?

In recent months, the departure of Jim Romenesko somewhat tarnished Poynter’s reputation, as has the organization’s uneven (or worse, as SI’s Richard Deitsch might suggest) performance as ESPN ombudsman. But I always had believed that Poynter was committed to journalistic integrity, and never considered that it might be an organization that would use a serial fabricator as both a source and a seminar instructor for guiding journalists’ behavior.

It appears that I was wrong in these beliefs. And unlike Wendy Murphy, I’m willing to admit when I make a mistake.

*--modified for clarity

Two E-Mail Chains; Or R. Brodhead, Movie Critic

2012-02-04T21:36:00.010-05:00

The closing scene of Primal Fear, the movie referenced by Richard Brodhead as, it seems, an avenue through which to interpret the lacrosse case. Brodhead's private comment came a few days after the arrests of Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty. Could this chilling portrayal by Ed Norton really be how the Duke president perceived his institution's own students?

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Courtesy of a Bob Ekstrand filing, two e-mail chains, including five April 2006 e-mails, from senior Duke administrators.

The e-mails are both surprising and unsurprising. The unsurprising elements: Provost Peter Lange comes across as the only humane member of Richard Brodhead's inner circle. Larry Moneta comes across as petulant and self-pitying.

The surprising: Brodhead (based, of course, on this very small sample size) appears even more crassly concerned with Duke's image than I would have expected. This concern also was demonstrated in an excerpt that Ekstrand featured from former AD Joe Alleva, who stated in a deposition that he was "crucified" by senior administrators after he appeared too sympathetic to the lacrosse players at this press conference. That revelation, it would seem, explains Alleva's becoming far colder in his treatment of the lacrosse players thereafter, even though his judgment about the team's character was confirmed by the Coleman Committee report.

The intriguing: None of the administrators (in these confidential, not-for-public exchanges) appeared even to consider that a sexual assault hadn't occurred--even though both e-mail chains came after the revelation that no DNA matches existed to any lacrosse players.

E-mail 1, from Brodhead to Moneta and Alleva, 9 or 10 April 2006:
"They have human needs."

Perhaps this can be Duke's new marketing slogan: "Send your sons to our school, at $50K/year: Our president understands they 'have human needs.'"

"We can't do anything to side with them, or even, if they are exonerated, to imply that they have behaved with honor."

Brodhead must have been stunned when he received the Coleman Committee report, and learned that they students about whom he was appalled had a history of drinking much too much but otherwise were good students and campus citizens.

E-mail 2, Moneta to Brodhead and Alleva, 10 April 2006:

"We . . . have ensured that faculty treat them fairly." I'm sure that Kyle Dowd would have been surprised to have learned this. Or the students in History classes taught by Profs. Deutsch or Thompson.

Why, exactly, did Moneta "hope" that fired coach Mike Pressler was "no longer communicating with the players"? Pressler had been virtually the team's only advocate within the Duke administration.

Moneta seems put out that the players and their parents were upset with Duke, given that "we have been supporting them throughout." If Duke's behavior between 25 March 2006 and 10 April 2006 constituted "support," imagine what opposition would have entailed!

E-mail 3: Brodhead to various administrators, 24 April 2006. By this time Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty have been arrested. And in response, the president traveled to the Durham Chamber of Commerce, where he roused applause with his infamous remarks about the duo: "If our students did what is alleged, it is appalling to the worst degree. If they didn’t do it, whatever they did is bad enough."

This e-mail suggests, again, a cold and calculating man. The same president who condescendingly remarked about how students facing on-campus mobs "have human needs" now mused--one month into the crisis--"maybe they just want someone to meet with them and show a humane face." A "let them eat cake" mentality.

The e-mail's other intriguing item was its first sentence. Two weeks after the revelation of the DNA test results, Brodhead doesn't even seem to have thought that maybe no rape of any type occurred. "Certainly a large number of them are [innocent] of the criminal charge." This assertion implied that Brodhead believed that at least some of the students were guilty. How, exactly, did he believe a crime occurred given the negative DNA tests?

E-mail 4: Lange to senior administrators, later that morning:

This e-mail from Lange, in response to Brodhead's missive, suggested that one "humane" person did exist among Duke's senior administrators. The e-mail suggests that Dean Sue probably fell into this category as well.

Presciently and perceptively, Lange warned that Duke's throw-them-to-the-wolves policy toward the lacrosse players "is probably mistaken."

Somewhat surprisingly, based on his closing paragraph, even Lange doesn't appear to have considered that a rape might not have occurred. It would have been shocking at this stage if any Duke administrator was certain that the accused players were innocent. (I certainly wasn't certain of it at this stage of the case, following things as I was exclusively in the media.) But it's equally shocking that the Duke leadership doesn't appear to have considered absolute innocence even as an option. That oversight helps explain why Brodhead didn't cover himself with a few throw-away presumption-of-innocence lines in his April 5 and April 20 statements.

The final e-mail, with Brodhead responding to Lange.

Even the clueless president appears to have realized that the lacrosse players and their parents wouldn't welcome a sit-down with the hopelessly-biased Moneta (who was firmly on record, by this point, as saying he didn't believe the players were innocent).

Brodhead's obsession with p.r. came in his comment about the "need to be on script"--which strongly implies that his "whatever they did was bad enough" comments were part of the "script" Duke had elected to follow.

Finally, and most chillingly, was the reference to the Edward Norton movie, Primal Fear. Here's the wikipedia description:

Martin Vail is a prominent defense attorney in Chicago who jumps at the chance to represent Aaron Stampler, a young, stuttering altar boy accused of murdering the Archbishop. At first interested primarily in the publicity that the case will bring, Vail comes to believe that his client is truly innocent, much to the chagrin of the prosecutor (and Vail's former lover), Janet Venable.

Vail discovers that powerful civic leaders, including the District Attorney, have lost millions in real estate investments due to a decision by the Archbishop not to develop certain church lands. The archbishop received numerous death threats as a result. He also learns that the archbishop had been sexually abusing altar boys, including Stampler.

Introducing this evidence, while it would make Stampler more sympathetic to the jury, would also give his client a motive for murder, something the prosecution otherwise has lacked.

The trial does not proceed well for the defense, as there is considerable evidence against Stampler and public opinion holds him almost certainly guilty. When Vail confronts his client and accuses him of having lied, Aaron breaks down and transforms into a new persona, a violent sociopath who calls himself "Roy." He confesses to the murder of the archbishop and throws Vail against the wall, injuring him.

When this incident is over, Aaron appears to have no recollection of it. Molly Arrington, the psychiatrist examining Aaron, is convinced he suffers from multiple personality disorder due to childhood abuse by his own father. However, Vail cannot enter an insanity plea during an ongoing trial.

Vail sets up a confrontation in court. After Venable questions him harshly, Aaron turns into Roy and charges at her, threatening to snap her neck if anyone comes near him. Aaron is subdued by courthouse marshals and is rushed back to his cell. In light of Aaron's apparent insanity, the judge dismisses the jury in favor of a bench trial and then finds Aaron not guilty by reason of mental insanity, and remands him to a mental hospital

Vail visits to tell him this news. Aaron says he recalls nothing of what happened in the courtroom, having again "lost time." However, just as Vail is leaving, Aaron asks him to "tell Ms. Venable I hope her neck is okay," which is not something that Aaron should have been able to remember if he had "lost time." Vail points this out, whereupon Stampler grins slyly and reveals that he has been pretending to be insane the whole time. But he didn't make up the identity of Roy, he made up Aaron.

Stampler now admits to having murdered the archbishop, as well as his girlfriend, Linda, whom the cleric also had molested. Stunned and disillusioned, Vail walks away, with Roy taunting him from the cell.

Did Brodhead see the lacrosse players as sociopaths? This cultural reference suggests an astonishingly negative view of the two students who had just been indicted. Or perhaps the president was merely asking his colleagues about the previous night's schedule on HBO.

Yale & Witt

2012-01-31T13:11:00.003-05:00

Readers of the New York Times might have noticed that the paper has gone after another athlete that fits the negative race/class/gender stereotype, Yale quarterback Patrick Witt. Witt, a Rhodes Scholar finalist, was the subject of an "informal complaint" through Yale's sexual assault/harassment program, which lists an undergraduate male causing "worry" to a female as a legitimate grounds for filing complaints.

I've written three posts at Minding the Campus on the topic, one just after the story broke, the second after Witt had issued his side of the story, and the third looking at the extraordinarily poor response to the case by so-called media critics. The worst of the latter was an article from Poynter, which describes itself as an institution "that exists to ensure that our communities have access to excellent journalism—the kind of journalism that enables us to participate fully and effectively in our democracy." To whom did this institution turn for guidance on how the Times should have handled the case? You guessed it: Wendy Murphy.

Cline Suspended

2012-01-27T17:12:00.006-05:00

[Update, Wed., 3.24pm: Retired judge Leon Stanback has been named Durham's interim DA.]

[Update, Sunday, 5.33: Gov. Bev Perdue, who just announced her retirement amidst very poor poll numbers, will appoint Cline's temporary replacement.

Judge Hobgood's order indicated that probable cause for removing Cline existed for, among others, the following items from Sutton's affidavit:

Will bring news when available on whether WRAL will stream the Feb. 13 hearing.]

The dysfunctional world of the Durham DA's office continues. A hearing on her case will take place on Feb. 13, assuming she does not resign first. Given Cline's delusional approach to affairs over the past several months, I'm not counting on an early resignation.

WRAL has posted Franklin County Judge Robert Hobgood's order; based on his preliminary findings, Cline's chances in the Feb. 13 hearing do not appear good.

Hobgood starts with a summary of the Allen case: he notes that evidence existed for Cline to bring the case to trial, but also finds that Judge Hudson's dismissal of the case (because the state hadn't turned over evidence) was correct. Hobgood reports that it was "apparent" that Cline found this decision "extremely frustrating," and that thereafter, "signals began to appear that Tracey E. Cline was losing her ability to exercise professional restraint and civility toward Judge Hudson."

Hobgood dismissed a couple of elements of Kerry Sutton's affidavit, but found probable cause for 14 paragraphs in her affidavit, and suspended Cline (with pay) until the hearing is held.

[Update, 10.36pm: Ray Gronberg of the H-S reports that as of Friday evening, it was unclear who would serve as acting DA until a final resolution of Cline's case occurs.]

Politics of Grievance at Duke [Updated: The Group, and Tim Tyson, Strike Back]

2012-01-22T23:31:00.019-05:00

[Updated, Friday, 1.07pm: In the race-to-the-bottom among critics of the paper, none other than Tim Tyson--yes, that Tim Tyson--has weighed in on the matter. In virtually any other environment, Tyson would have no credibility to comment on public matters. This was, after all, a figure who so badly misjudged the lacrosse case that he participated, as a "teacher," in a candlelight vigil on behalf of false accuser Crystal Mangum (who he described as somebody's "sweetheart") a couple of hours before Mangum took the stage, in a highly . . . limber . . . fashion, in a local strip club.

But in the race/class/gender-dominated academy, a race-baiter like Tyson speaks pearls of wisdom. And so in yesterday's Chronicle, Tyson goes after Peter Arcidiacono, fuming, "Who appointed [Arcidiacono] to weigh the merits of black folks being allowed into the room?" I was unaware that tenured faculty members like Arcidiacono had to be "appointed" before they could engage in scholarly inquiry.

As with virtually all of Arcidiacono's critics, Tyson does not challenge the data that the paper of Arcidiacono, et al., uncovered. Instead, he resorts to the race-baiting attack lines: after disingenuously suggesting that he's not challenging the academic freedom of people who don't share his world-view, he does just that: "Duke’s treasure, the late Dr. John Hope Franklin, whose legacy Arcidiacono treads upon, provided research for Thurgood Marshall in the Brown v. Board of Education case. But there is no constitutional right to R-E-S-P-E-C-T, as Aretha might put it. BSA members who question 'the research’s intent, methodology, analysis and conclusion, in addition to its validity,' display a generosity and deliberation far exceeding those of this study."

Once again: Tyson does not challenge in any way the data that Arcidiacono, et al., presented, that black students at Duke disproportionately migrate away from more difficult (science and engineering) to easier (liberal arts) majors.

[Updated, Wed., 8.14pm: In what could be deemed the least surprising development of this entire affair, prominent members of the Group of 88 have sharpened their race-baiting credentials to attack the paper.

Karla Holloway, notorious for her decision to pass along fifth-hand, slanderous gossip against Duke students, at least when doing so furthered her on-campus agenda, tweeted that "Duke authors' unpublished study of race + Affirmative Action lacks academic rigor." Nowhere in her twitter feed has Holloway provided any specific criticism of the study's data; indeed, in another tweet, she even elected to use scare quotes when describing the paper as a study.

The existence of the paper, the Group of 88'er wildly implied, indicated that "Duke still struggles w/issues of diversity," as she appeared to demand that Duke administrators publicly speak out about a research study from Duke professors. (This position was particularly rich coming from Holloway, who during the lacrosse case had issued the bizarre demand that Duke administrators had to publicly support her, as a Duke professor, from criticism.) In what could qualify as a textbook case of the politics of grievance in action, Holloway leveled the inflammatory allegation that the paper--a paper, again, whose data she does not appear to have publicly challenged--"re-opens old racial wounds."

The message here was clear: professors willing to provide data--even if that data is accurate--that challenges Holloway's worldview will face ill-concealed accusations of racism.

Holloway also tweeted a link to the blog run by Mark Anthony ("Thugniggaintellectual") Neal, who ran a post by David Leonard criticizing the paper. Imitating Holloway's race-baiting tactics, Leonard asserted that the paper (whose data he, too, did not challenge) "has dangerous implications."

Meanwhile the Black Student Association has upped its pressure, delivering what the Chronicle terms a "list of demands" to the administration. The list includes--of course--hiring more black professors. The almost laughable inference here is that Duke's arts and sciences faculty--a faculty where many departments are dominated by Group of 88 members, and others have strong Group influence--somehow are insufficiently attentive to hiring African-American faculty. Anyone who believes such a claim would have to reside in some sort of fantasy-land.]

Watching the returns from Saturday night’s South Carolina primary, I was struck by a focus group of Florida GOP voters, who had response dials as they listened to Newt Gingrich’s victory speech. Their dials skyrocketed into positive territory when Gingrich spoke of his willingness to stand up to ill-defined anti-Christian bigotry—this in a majority-Christian country where more than six in ten voters say they’d be less likely to support a presidential candidate who was an atheist.

But Gingrich did not need data or factual evidence to bolster his claims. Rather, as the (basically sympathetic) Sheldon Alberts correctly analyzed, the speech was part of a “broader ‘politics of grievance’ strategy that Gingrich is executing — at the moment — better than his rivals.”

As expert as Gingrich might be at practicing the politics of grievance—and he’s a master—the former Speaker can’t hold a candle to campus “diversity” advocates, who all but originated the tactic. An excellent example came last week at Duke.

The affair started with an unpublished paper penned by Peter Arcidiacono, Kenneth Spenner, and Esteban Aucejo. (Arcidiacono and Spenner are professors at Duke.) The paper used Duke’s own data to show that groups of students who receive preferential treatment in the admissions process (African-Americans and “legacy” admittees) disproportionately migrate from more difficult (science and engineering) to easier (liberal arts) majors.

The paper was cited in an amicus brief in the Fisher case. In briefs filed with the Supreme Court, a key, and persuasive, argument of opponents of on-campus preferences—including, as I wrote about at MTC, my UPI co-author Stuart Taylor—is that not only do these preferences violate the 14^th amendment’s promise of all people receiving equal treatment under the law regardless of their race, but preferences don’t even benefit the people (minorities, in this instance) they allegedly were designed to serve. In this instance, the paper’s authors concluded that “attempts to increase representation [of minorities] at elite universities through the use of affirmative action may come at a cost of perpetuating underrepresentation of blacks in the natural sciences and engineering.”

As far as I can tell, no one has presented evidence that challenges the accuracy of the data that the trio presented. To reiterate: as far as I can tell, no one has presented evidence that challenges the accuracy of the data that the trio presented.

The paper first generated outrage from Duke’s Black Student Alliance. The H-S revealed that the organization e-mailed the state NAACP to complain that “the implications and intentions of this research at the hands of our very own prestigious faculty, seemingly without a genuine concern for proactively furthering the well-being of the black community is hurtful and alienating.” Newt couldn’t have handled the faux grievance angle better!

The e-mail further noted that the BSA had demanded “a dialogue” with the paper’s authors “that addresses our concerns about research’s intent, methodology, analysis and conclusion, in addition to its validity.” Yet as far as I could tell, the BSA did not challenge the accuracy of the data that the paper presented. I e-mailed BSA president Nana Asante to ask her if, in fact, she had any complaints about the accuracy of the paper’s data. She did not reply.

Even more boldly, the BSA suggested that some type of “acknowledgement or intervention took place, in the best interests of black students” by the Duke administration. I also asked Asante what type of administration “intervention” she and her colleagues envisioned. She did not reply.

To reiterate: as far as I can tell, the BSA did not challenge the accuracy of the data that the paper presented.

According to the H-S, the grievance crusade then moved on from the BSA to a group of black Duke alums. Seventeen alums wrote to the H-S to say that “we are deeply troubled and offended by the recent study emanating from faculty members at our alma mater.” The letter accused Arcidiacono, Spenner, and Aucejo of “slander” and having produced “both flawed and incorrect” research.

Yet, at least according to what was revealed in the H-S article, the letter didn’t actually identify any specific areas in which the paper was “both flawed and incorrect,” much less slanderous. It’s not even clear to me who the paper could have slandered.

To reiterate: as far as I can tell, despite their overheated rhetoric, the alums did not challenge the accuracy of the data that the paper presented.

The grievance demands triggered a joint letter from Duke provost Peter Lange and other Duke administrators (including Group of 88’er Lee Baker, now a Duke dean). The letter gave a generic defense of academic freedom. But it also included this extraordinary sentence: “We understand how the conclusions of the research paper can be interpreted in ways that reinforce negative stereotypes.”

The administrators did not identify which “negative stereotypes” they had detected, nor did they explain how “the conclusions of the research paper” could be “interpreted in ways that reinforce” these unidentified “negative stereotypes.” The administrators’ letter did not challenge, in any way, the accuracy of the data that the paper presented.

Apart from instances of academic fraud or outright racist/sexist/anti-semitic “research” claims by professors (the “work” of Northwestern’s Arthur Butz comes to mind), I can’t recall a single instance of a university’s administrators—much less a leading research university’s administrators—accusing professors at their school of producing scholarship that could “be interpreted in ways that reinforce negative stereotypes."

This administrative outrage, of course, is highly selective. Imagine the following counter-example. A couple of Duke professors pen a research paper noting (correctly) that opposition to marriage equality skews toward under-educated segments of the population. Duke’s Christian student organization, whose members oppose marriage equality but who see an association with poorly educated people as personally offensive to their religious beliefs, pen a letter wailing that “the implications and intentions of this research at the hands of our very own prestigious faculty, seemingly without a genuine concern for proactively furthering the well-being of the Christian community is hurtful and alienating.” The Christian students demand “a dialogue” with the paper’s authors “that addresses our concerns about research’s intent, methodology, analysis and conclusion, in addition to its validity.”

Does anyone believe that Duke administrators would respond to the Christian students with an open letter seeming to validate their complaints about the (accurate) scholarship, or that “we understand how the conclusions of the research paper can be interpreted in ways that reinforce negative stereotypes”? And if such a public letter were penned, does anyone believe that Duke administrators would not be facing a revolt from the Group of 88 and their allies?

To reiterate: as far as I can tell, no no one has presented evidence that challenges the accuracy of the data that Aucejo, Arcidiacono, and Spenner presented. But in the contemporary academy, which worships before the altar of “diversity,” accurate scholarship can be insufficient—and can even, as in this case, generate an implicit rebuke from a university leadership.

Hat tip--O.S.

Yet Another Cline Embarrassment (Updated)

2012-01-15T15:13:00.004-05:00

[Updated, Thurs., 5.56pm: "Ahab" Cline will continue her quixotic quest against Judge Hudson, the N&O reveals. Cline--the person who, it's worth noting, wouldn't recognize the truth if it bopped her in the head--wrote that "it is truth telling time" for Durham County.]

[Updated, Wed., 4.22pm: Durham attorney Kerry Sutton (who played a minor role in the lacrosse case) has filed an affidavit urging the removal of Tracey Cline as Durham DA. In the affidavit, Sutton accuses Cline of "habitual intemperance" and conduct "prejudicial to the administration of justice." Sutton, not unreasonably, characterized Cline's "inflammatory" filings against Judge Orlando Hudson as filled with "venom" and "paranoid" language, lacking in "fact or evidence, other than Ms. Cline's personal beliefs." Sutton goes into considerable length about how Cline's obsession with Hudson has both harmed the Durham DA office's reputation and consumed the Durham legal community's resources. (She also points out that the grammatically-challenged Cline also has a tendency to misspell "affidavit" in her legal filings.)

The N&O's Andrew Curliss reports that the gambit employed by Sutton is rarely used, and is believed to have resulted in the removal of only one DA in North Carolina history.]

Durham County’s minister of justice was last heard from penning a bizarre e-mail to the Herald-Sun in which she misspelled a judge’s name and asserted that “truth should be intimidated by the pressure of the powerful or the fear of failure.” This morning’s N&O exposes as false a central claim made by Tracey Cline in her quixotic crusade against Judge Orlando Hudson—that Hudson had demonstrated his anti-Cline bias by entering an August order before the prosecution even had the chance even to present all of its witnesses.

Reporter Andrew Curliss did what Cline failed to do—he actually investigated the seeming anomaly. And he discovered a benign explanation: “The clock at the courthouse that stamped the document was more than two hours slow that day.” In a situation that would seem more likely in a small town courthouse than in North Carolina’s fifth-largest city, the clock in the county clerk’s office seems to malfunction with some regularity. Curliss spoke to assistant county clerk Angela Kelly, who commented about the clock, “It is a machine that's plugged up in the wall that runs constantly. When things are filed, we stick it in there, and we always hope and pray it's correct. But there have been times when we notice that it's not correct."

Curliss confirmed Kelly’s recollection by checking into legal documents filed the next morning—which the clock erroneously stamped at 7.18am, rather than after 9.00am, when the clerk’s office actually opened. (Times public editor Arthur Brisbane might just call Curliss a “truth vigilante.”) The N&O website has a photo of the relevant filings.

Rather than assuming the worst and thereby leveling wild, unsubstantiated allegations against a sitting judge, Cline might have checked to see if there were problems with the clock in the clerk’s office, something that would have taken her only a few minutes to do. The N&O presented Cline with the information, but she declined comment, and thus did not take the opportunity to say that she would withdraw her charges against Hudson. Jim Coleman summarized the problem to Curliss: "She has made a serious allegation, and it warranted serious review by her before this filing. It is now just more evidence of a lawyer who is barreling down a hill totally oblivious to the damage she is causing to the judicial system. She is undermining confidence in the system. It's disgraceful."

Such cavalier disregard for the truth and professional behavior from his county’s “minister of justice” might be enough to cause “shame” and “anger” even from the likes of Duke professor William Reichert. But I suspect not.

The Reichert Rules

2012-01-13T13:52:00.006-05:00

Though Duke’s race/class/gender-dominated humanities faculty members embarrassed themselves in their response to the lacrosse case, faculty in the hard sciences and engineering behaved very differently. Indeed, only one member of the Group of 88, Ronen Plessler, came from any of the sciences or engineering departments.

That said, on the one occasion in which a science professor did try to imitate his “activist” colleagues—when “Counselor” Thomas Crowley hung his shingle for readers of the Herald-Sun—the result was humiliation and a quick backtrack.

Biomedical Engineering professor William Reichert should have learned Crowley’s lesson. In what’s described as a guest “commentary” in today’s Chronicle, Reichert begins by complaining about SportsCenter devoting excessive coverage to the Jerry Sandusky case, thereby disturbing his workout. This situation—not, it seems, Sandusky’s alleged crime, but ESPN’s coverage, from which for unknown reasons he could not avert his eyes—left him “stewing . . . for weeks and weeks,” until, finally, he elected to turn to the pages of the Chronicle. (Did Deadspin, known for its biting ESPN commentary, reject his submission?)

From the Sandusky affair, Reichert moved on to a . . . curious . . . recapitulation of the lacrosse case. He confessed that “senseless behavior,” which he did not specifically define, left him with feelings of “anger” and “shame.” Of what senseless behavior, then, did he speak? His colleagues’ rush to judgment and their abandoning the basic requirements of the Faculty Handbook? The local prosecutor’s violating myriad ethical standards? The Durham newspaper’s decision to turn a blind eye to the abuses?

None of these developments appeared to produce either “shame” or “anger” for Dr. Reichert—in itself a revealing insight into his character. His “shame” or “anger” came from the “behavior of students”—presumably the lacrosse players, rather than the potbangers, though Reichert is careful not to say so (perhaps for legal reasons?). Fortunately, however, there was a hero of the affair: Richard Brodhead, who showed “courage” in prematurely terminating the 2006 lacrosse season, fully aware of “the blow back [sic] that was sure to come.”

This claim is a little bit like Cathy Davidson’s reinvention of spring 2006 as a time of terror for black students on the Duke campus. Brodhead’s canceling the lacrosse season required no courage at all. Faculty “activists” were demanding it, the team itself had virtually no supporters on campus at the time, and then-BOT chairman Bob Steel considered it a necessary sacrifice for public relations purposes.

Brodhead, in short, received virtually no “blow back” for the decision, at least at the time. Indeed, the only way in which Reichert’s “blow back” claim makes any sense would be if he’s suggesting that Brodhead fully believed that the accused students were innocent but cancelled the season anyway, thereby anticipating a “blow back” once outsiders (even the biased New York Times) came to criticize the university for its guilt-presuming action.

A question: could it be that Reichert’s other title—“Associate Dean for Diversity”—accounted for his Group of 88-like interpretation of the lacrosse case?

Updates: Times, Cline, FERPA, Chafe

2012-01-12T16:49:00.005-05:00

[Updated, Friday, 1.03pm: Duke has filed its discovery requests in the McFadyen lawsuit. University lawyers are asking for potentially thousands of documents, including logs of Facebook accounts, e-mails to their teammates and their parents, high school grades, drafts(!) of class papers, tax returns, and medical records since 2001.

The document requests suggest that the university's legal strategy will focus on attempting to blame the lacrosse players for any damages they received, presumably by trying to detect stray items in Facebook posts or e-mails. The strategy is unsurprising: if the Brodhead administration's actions are indefensible, the university has little choice but to go after the plaintiffs. That said, it's still striking that as the same university that wants thousands of documents from its former students has been willing, thus far, to hand over only 27 documents of its own.]

New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane, last seen searching out Wendy Murphy for guidance about how his newspaper should report sexual assault cases, posted a provocative item this morning asking if the Times should be a “truth vigilante.”

Brisbane said that his post was prompted by reader concerns about the paper’s repeating false candidate claims (such as Mitt Romney’s repeated assertion that Pres. Obama embarked on a tour to “apologize” for the United States) without reporters pointing out that these claims were . . . false.

Of course, it’s hard to give any credibility to someone, like Brisbane, who sees Wendy Murphy as an arbiter of truth. In any case, the Times’ indifference to repeating false items obviously predated the current campaign. The factual errors from Duff Wilson’s reporting remain uncorrected.

-----------

Durham County’s “Minister of Justice” is back in the news this week. Tracey Cline, continuing her quixotic case against Durham judge Orlando Hudson, filed papers demanding Hudson’s removal from a yet another criminal case, on spurious grounds that he is biased against her office.

N&O reporter Andrew Curliss noted that Cline’s filing repeated factual errors that she’s made in previous legal documents (even if the office struggles with basic research, does anyone from the Durham DA’s office bother to read the newspaper?). At least, however, Curliss notes that Cline's 30-page submission was “much smaller than previous filings by her that attacked Hudson.”

BTW: Cline came second for worst prosecutor of the year, 2011, to John Bradley.

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I have a post at Minding the Campus using the recent example of former St. Joe’s basketball player Todd O’Brien to point out how universities too often abuse FERPA, using the law not as it was intended (to protect student rights) but instead as a shield to avoid public criticism.

That post suggested (and a browse through FIRE’s archive would confirm) that universities too often interpret FERPA far too rigorously. But the post also acknowledged the one high-profile instance in which a university ignored FERPA so as to serve short-term public relations interests—Duke’s decision to give the DPD keycard information on the lacrosse players—without a subpoena, and without telling the students or their parents. Intriguingly, among the handful of documents turned over to Bob Ekstrand in discovery was an email from Duke falsely claiming that the university had followed FERPA’s terms.

---------

Finally, Politico reports on a new PBS movie focusing on Bill Clinton and the former President's many, many affairs. Among the people quoted in the article--U.S. history's race/class/gender specialist, none other than William Chafe.

The Group of 88'er conclusion: Clinton's lack of control over his behavior was "terrifying." There's no indication whether Chafe will be endorsing a full-page ad in the Chronicle denouncing Clinton.

Hat tip--O.S.

Items from the Ekstrand Filing

2012-01-06T14:49:00.002-05:00

A filing by Bob Ekstrand in the McFadyen lawsuit has revealed some interesting material about Duke’s initial response to Crystal Mangum’s false allegations. Ekstrand filed in response to Duke’s . . . miserly . . . approach to discovery—the University has turned over only 27 documents—some of which, according to Ekstrand, were duplicates.

Ekstrand’s brief included examples of material already obtained in discovery—and provides a good sense of why Duke has proven so . . . reluctant . . . to hand over material.

By far the most significant item is a March 17, 2006 e-mail from Dean Sue Wasiolek, sent to an array of top Duke administrators, including John Burness, Larry Moneta, and Tallman Trask:

Here’s the latest update on this situation. Most important is that the students who reside in this house have been fully cooperative and are concerned that their names will be in the press. Since they have not yet been officially charged with anything, they have asked that should the realty company (or anyone else at Duke) be asked for those names, that we not give them out since this is still just an investigation. Scott Selig has called Allenton Realy and alerted them to this.
The Durham police are, in fact, investigating an alleged rape/kidnapping at 610 N. Buchanan. On Monday, March 13, two strippers were hired to perform at 610 N. Buchanan. About 30 men were in attendance, all members of the Duke Lacrosse team. One of the strippers appeared to be on drugs. the men decided to pay the women early, and then asked them to leave. They refused and the men paid them more. The one stripper ended up passing out either on a porch or deck in the back of the house and the men carried her to the other woman’s car. At some point later, the passed out woman interacted with Durham police at the Kroger on Hillsborough Road and made the allegations. I believe she was examined at Duke ED.
Last night the house was searched. The men volunteered to engage in DNA testing and to take lie detector test. I believe the DNA testing was done.
Mike Pressler and Chris Kennedy are well aware of this situation. The men have denied all allegations--they obviously admit to hiring the strippers.

The Wasiolek e-mail confirms that the senior Duke administration knew from the start that the lacrosse players had fully cooperated (even to the extent of the captains volunteering to take lie detector tests) with the police inquiry. Less than two weeks later, when Mike Nifong began his pre-primary publicity crusade, he suggested something else—that, in fact, that players had erected a “wall of silence” to frustrate the investigation.

Duke administrators were under no legal obligation to correct the record. (Whether they had a moral obligation to do so is another story.) But the Wasiolek e-mail confirms that senior Duke administrators knew from the start that not only was the DA violating standard procedure by speaking early and often about the case, but that one key element of his publicity barrage—the lack of cooperation by the players—was demonstrably false.

Yet this knowledge (which, at the time, very few people outside the lacrosse team, their families, and their attorneys possessed) that the DA was publicly lying about Duke students appears to have had no impact in how Duke administrators initially responded to the case. Why was that?

The other intriguing item from the Ekstrand filing is a deposition from Associate AD Chris Kennedy, a consistently first-rate figure throughout the case. (Kennedy was quickly marginalized from discussions about how Duke should respond to Mangum’s allegations.)

Kennedy’s deposition provided an insight into the mindset of senior Duke administrators. For instance, he recalled a March 24 or March 25 conversation with Tallman Trask, in which Trask said “something to the effect of he would be amazed or astounded . . . if there was anything to the allegations.”

Obviously, public statements from Duke administrators near this time—most particularly the Brodhead April 5, 2006 “letter to the Duke community”—appeared to operate from a radically different premise. Why was that?

Kennedy’s deposition also provided useful context on how two particular actions by Duke helped shape public opinion in the case. The first came in the extraordinary decision to cancel the March 25, 2006 Duke-Georgetown game less than two hours before the game was to start. In response to a question from Ekstrand, Kennedy said he couldn’t recall an instance in which Duke had canceled an athletic contest in response to criminal allegations against team members, and added, when questioned again, that “I thought that somebody from the outside—in light of the newspaper article that appeared that morning in the News and Observer,"Dancer Gives Details of Ordeal”—I thought that that would send the message that that was, in fact, an accurate account of what had happened.”

Kennedy was right. Indeed, in their non-apology apology, the New York Times sports editors cited the unprecedented cancellation of the game and then the season as one reason for the paper’s presumption of guilt in its coverage.

The second came in Brodhead’s infamous April 20, 2006 remarks to the Durham Chamber of Commerce, shortly after the arrests of Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty, in which the Duke president declared of his students, “If our students did what is alleged, it is appalling to the worst degree. If they didn’t do it, whatever they did is bad enough.”

Kennedy was asked how the Durham community viewed this statement, and he responded, reasonably, "I think that someone without any knowledge of any of the facts, someone on the outside would again draw the conclusion that some kind of crime had been committed and that Brodhead believed they were guilty. And furthermore, I think it was incredibly indiscreet to say ‘whatever they did was bad enough.”

Finally, the deposition offers a revealing vignette. Kennedy spearheaded the (successful) NCAA appeal for the members of the team to obtain an extra year of athletic eligibility. He wrote the appeal document, and passed it along to the Duke counsel’s office for approval. The counsel eliminated items dealing with the on-campus threats to the students and the behavior of the Duke faculty toward their own students.

A bit of revisionist history, perhaps.

Vote for Tracey!

2012-01-02T13:07:00.002-05:00

The competition (especially John Bradley) is stiff for worst prosecutor of the year. But Durham's "minister of justice" is definitely in the running.

Housekeeping matters: I tweet all my posts (both here and from Minding the Campus) on my twitter feed; follow me here.

Attorney Wilson Approaches the Bench

2011-12-28T17:19:00.003-05:00

Again proving that a man who represents himself has a fool for a client, Attorney pro se Linwood Wilson has filed a civil rights lawsuit against Kent (DE) County, Durham County, and no fewer than 31 individuals (ranging from his estranged wife Barbara to Beau Biden(!), the vice president’s son and the current Attorney General of Delaware). The former DA’s chief investigator, Christian singer, and ethical sinkhole alleges that his arrest for possible spousal abuse in fact involved malicious prosecution, concealment of evidence, conspiracy, supervisory violations, and fabrication of false evidence—all matters of which, it goes without saying, his service under Mike Nifong gave him intimate knowledge.

Wilson’s 92-page complaint, filed alongside 10 exhibits (totaling some 355 pages), takes 10 pages just to identify the various people that he’s suing. Attorney Wilson suggests a wide-ranging and multi-layered conspiracy of his wife, her alleged “paramour,” a Delaware police officer with whom she also allegedly was having an affair, his wife’s family, some of his wife’s friends and co-workers, some law enforcement officials in Durham County, and various law enforcement officials in Delaware—all working in concert to deny Linwood Wilson his constitutional rights. Remarkably, until the filing of this complaint, this vast conspiracy went undetected—not by the media, nor by state legislators in Delaware or North Carolina, nor by various watchdog agencies. How could this be?

In the real world, the chief purpose of the complaint seems to be less exposing a previously undetected “conspiracy” than humiliating Wilson’s estranged wife and her alleged “paramour,” Joseph Curtis. Attorney Wilson describes his wife as “a mentally troubled woman who had abandoned her marriage.” Indeed, she had “plenty of Zoloft at home,” yet was caught going to the pharmacy for more. Wilson recounts the following alleged event at a local Mexican restaurant: “Defendant [Barbara] Wilson drank a large double margarita (while taking Zoloft, Clonazepam, and Xanax) and got extremely drunk, telling Plantiff [Linwood] how she wanted to rip his clothes off and have sex with him on the table.” Attorney Wilson describes this evening as “the best [the marriage] had been in months.”

But, alas, Barbara Wilson was leading a double life, according to her husband. She was having an affair with her “paramour” at the workplace, while at their “marital home,” Barbara Wilson “sat next to her husband each night, wanted [sic] him to rub her feet and legs.” The “paramour,” meanwhile, “ran from Wilson’s marital home like a dog with his tail between his legs” when confronted by Linwood.

The gap between Attorney Wilson and Plaintiff Wilson is sometimes difficult to follow. For instance, in paragraph 48 of the complaint, Attorney Wilson speaks of “our marriage” (the marriage between Barbara and Plaintiff Wilson); at other occasions, he uses “I” rather than “plaintiff” to describe his recollections of alleged events.

Attorney Wilson claims that his client has suffered various injuries, including “economic” harm, presumably a result of the marriage’s breakup shattering the “Voiceovers by Wilson” business that the husband and wife planned to start. Attorney Wilson also claims that his client has “suffered irreparable harm to his reputation.” How? After the exposures of the lacrosse case, Linwood Wilson had no reputation to lose.

Attorney Wilson is particularly fond of the phrase “upon information and belief”—an approach used in civil suits when lawyers believe that something occurred but for which they do not, before discovery, possess hard evidence to substantiate. But in the Wilson complaint, virtually every “factual” claim comes not from any evidence he possesses but from his own . . . beliefs. To give a sampling from the complaint:

“Upon information and belief Durham Coca-Cola was already aware of the affair.”

“Upon information and belief . . . Barbara Wilson had been reportedly locking herself in her office at work and crying all the time.”

“Upon information and belief, a display of public affection occurred between Defendants Wilson and Curtis, in Curtis’ car on the way back from NCCU.”

“Upon information and belief, Barbara Wilson was the only one who got a raise in the past 2-3 years.”

“Upon information and belief, the ‘Delaware Conspiracy’ along with co-conspirators . . . from North Carolina, made a ‘rush to judgment’ and manufactured changes.”

“Upon information and belief, Defendant Reimann continued to conspire with Defendants [Barbara] Wilson, Curtis, and Delaware Sgt. Weaver.”

“Upon information and belief Defendants Whitfield and Wilson hacked Plaintiff’s computers at his residence and falsified evidence.”

“Upon information and belief, Defendant Deputy Reimann was the source of information for Defendant Weaver, thus thickening the conspiracy more and more between North Carolina law enforcement and Delaware law enforcement.”

“Upon information and belief, it was common knowledge throughout the legal system in Dover, DE.”

“Upon information and belief, this is when the conspiracy was formed . . . to make it appear that Barbara Wilson was afraid of her husband (Plaintiff) and that he (Plaintiff) was crazy.” [As an aside, Barbara Wilson needn’t have entered into a conspiracy to have accomplished these goals: she simply could have told people to read this complaint.]

The strangest of these “information and belief” structures comes in paragraph 49, when Attorney Wilson writes, “Upon information and belief . . . Beth Greenman called Plaintiff [Linwood Wilson] and advised him that “If you don’t get Barbara away from [her alleged ‘paramour’] Joe he is going to ruin her and destroy your marriage.” The person who wrote these words was a party to the alleged call. This is his complaint. Is Wilson suggesting that he himself doesn’t know if the call occurred (the only reason for an “upon information and belief” construction)?

The anti-Linwood “conspiracy,” Attorney Wilson claims, intensified after his wife discovered that Linwood planned to involuntarily commit her for mental observation. At that point, Barbara Wilson decided to “flea [sic!!] the jurisdiction of North Carolina in order to avoid commitment proceedings.”

Attorney Wilson also appeared to have taken writing lessons from the grammatically-challenged Tracey Cline. Consider, for example, this head-scratching sentence: “Also none of it was relevant to Delaware since, according to Defendant Weaver himself, the fact that all this supposedly occurred in another jurisdiction, North Carolina, which Defendant Weaver had nothing to do with.”

Some of the “evidence” proffered by Attorney Wilson, alas, undermines the position of his client. For instance, Attorney Wilson recounts a conversation between Barbara Wilson and her husband, in which she told Linwood that she wanted the marriage to work, but that she had some “conditions.” That admission might sound damaging to Barbara, until Attorney Wilson reveals the wife’s conditions: that Linwood “was not to call her cell and ask where she was or what she was doing”; and that Linwood was not to “follow” her. If, in fact, the unemployed Linwood Wilson was following his wife around, or frequently calling her up asking her what she was doing, it would seem as if he was engaging in, at the least, emotional abuse; and, at the most, stalking.

In any case, Attorney Wilson says that his client immediately discerned that his wife wasn’t serious in hoping that the marriage would work—a conclusion he based on his “training and experience as a police investigator, private investigator, and District Attorney investigator, for over 38 years.”

Or take this charming anecdote from Attorney Wilson after his wife’s alleged “paramour” visited the “marital home” to check on Barbara Wilson’s well-being. Linwood Wilson admits to screaming at Curtis, “Don’t come into my home, push me out of the way, and disgrace me, my wife, or my home in this way or I’ll blow your f_king head off!” Again: a person charged with spousal abuse is admitting that he threatened to “blow [the] f_king head off” the man he believed was sleeping with his estranged wife.

As the marriage deteriorated, Attorney Wilson admits that his client refused to have sex with his wife, as the “Plantiff knew that would damage his case, if the marriage didn’t work out, from 20 plus years as a private investigator. A field in which Plaintiff had testified as an expert witness over 200 times . . . throughout North Carolina.” Demonstrating his client’s classless nature, Attorney Wilson passes along the fact that his wife “started using dildo’s” to pleasure herself.

The Linwood Wilson who comes through in this complaint is an enraged man, something of a control freak, clearly humiliated by his wife’s apparent infidelity. How he could escape sanctions for filing such a bizarre complaint remains to be seen.

Finally, perhaps the strangest or the many strange clauses from the Wilson filing was the following: “Defendant Eric Campen stated loudly in the lobby of the Durham County Sheriff’s Department and Courthouse in front of Deputy Tom McRae, several unknown deputies, about ten people in the lobby, one [sic] of whom was Victoria Peterson and Richard Porter, “You are a convicted felon! You will never get your guns back! You know better than to even try this!.” “I’ve seen your handy work on the computers, I know how good you are!” The truth is that Plaintiff Wilson has never been convicted of any felony and why was Campen tampering with evidence that he was not authorized to (computer). When Plaintiff Wilson and Richard Porter left the lobby of the Sheriff’s Department several unknown bystanders stated, “We didn’t know you were a convicted felon!” An obvious character assassination and deformation.”

Leaving aside the implausibility that the events occurred even remotely as Wilson described, and further leaving aside Wilson’s hilarious claim that a government official allegedly saying false things about him constitutes “deformation,” the vignette begs the question: what was Durham’s resident bigot and homophobe, Victoria Peterson, doing milling around the sheriff’s office lobby?

'Tis the Season . . . for the "Thugniggaintellectual"

2011-12-23T19:38:00.006-05:00

The lacrosse case unintentionally exposed the extent to which shoddy thinking passes for insight in the contemporary academy. Dozens of professors at one of the nation’s finest universities rushed to judgment based on highly incomplete information—and then when evidence emerged that contradicted their preconceived biases, they resolutely clung to their original opinions.

Such behavior had to raise questions about whether Group members—who, after all, represent the dominant pedagogical approaches in most humanities and social sciences departments—also poorly evaluated evidence in their own scholarship. Addressing that question was a central theme of the blog’s series of Group profiles.

Yet a closer look at what passes for scholarship among the Group also revealed some zany (to borrow an adjective from the current presidential campaign) assertions—such as Grant Farred’s claim that former Houston Rockets center Yao Ming represented “the most profound threat to American empire.”

A recent blog post ("'Santa Claus Is Coming to Town': Some Thoughts on Christmas and State Surveillance") from the self-described “thugniggaintellectual,” Group member Mark Anthony Neal, reached Farred-ian levels. Indeed, as one correspondent noted, it read as if it were intended as a caricature of the most ridiculous type of academic discourse.

The post opened with a warm holiday scene—the Neal family getting into the holiday spirit by listening to “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” (The Temptations’ version, of course, given that in the Group member's “youthful nationalist days, it was easy to reject the idea that some ‘fat white man’ would be honored for providing gifts that hardworking black women and men, like my parents sacrificed to provide for their families.”) And as this happy scene proceeded, Neal’s daughter tossed in a comment: “Santa sounds like a stalker.”

This . . . insight . . . prompted Neal to pause and reflect on “the more troubling aspects of Santa Claus.” He ultimately concluded that his “daughter was on to something. Every holiday season millions of American embrace a seemingly innocuous symbol, that is in truth a powerful reminder of the reality of State surveillance in everyday life.”

Santa as a latter-day J. Edgar Hoover, all courtesy of a professor's child! Who knew?

It also seems that parents who invoke Santa in a desperate attempt to get their kids to behave need to turn in their ACLU cards—for, as Neal explained, “Santa Claus is but a user friendly symbol of the State’s capacity not only to engage in blatant forms of surveillance, but to essentially police behavior in the absence of actual surveillance . . . How many parents have exploited their children’s knowledge that Santa ‘knows when you are bad or good’ as a means of reigning in bad behavior.”

Neal then proceeded to more flights of fancy, moving on from surveillance to a critique of Santa-themed Christmas TV shows, which “portray Santa Claus as a benevolent patriarch. Benevolent, that is, as long as children (and presumably adults) adhere to some State sanctioned notion of normal and legal behavior.”

The “thugniggaintellectual” provided his own unique brand of insight into Santa’s “disruptive outlaw figures.” BurgermeisterMeisterburger in Santa Claus is Coming to Town, according to Neal, “reproduced anxieties” not about Nazism (don’t be fooled by the German-sounding name) but instead “about Soviet-styled Communism.” As usual with the Group, why let evidence get in the way of a good argument, in this case proving American society’s reflexive anti-leftism? Or take two of my favorites—the Miser Brothers of The Year Without a Santa Claus. In Neal’s reality, they “are used to gently chide the kinds of male flamboyance often associated with homosexuality(!!).”

Neal’s post concluded by meandering from his reflections on Santa to commentary about the “State sanctioned assassinations of Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.” Of course.

It’s easy, and wholly understandable, to laugh at this type of drivel. But it’s worth recalling Neal’s valued place within Duke. Indeed, the revelation of the “thugniggaintellectual” moniker came from Duke's public relations office itself; Duke Magazine published an interview with Neal in which he asserted that “my intellectual alter ego is thugniggaintellectual—one word . . .I wanted to embody this figure that comes into intellectual spaces like a thug, who literally is fearful and menacing. I wanted to use this idea of this intellectual persona to do some real kind of ‘gangster’ scholarship, if you will. All right, just hard, hard-core intellectual thuggery.”

Those remarks appeared in print just after the dean of students, in a public forum on the university’s response to the lacrosse case, worried that Duke students had created a "culture of crassness.” No worries about how a professor who said that he engaged in “hard-core intellectual thuggery” contributed to a “crassness” of discourse on campus.

But why bother confronting the hypocrisy of the academic powers-that-be when we can speculate on Heat Miser's sexual orientation?

A Few Updates

2011-12-18T17:35:00.004-05:00

[Update, Tuesday, 11.51am: The N&O reports that in an unpublished decision, a three-judge panel of the state Court of Appeals has upheld the conviction of Angel Richardson, even though DA Cline didn't turn over to the defense a statement that someone else claimed he had committed the killing until the trial was already underway.

In a remarkable piece of legal reasoning, the panel conceded that the evidence was exculpatory, and acknowledged that the Supreme Court's Brady standard (as well as, of course, North Carolina's seemingly toothless open file discovery law) requires turning over exculpatory material to the defense, but that there's nothing wrong with "the disclosure of evidence at trial, so long as disclosure is made in time for the defendant to make effective use of the evidence."]

A few updates on legal matters from Durham:

False accuser Crystal Mangum has been deemed mentally competent to stand trial for murder. Such a finding, it seems to me, best illustrates how low the bar for competency actually is—if Mangum isn’t seen as mentally imbalanced under the law, it’s hard to see who would be.

That said, the false accuser still has her defenders. Mangum co-author Vincent “Ed” Clark recently offered the following:

"The one thing I would want to add to this is that the story has been reported all wrong from the beginning . . . The narrative that Crystal lied about what happened that night is not true either. I was involved in the case from nearly the start. There are so many things that people don't know . . . the Duke case got used by a lot of people to score points in North Carolina . . . Unfortunately, reporter[s] and the general public are too lazy to do the work it takes to tell the real story. If you could just see, read or hear any of the interviews Crystal did with major media like NBC, CNN and the Daily Beast, you would have a completely different impression of what went on. Unfortunately, the attorneys for the players were very affective [sic] in killing any interviews Crystal did that made her look favorable . . . What I can tell you is that Crystal didn't make up being hurt. There were problems with the case but it didn't have anything to do with the information she provided . . . attorneys for the players[:] Many of them wereon the OJ [Brad Bannon as Johnnie Cochran??], Michael Vick and other similar cases . . . Racists [sic] idiots have no idea that the poor white boys in the case are and their parents have strong connections to the very media the hate[??]. The stress and lack of support for our own community really hurt Crystal. She has struggled to try and have a normal life but can't. Those clowns have hounded her for over five years. It has been said and unnecessary."

It’s worth pointing out: (1) none of the lacrosse players sued Mangum, as they obviously would have done if they had desired to “hound” her; (2) even the Queen of Bias, former SANE-nurse-in-training Tara Levicy, didn’t find any evidence that Mangum was “hurt”; (3) if the lacrosse players’ families had such strong connections to the media, how to explain the guilt-presuming media barrage in the early stages of the case?; (4) given that Mangum went on record with her rape-by-levitation theory, it’s hard to argue that anyone could deem any of her interviews credible.

But such comments offer a sense of the continuing reputational harm to the lacrosse players caused by Mangum’s false accusations and the Nifong/DPD misconduct.

--------------------

The ethically challenged Tracey Cline remains Durham County’s chief prosecutor, even though her behavior prompted this extraordinary in-court remark from her former boss, now-Judge Jim Hardin: “In respect to motions in this court, and any others, please ensure they are factual . . . Consider this a warning and a public admonition as to that.”

That said: despite the public admonition, Hardin allowed Cline to “withdraw” her motions asking for prison-visitor records, apparently as part of an attempt to dig for evidence to prove her wild claims of a “conspiracy” against her. And Hardin chose leniency even though, as Andrew Curliss noted, “Cline offered explanations for why she sought the documents that do not match up with records requests made by her office's investigator or in the motions she presented to Hardin."

Meanwhile, the N&O is reporting that a Durham attorney, Scott Cooper, has organized a grassroots legal campaign to remove Cline from office—as the State Bar has requested between 800 and 900 pages of files from five of Cline’s cases.

--------------------

Duke has filed a follow-up motion as the university continues its efforts to conceal as much as possible regarding its spring 2006 decisionmaking process. In the McFadyen lawsuit, attorney Bob Ekstrand requested material from the two public relations firms retained by Duke to craft the university’s public response to the lacrosse case. The requested material included items of considerable interest to any student of the case:

Burson-Marsteller’s public relations advice and communications with Duke University, its administrators, officials, employees, alumni, board members, regarding both “on” and “off-the record” statements to members of the press;

Duke University’s actions on April 5, 2006, including but not limited to […] the firing of former Head Coach Mike Pressler, President Brodhead’s television interviews, President Brodhead’s Letter to the Community, setting up a committee to examine the culture of the lacrosse team, setting up a committee to investigate the Duke administration and/or the decision to create any of the 5 committees announced by President Brodhead on April 5, 2006.

In a sometimes overheated reply, Duke’s attorneys described the subpoenas as an attempt to “harass the Duke Defendants” by prying into “confidential commercial information.” Somehow, I doubt that in future letters to prospective donors, Duke will describe itself as a commercial institution.

In the event, I suspect Judge Beaty will side with Duke on this matter—but his reasoning will be intriguing.

------------------

Finally, an issue unrelated to the specifics of the lacrosse case but one that touches upon some of the themes of the case.

A few days ago, the Suffolk (MA) County DA dropped all charges against New England Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman, who had been accused of indecent assault by a woman he allegedly groped at a Halloween Party. Early press coverage, especially from the tabloid-ish Boston Herald, presumed if not guilt at the least a demonstration of extremely poor character.

When the charges were dropped, the DA’s office also released a video of the alleged “assault,” which the accompanying press release conceded showed what was, at most, “fleeting” contact between Edelman and the accuser—who neither the Globe nor the Herald deigned to name.

Perhaps, as occurred initially when the New York Times refused to identify Mangum after the exoneration, the papers didn’t want to do anything that might deter false-grope accusers from coming forward in the future.

More Words from Wahneema

2011-12-12T23:03:00.003-05:00

Followers of the “Duke Events” website and U-stream portal received a rare treat this semester: Group of 88 author Wahneema Lubiano took time away from her two “forthcoming” manuscripts (forthcoming at 14 years and counting) to answer questions on such topics as the “relationship between literature and Marxist theory” in Duke’s online office hours.

In the literature program, explained Lubiano, “we could be attending to the thought of Marx.”

But she also wants to “attend” to the “discourse” of everyday matters, such as a bus schedule. “My students,” revealed she, “wanted to be able to explain to their parents what the Literature program was about that was different from the English Department.” Her example: bus schedules as a text! “People need to know what time is, what durations of time are. You need to think about where it’s going . . . you need to think about what it means to get on a vehicle,” and to move to the relevant section of the bus. The bus schedule allows her students to think about “how we know something.”

To give a related example: my five-year-old nephew is very interested in bus (and subway) schedules for many of the reasons that Lubiano identified. Perhaps he should apply for a position as a tenured position in Duke’s Literature program?

To communicate a thought, Lubiano never uses one word where ten would do. She spends nearly six minutes “analyzing” an Obama speech to the Congressional Black Caucus (at 6.21 of the linked clip). After much verbiage, she comes to a conclusion that anyone looking at a typical political column could receive: that standard black political rhetoric often imitates the cadences and style of the Black church. Lubiano delivers this analysis while taking sure to note that she, herself, is a non-believer.

The host of the program responded to this string of banalities with a breathless reply, “Wow.” Wow, indeed.

In things like an Obama presidential speech, Lubiano continues, “None of these words are accidental choices.” No kidding.

Lubiano also describes her classroom style, where “I would talk about the discourses that come together.” Sports, for instance—which according to Lubiano, is “an incredibly elaborate discourse.” (She admits that she doesn’t “know anything about it,” but has no problem speaking about it in the classroom.) “You could think of football or food or cancer treatment as a collection of social texts”—all of these things, she says, illustrate the “social order.”

Lubiano excitedly recalled that she was “sitting up all night long preparing for class one day, and . . . I just made a sign: ‘I heart Occupy Wall Street.’” It must be nice to teach a class in which the prof’s prep work consists of drawing a sign to place in her “folio.”

The host says that Lubiano has “written quite a bit” about Anita Hill. “Quite a bit” in this respect would be relative—Lubiano has written an essay on the topic. And Lubiano (see at the 20-minute mark) is such an “expert” on this matter that she apparently believes that former Missouri senator John Danforth’s name was actually Danfort. The discussion about Clarence Thomas revolves around two (apparently randomly-selected) photos of Thomas, one with President Bush and one with Senator Danfort [sic].

Amazingly, Lubiano says that she sees part of her work as commenting on “political history”—and yet she appears to know no more about U.S. political history than a typical college student. She certainly has no research background in U.S. political history. But, keep in mind, her student Melissa Harris-Perry has claimed that devotees of "black feminist" scholarship can rely on "experiential knowledge" rather than actual facts. Appropriately, the session concludes with a question submitted from none other than fellow Group stalwart Karla Holloway, asking Lubiano to reflect on the legacy of Derrick Bell—a race-obsessed law professor whose work mirrored the Group of 88’s “discourse” (to borrow a Lubiano term).

Based on these 40 minutes, Lubiano views her job as pontificating about everyday phenomena, in a way that virtually anyone with a pulse could do. Why it’s taken her more than a decade to produce the two books that she claimed were forthcoming is beyond me.

By the way, this “Online Office Hours” program seems to be a regular spot for Group of 88 figures. Below is a screenshot from Group member Kathy Rudy’s September appearance.

It’s worth pointing out, by the way, that the above comments refer to the thoughts of a figure described (by an unnamed professor) as “one of the smartest people in America.”

POSTED BY KC JOHNSON AT 8:19 PM

LABELS: FACULTY
8 COMMENTS:

skwilli said...
I had a conversation with my dog yesterday that was waaaaay more interesting than anything Lubiano could ever say. Can any student taking one of her classes get their money back? Or how do I apply for a position in her department? I'm pretty sure I write just as well as she does, and I have many more interesting stories. How can Duke survive with crap like that?

12/12/11 7:41 AM
Anonymous said...
I hope parents of every kid even thinking about applying to Duke watch this. Before anyone writes a check to Duke Univ. they should know the pap that Duke is "selling."

12/12/11 9:00 AM
Anonymous said...
Almost like looking at "the people of Walmart." Also did you mean to say she has written 2 books?

12/12/11 9:27 AM
Anonymous said...
Just sent Duke my "88 cents" in response to their umteenth fund drive request. They can kiss my experiential backside.
My kid, and my meager funds, go to a real university where intelligence, production, honesty, hard work and integrity are words directly associated with the FACULTY! And taught daily to all the students. They don't harp on the evils of capitalism, the horror of racism, the disgrace of homophobia....they demand, live and teach by example....the value of hard work, the truth of real human rights, and the silliness of discrimination based on sexual preference. Shame on Duke for hiring and retaining these empty suit clowns. Cline would be a great Duke faculty member....she could teach Hooked on Phonics.

12/12/11 10:06 AM
Anonymous said...
I suppose it would politically incorrect to describe the arguments of these people as "fatuous"?

12/12/11 10:14 AM
Anonymous said...
If this is in any way indicative of the humanities and social sciences in American higher education, it's no wonder so many recent college graduates in this country are jobless. Before condemning Duke as an institution, however, it's worth noting that there are many excellent faculty teaching rigorous material in the physical sciences, engineering, economics, public policy, and others.

My son graduated from Duke in 2006 and majored in chemistry and economics. I got my monies worth. But I lament that my Alma mater employs, even promotes, such lunatic fringe. Our nation is experiencing unprecedented global competition. Society cannot afford to waste precious resources on self indulgent tripe masquerading as education.

12/12/11 1:50 PM
Lois Turner said...
The "People of Walmart" comment is spot on, and I suspect these two would take it as a compliment. No one expects middle aged college professors to look like, say, Helen Mirren, but this level of slovenliness and unprofessionalism as to personal appearance gives an awful impression of the university.

I note that the renowned Duke Diet & Fitness Center is "offering extra savings on new client seasonal rates" until December 19. Maybe someone should alert our dynamic duo of pie-loving profs.

http://www.dukehealth.org/services/diet_and_fitness/about/news/promotions

12/12/11 4:12 PM
Anonymous said...
I am ashamed of Duke. Period.

12/12/11 5:59 PM

Rev. Wells Departs Duke

2011-12-08T15:55:00.002-05:00

The Rev. Sam Wells, Duke chaplain, is leaving his post to return to England. Wells was a peripheral player in the lacrosse saga, but his performance was a deeply unfortunate one, given his status as a man of the cloth. Throughout the case, Wells implied that he viewed his ministerial functions as confined to students who conformed to the humanities' faculty preferred race, class, and gender status.

On April 2, 2006, Wells (as he later revealed to the H-S) shelved his planned sermon, and instead talked about the lacrosse case. (Many months later, in an e-mail to me, Wells claimed his sermon in fact wasn't about the case, an assertion that not only contradicted what he told the H-S, but made no sense, given the sermon's contents.) In his sermon, Wells implied that the lacrosse players had broken the “law” of the university, and he placed their actions in a “subculture of reckless ‘entitlement’, sexual acquisitiveness and aggressive arrogance goes against every aspect of this law. It commodifies and consumes the bodies of others, with no generosity, no patience, no searching for truth or beauty, and no regard to its social significance. It undermines the university because it corrupts the imagination on which the whole university rests. It breaks the university's law. It debases desire.”

“The last week,” he contended, “has exposed the reality that sexual practices are an area where some male students are accustomed to manipulating, exploiting and terrorizing women all the time—and that this has been accepted by many as a given.”

Such views got Wells a spot on the wildly biased Campus Culture Initiative; and also appear to have prompted him--after Mike Nifong's case imploded--to invite NAACP head William Barber to give a Sunday sermon at Duke. That invitation came despite (or, perhaps, because of?) the NAACP's flagrant biases against the wrongly accused Duke students, and unsurprisingly led to a sermon that tried to rationalize the NAACP's inexcusable handling of the case.

To my knowledge, the Rev. Wells never apologized for his response to the lacrosse case, either to the wider Duke community or to the specific Duke students whose words he (erroneously) targeted. Indeed, in an e-mail to the blogger John in Carolina, Wells, like Barber, tried to rationalize his behavior.

Cline Losing Her Grip (Updated)

2011-12-04T18:58:00.010-05:00

[Update, Tuesday, 2.31pm: Joe Neff reports that proceedings were adjourned because of an apparent bomb threat, but not before DA Cline offered a "dog-at-my-homework" excuse in the Peterson hearing:

Cline also said she was unprepared and had not read(!!) 800 pages of evidence given to her after Thanksgiving . . .
“I am here to say my sister still has rights, and there is no way you can have this district attorney represent my sister,” said Candace Zamperini, (Kathleen Peterson’s sister). “They are not prepared, they haven’t read the documents…..I will tell you, this district attorney’s office is not the district attorney’s office of Jim Hardin, where I got good representation.”

Cline does not appear to have given a reason why she didn't do her job and read the relevant documents; she seemingly assumed that, at worst, Judge Hudson would allow her to delay proceedings by removing herself from the case, and was caught unprepared when the judge refused her demand.]

[Update, Tuesday, 9.28am: Joe Neff's article in today's N&O is worth reading in full, if only for the sheer entertainment value. It ranges from the bizarre (the attendance of a figure who has argued that an owl(!), rather than Michael Peterson, killed Peterson's wife) to the ridiculous:

Fox patiently listened as Cline discussed more than a dozen cases from state appellate courts that she said supported her request. At one point, Cline mentioned a case that she hadn't read yet and asked the judge for time to read it. Fox said yes.
The packed courtroom sat in silence while Cline sat alone at her table, flipping through documents.
After 14 minutes, Fox broke the silence: "Are you still reading the case?"
Cline said she hadn't located the correct citation.

Bill Thomas, appropriately, summarized: "It was remarkable that she offered no evidence in support of these extraordinary allegations."]

[Update, Monday, 6.42pm: Joe Neff reports that Judge Fox dismissed all of Cline's filings, dismissing her reasoning as "woefully inadequate."

Here's how Neff described the courtroom scene: "Cline then gave a rambling half hour speech that roughly tracked her court filings and made no mention of Peterson: Hudson was retaliating against her because she failed to dismiss a murder charge in the case of Derrick Allen."]

[Update, Monday, 12.29pm: Reporting from the courtroom, Joe Neff brings word that Judge Fox is . . . skeptical . . . of Cline's bizarre claims:

“There’s a lot of verbiage in here that has nothing to do with anything,” Fox said of Cline’s 286-page motion and foot tall stack of exhibits. “The affidavits are not sufficient.”]

There were a couple of occasions in the lacrosse case in which Mike Nifong all but baited the State Bar to file prompt ethics charges against him. The first came just before Election Day, when the embattled candidate traveled to NCCU and all but turned the American theory of justice on its head, asserting, “If a case is of such significance that people in the community are divided or up in arms over the existence of that case, then that in and of itself [emphasis added] is an indication that a case needs to be tried.” The second coincided with the week of the Meehan hearing, during which Nifong offered myriad (often mutually contradictory) explanations as to why he hadn’t reported all the DNA test results. The first set of ethics charges against Nifong arrived a few days later.

Based on an article in today’s N&O by Andrew Curliss, Durham is rapidly moving toward seeing its second DA in less than a decade removed for ethical improprieties. Curliss’s piece traces Cline’s by-now-standard pattern of fabrications, but it also shows that the county’s “minister of justice” has been reduced to lying about seemingly trivial matters.

In recent months, Cline expanded her network of untruths from Judge Hudson’s courtroom to that of her (and Nifong’s) former boss, Judge Hardin. The topic of Cline’s false filings: prison visitation records. In her filings to Hardin, Cline (falsely) claimed that the two prisoners (Keith Kidwell and Angel Richardson) had filed motions to which she needed to respond. Yet neither man had filed such a motion, nor had their attorneys intended to do so.

So why did Cline mislead the court; and why would she have any interest in such a seemingly obscure matter as prison visitation records? Cline refused to speak to the N&O, nor did she respond to an e-mail from me requesting comment. But it appears as if she was not only lying to a judge but abusing the powers of her office either (1) to dig for material to help save her law license in any ethics proceedings against her; or (2) as part of her futile attempt to compile “evidence” substantiating her wild claims of an anti-Cline “conspiracy” between Judge Hudson, defense attorneys, and the N&O.

Cline had no good reason for desiring the information: the prison department spokesperson Curliss, "Why the DA's office is interested in whether Kidwell is seeing his pre-approved visitors, I have no earthly idea. It's our own internal policy, so it's ours to police."

Jim Coleman told the N&O that the State Bar will be concerned about "not only whether she is misrepresenting and abusing the judicial process, but also whether she is filing patently false allegations in pleadings and taking advantage of the immunity that she has (as a prosecutor). ... She really is undermining the integrity of her office." Coleman also predicted that Cline could face a contempt-of-court hearing from Hardin.

Curliss’ latest exposé follows on Cline’s moves late last week regarding a hearing tomorrow in the latest appeal filed by Michael Peterson, the former Durham mayoral candidate convicted of killing his wife. (Judge Hudson was scheduled to preside over the hearing.) Cline wants Hudson off the case, and the H-S reported Friday that Cline has subpoenaed as many as 53(!) people to appear at the hearing. As a fallback, she’s requested that the Attorney General’s office step in for her if Hudson isn’t removed. The AG’s office has said it will accept Cline’s request—but only if it can obtain a continuance to allow its attorneys to get up to speed on the case.

The AG’s position is a reasonable one, but the fact that a long-scheduled hearing might have to be delayed because of Cline’s increasingly unhinged behavior gives a sense of why the Bar needs to intervene sooner rather than later.

For a sense of how untenable Cline’s position has become, even the local legal academy’s most prominent apologist for prosecutorial misconduct, Irving Joyner, has deemed the DA’s conduct “strange” and noted that her filings were apparent “misrepresentations to a court.”

When an unethical Durham prosecutor has lost Irving Joyner, it would seem there are few local legal allies left.

“Students Are Not The Enemy of . . . Faculty Unless We Invite Them To Be”

2011-11-21T21:20:00.007-05:00

The past few days appear to have launched “Hypocrisy Week.” First, the New York Times public editor turned to Wendy Murphy—Wendy Murphy!—for guidance on how journalists should cover sexual assault cases. Then, the Chronicle of Higher Education turned to Cathy Davidson—Cathy Davidson!—to deliver a plea about protecting students’ due process rights on campus.

During the lacrosse case, Davidson distinguished herself for her “revisionist” interpretation of the Group of 88 statement, which she displayed in a January 2007 N&O op-ed. In a bizarre inversion of reality, the Group member claimed that the period between March 24 and April 6, 2006—when Duke administrators, professors, some students, and “activists” regularly denounced the lacrosse players—in fact featured a Duke campus with widespread, boisterous defenses of lacrosse players coupled with racist attacks on black women. “It was,” fantasized she, “as if defending David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann necessitated reverting to pernicious stereotypes about African-Americans, especially poor black women.” (In an e-mail circulated at the time, Davidson confessed that she penned the op-ed after consulting with a lawyer, and being informed that Group members could be vulnerable to civil suits.)

Davidson’s latest stab at commentary came in response to the pepper-spraying of peaceful protesters at UC-Davis—which today led to the suspension of the campus police chief. Cal-Davis deserves all the criticism that it gets for this incident, and I agree wholeheartedly with the remarks of FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff on the issue. Yet there’s something . . . peculiar . . . about seeing Cathy Davidson standing up for due process, given what was (at best) her indifference when three of her own institution’s students faced the highest-profile case of prosecutorial misconduct in recent U.S. history. It’s even more remarkable to see her pen an article entitled “A Plea to College Presidents: Exercise Your Moral Leadership,” given the failed “moral leadership” exhibited by her own institution’s president in the lacrosse case.

Davidson, however, appears unable or unwilling to detect her hypocrisy. “Students are not the enemy of administrators and faculty unless we invite them to be,” writes the Group member. If nothing else, the Group of 88 statement invited dozens of Duke students to recognize that some of the most outspoken faculty members on campus viewed them as the enemy.

The Davidson essay is notable for another matter relating to academic hypocrisy. Over the past several weeks, I’ve heard of troubling instances in which CUNY faculty members have brought the Occupy Wall Street protests into their classrooms, including at least two occasions of professors “encouraging” their students to actually attend the protests. Davidson seems to see little problematic with such conduct, noting approvingly that she has “heard from faculty and administrators who see the Occupy activities as appropriate for thoughtful conversation and debate across a numerous departments, whether economics or ethics.”

It would be interesting to see how many professors who see OWS as a “teachable moment” had a similar reaction to the Tea Party movement, which in many ways was OWS’ mirror image from 2009-10. (I rather doubt that Davidson had such a reaction, for instance.) From defenders of the academic status quo, we often hear (correctly, in my opinion) that the partisan affiliation of professors, in and of itself, is irrelevant to the quality of education. But that argument becomes much harder to sustain when professors so blatantly bring their political sympathies into the classroom.

“Students are not the enemy of administrators and faculty unless we invite them to be.” Cathy Davidson certainly knows of what she speaks.

The Times Again Shames Itself

2011-11-21T00:11:00.006-05:00

The New York Times’ failure in covering the lacrosse case occurred on many levels. At the most basic level, of course, the paper’s handling of events could be blamed on the flawed and biased reporting of Duff Wilson, along with the fact-free “commentary” of Selena Roberts and Harvey Araton. At a second level, the paper’s record demonstrated a massive failure by the editors—from then-sports editor Tom Jolly upwards, to Bill Keller: once Wilson’s flaws had been exposed for the world to see, editors had no obligation to keep him on the story.

At a third level, however, the story represented a failure of the Times’ public editor, a position established in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal to represent the readers and to champion journalistic integrity from within the paper. Then-public editor Byron Calame penned two columns on the lacrosse case. The first, which appeared in spring 2006, minimized even the factual inaccuracies that had marred Roberts’ early columns. The second, which came after the exonerations in spring 2007, denied any ideological bias to the Times coverage, and declined even to speculate on why the Times had gotten the story so wrong for so long. It was left to the AJR and the Chronicle to analyze the Times’ wreckage.

Yet even Calame’s poor performance can’t hold a candle to the most recent public editor’s column from Arthur Brisbane. The subject: how the paper should cover rape allegations. In formulating his suggested approach, Brisbane consulted with three people, each of whom was described as some form of victims’ advocate. One was Claudia Bayliff, project attorney for the National Judicial Education Program. A second was Marci Hamilton, a professor at Cardozo Law School.

The third was . . . Wendy Murphy.

That’s right. The public editor believes that reporters at the nation’s paper of record should take guidance on how to appropriately cover sexual assault cases from a figure who informed a national TV audience that she had “never, ever met a false rape claim”; and had, in her public statements about the highest profile sexual assault case of recent years:

asserted, without any evidence, that “there’s a very good chance there was a payoff” to false accuser Crystal Mangum and the second dancer, Kim Roberts;
implied, falsely, that the unreleased 1000+ pages of the discovery file, which contained Mangum’s psychological records and was sealed upon orders of the judge, might have contained “witness statements from the defendants’ friends—statements saying that a rape occurred just as [Mangum] described”;
fantasized, falsely, about the existence of “broomstick DNA” in the case;
reasoned that, contrary to North Carolina’s open-file discovery law, ex-DA Mike Nifong had a right to withhold evidence from the defense (one of the offenses for which he was eventually disbarred;
deemed Mangum’s ever-changing version of events as “minor inconsistencies”;
claimed, falsely, that President Brodhead had publicly asserted that “many” non-lacrosse players attended the party;
“bet,” on national TV, that one of the falsely accused players was “molested as a child”;
made no fewer than 18 false statements in the first nine months of the case alone.

A while back, Salon’s Alex Pareene used Murphy’s career to suggest that “there are, in the mass media, absolutely no consequences for blatant, constant lying.” Public Editor Brisbane’s column, however, reveals something even more shameful: that the public editor of the nation’s most influential newspaper could consider such a figure suitable to provide guidance to journalists.

"Power Without Responsibility or Conscious"

2011-11-18T09:40:00.007-05:00

[Update III, 3.47pm, Saturday: Two articles were posted on the N&O website earlier this afternoon. The first, by Joe Neff, notes that on Friday, Cline filed a 285-page(!) motion--described by Neff as "packed with passionate and personal attacks" against Judge Orlando Hudson--demanding the removal of Hudson from all Durham criminal cases. Cline further alleged a wide-ranging conspiracy to discredit her between Hudson, various Durham defense attorneys, and the N&O. The paper's executive editor, John Drescher, appropriately deemed the (unsubstantiated) allegation "crazy."

The second article, by Andrew Curliss, reveals that the State Bar has begun looking into Cline's behavior. Additionally, both Jim Coleman and former North Carolina chief justice Burley Mitchell sharply criticized Cline's behavior, noting that the issues raised by Cline--alleged errors by Hudson--would be handled through appeals, not by accusations of ethical misconduct. Of Cline's filing, Mitchell said, "I have never, never seen anything like it"; Coleman contended that "you don't discredit a judge in this intemperate way," adding that he was unaware of any comparable filing against a judge "in any context."

And, from the comments section, a reminder that in 2008, the Independent hailed Cline (whose J.D. comes from North Carolina Central, and whose B.A. comes from Livingstone College, in Salisbury, N.C.) as a "great attorney" who "could be an excellent role model for the young African Americans caught in the system." Those comments, by the way, came in an editorial in which the paper admitted that it was wrong to have endorsed Mike Nifong in 2006. How long will it be until Indy similarly retracts its praise of Cline?]

[Update II, 10.35pm: In an interview with WTVD-11, Jim Coleman notes, "This is as an extreme of a reaction by rulings of a court that I've ever seen, particularly because it's so personal. The basis for it appears to be rulings that can be reviewed on appeal and if the judge got it wrong, they can be reversed . . . There probably a lot of lawyers who had thoughts like this about judges, but I've never seen one actually put it in a pleading and filing it."]

[Update I, 12.40pm: Joe Neff tweets that the Cline filing was an "all out, one of a kind attack" on a judge. And I e-mailed Cline to ask why she didn't proofread her document before filing it; she did not respond.]

In a blockbuster article, the N&O’s Andrew Curliss revealed that embattled Durham County “minister of justice” Tracey Cline has filed a complaint with the North Carolina Judicial Standards Commission against Durham judge Orlando Hudson. Cline accused Hudson of acting with “BAD FAITH” (capitalization and emphasis in original) and deemed him guilty of “moral turpitude, dishonesty, and corruption.” The DA added that the existence of the complaint gives Judge Hudson a conflict of interest with the Durham DA’s office, and therefore he should hear no criminal cases until any ethics proceedings against him are completed.

In a rambling, 12-page document, Cline charged Hudson with having a vendetta based on her handling of the Derrick Allen case. She outlined her . . . reasoning . . . in this meandering sentence (grammatical and run-on errors all in original): “The District Attorney alleges, based upon information and belief, that this Honorable Court’s action of attempting to coerce the District Attorney into dismissing Allen and then for this Honorable Court to engaged in retaliatory conduct against the District Attorney and the District Attorney’s office after the District Attorney refused to dismiss that case are actions that constitute an improper or wrongful use of the power of this office by acting intentionally and with gross disregard for this conduct and in bad faith.”

Cline offered her “evidence” for Hudson’s alleged gross misconduct in three-and-a-half pages. She summarized what she saw as the basic facts of three cases (Yearwood, Dorman, and Allen) in which Hudson had ruled against her. Cline provided no new evidence to sustain her wild claims, most of which were thoroughly debunked in the N&O’s “Twisted Truth” series. Instead, she frequently resorted to citing unspecified, and unrevealed, “information and belief” (about her own cases!). Based on the arguments presented in her filing, virtually any high-profile ruling against a prosecutor could be deemed judicial misconduct.

The most striking aspect of the filing, however, came not in Cline’s decision to accuse a sitting judge of gross misconduct based largely on his having had the temerity to criticize her own unethical behavior. Rather, it was her decision to do so in a filing that appeared as if it were written by an ill-prepared high school student rather than a major county’s chief prosecutor.

A comedy of grammatical errors, the filing included numerous comma splices that (doubtless unintentionally) produced passages that differed from Cline’s desired meaning. Sometimes the DA seemed unable to write in complete sentences. (“Also a nurse saw the defendant looking at the deceased child’s vagina prior to there being any indication of sexual assault.” Or: “That the appellate courts have reviewed this case two times and each time did not overturn this conviction.” Or: “In that the agency was helping the family with counseling and trying to locate other family members.”) Mid-sentence, Cline frequently capitalized words (Game, Stayed, Interest) for no apparent reason. Occasionally, she ended sentences without periods. Sometimes, she used words Sarah Palin-style, as when she asserted that Hudson’s behavior “retards” confidence in the court’s application of the law.

Most embarrassingly, the filing was riddled with spelling mistakes. At one point, Cline referred to saliva as “salvia.” At another, she described the court system’s principles as the “principals” of the criminal court system. At still another, she feared that her rights were “striped away” by Hudson’s rulings. At yet another point, Cline charged that the legal system’s credibility was a “causality” of Hudson’s conduct. And consider this single-sentence paragraph, with the emphasis added: “This is power without responsibility or conscious.” Was Cline suggesting that Hudson had passed out while delivering his rulings?

Finally, ponder this borderline incoherent sentence, with which Cline began her introduction to the Yearwood case (run-on nature, lack of punctuation as in original): “Mother of 12 year old victim comes home at lunch hears her daughter scream out Mom help and goes to her bedroom to see her daughter crying, her panties torn on the floor, her dress torn and being held up trying to cover her body and the defendant is there buttoning his pants.”

In many circumstances—say, comments on a blog—there’s little, if any, expectation of the writer adhering to basic rules of grammar. But, in this instance, a sitting district attorney took the extraordinary step of registering a claim of ethical misconduct against a sitting judge. Yet this prosecutor, whose job includes the writing of legal briefs at the trial level*, couldn’t even take the time to have someone who knows how to write proofread her legal filing?

It should go without saying that, if removal proceedings aren’t already underway against Cline, this filing should force the State Bar to take a hard look at her fitness for office. As Curliss notes in his article, "Ethics rules for lawyers say they cannot 'engage in conduct intended to disrupt a tribunal' or engage in discourteous conduct 'degrading to a tribunal.' Ethics rules also require lawyers to bring actions based in law and fact, and that a lawyer cannot make a statement 'with reckless disregard as to its truth or falsity concerning the qualifications or integrity of a judge.'"

*--corrected

Duke & Penn State

2011-11-14T21:31:00.003-05:00

A couple of intriguing connections in the media coverage between the Penn State scandal and the Duke case crossed my desk in the past week.

The first comes in a well-done piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education on how the scandal might affect the university in the long term. The article contains the following passage:

It could be years before the legal case runs its course. In the meantime, the university needs to focus on the messages it presents to the world and figure out the right strategies to get those messages across, says John F. Burness, a visiting professor of public policy at Duke University, who was its chief spokesman during the 2006 lacrosse scandal.
"While Penn State is probably best known for its football program and iconic coach, it has a lot of academic quality across the board," he said. "In the long run, that won't be changed at all, and will very much help them get out of the current chasm they're in."

I suspect that Burness is correct, although at this stage I wouldn’t be confident in the prediction—in part because I’m not at all certain that Penn State has much of a reputation for “academic quality across the board,” in part because this affair has the potential to exact even more damage depending on how the civil lawsuits proceed.

That said, it’s worth using the Burness quote to note the difference between this scandal and that at Duke: at Penn St., there’s no evidence of any wrongdoing by any academic units. At Duke, by contrast, the scandal quickly called into question the “academic quality” of dozens of faculty members, who seemed unable or unwilling to unable to evaluate evidence that contradicted their preconceived race/class/gender worldview.

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Late last week, the Patriot-News, the major newspaper in the Penn State area, also examined the issue of the potential damage to the long-term Penn State “brand.” The article featured extensive quotes and summaries of previous university episodes of bad publicity (Duke, Texas A&M, and Virginia Tech) from Terry Hartle, a vice president at the American Council on Education (ACE). The council describes itself as “the major coordinating body for all of the nation's higher education institutions, seeks to provide leadership and a unifying voice on higher education issues and to influence public policy through advocacy, research, and program initiatives.” Given the obsession with certain types of diversity in contemporary higher education, it’s not hard to determine ACE’s reflexive position on “diversity” issues.

Hartle was paraphrased in the following way:

In all three cases, the universities organized themselves to determine the root causes of the crisis put policies and procedures in place to ensure it never happens again and fairly quickly re-established credibility and confidence with various public audiences.

It’s difficult to determine what Hartle could have been talking about when he suggested that Duke had done anything that resembled reforming its policies or procedures to ensure that something like the university’s response to the lacrosse case never occurs again. The university, of course, has spent lots of money in legal fees and settlements—but those efforts have, in part, been undertaken to protect the rush-to-judgment contingent among the faculty.

The university reappointed its president, and retained the same faculty hiring patterns that appeared to foster the rush-to-judgment attitude. It doesn’t appear that even any of the faculty members were punished in any way for their dubious and in a few cases unethical conduct. Indeed, several Group of 88 members have been promoted to deanships. Duke consistently has avoided any kind of investigation into why the administration and faculty so disastrously rushed to judgment and abridged their students' rights—the episodes that prompted the university to settle out of court with the falsely accused players and remain at issue in the unindicted players' suit. If a lacrosse-like case emerged at Duke tomorrow, it's hard to imagine things would play out much differently at the university than they did in 2006.

While I know little of the Texas A&M case, Duke appears to be the anti-Virginia Tech. While VT undertook a full inquiry, and changed procedures to make sure that a student like the shooter never again fell through the cracks, Duke appears to have taken the reverse approach. But, of course, for a university convinced that it must do nothing to reduce the emphasis on "diversity" in hiring patterns or regarding curricular matters, Duke's response comes as little surprise.

I e-mailed Hartle to ask him what he was talking about in his comments regarding Duke. He did not reply.

Assorted Legal Matters

2011-11-06T20:49:00.006-05:00

The City of Durham has filed its final brief in its mid-case appeal to the 4^th Circuit. I have analyzed the previous filings of the city and the falsely accused players; and the city’s appeal adds little to the exchange. The city’s attorneys—who according to the AP have already charged Durham more than $5 million for their services—continued to maintain that, when all was said and done, the city and its employees handled Crystal Mangum’s charges properly.

To reiterate, here is how Judge Beaty has responded to the Durham argument:

Defendants in this case essentially contend that this Court should take the most restrictive view of the applicable doctrines and should conclude that no provision of the Constitution has been violated, and that no redressable claim can be stated, when government officials intentionally fabricate evidence to frame innocent citizens, even if the evidence is used to indict and arrest those citizens without probable cause.

Some of the city’s old favorites are back. The brief, for instance, feigns ignorance at Mike Nifong’s former title (which was, since the city's multi-million dollar attorneys appear to be unaware of it, District Attorney of Durham County). Instead, the city’s attorneys repeatedly term him “State Prosecutor” Nifong, as if his office instead was under the supervision of AG Roy Cooper. Durham’s lawyers also ignore Nifong’s role in supervising the police investigation. The brief also repeats the conventional Durham argument about the grand jury indictment all but requiring that the civil suit against the city be thrown out, regardless of the myriad instances of misconduct committed by DPD officers that had nothing to do with two officers' grand jury testimony.

The city attorneys do, however, employ three new arguments, though two don’t help them all that much. Responding to the falsely accused players’ attacks on the procedurally fraudulent “pick-any-three” photo array, the Durham brief maintains that “the only way that the arrays could become misleading at all would be if the prosecutor presented them to the grand jury without ensuring that the members fully understood the inherent limitations of the identification procedure used [emphasis added].”

But there’s absolutely no evidence that Nifong did present the photo array in this manner, and certainly nothing in Gottlieb’s description of his grand jury testimony suggests that Nifong acted to ensure that the grand jury “members fully understood the inherent limitations of the identification procedure used.” What evidence does the city’s brief present in this regard? “The officers ensured that the entire procedure was videotaped so that its inculpatory and exculpatory aspects could receive a full and fair vetting after the fact.” The brief makes no claim that the tape was presented to the grand jury, or that Nifong, Gottlieb, or Himan explained the ID process violated Durham’s lineup procedures. Therefore, by the city’s own argument, agents of the city (Gottlieb and/or Himan) deliberately presented “misleading” testimony to the grand jury. Why the city would have bothered to make such an admission is unclear.

Second, the Durham attorneys aggressively attempt to vindicate the performance of then-Cpl. David Addison, who functioned (according to press reports) as police spokesperson when the case first broke. According to the brief, the plaintiffs’ “allegations plausibly suggest only that Addison described the case to the public consistently with the way it was described to him by other officers.” In other words: Addison shouldn’t be legally vulnerable for having made false, malicious statements, because he was relying on false, malicious material provided to him by other police officers.

This argument, which reflects the case’s more general “Blame-Another-Defendant” strategy, at the very least would imply that discovery should continue forward, to determine which Durham employees fed the spokesperson this false and malicious material, which he then unthinkingly parroted to the local, state, and national media. Yet the Durham attorneys cite this version of events as an argument for why the case should be immediately terminated before any discovery occurs.

Finally, the city attorneys take direct aim at Beaty, by dismissing the claim that Americans possess a constitutional right not to be framed for a crime by government agents. Such an “argument carries no water,” according to the Durham attorneys, because it is excessively broad. Or, in Judge Beaty’s words, according to Durham, the Constitution does not give the average American a right against “government officials intentionally fabricat[ing] evidence to frame innocent citizens, even if the evidence is used to indict and arrest those citizens without probable cause.”

A procedural reminder: this appeal, which Judge Beaty granted despite the only on-point precedent coming from the Middle District of Alabama, involves the City’s attempt to have the case dismissed before any discovery occurs.

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One reason, perhaps, for Durham’s aggressive attempt to overturn Judge Beaty’s decision came last week, when the Supreme Court considered a grand jury immunity case, Rehberg v. Paulk. The question posed by the Georgia case: “Whether a government official who acts as a complaining witness by presenting perjured testimony against an innocent citizen is entitled to absolute immunity from a Section 1983 claim for civil damages.” The case had quite a few similarities with events in Durham—the allegation was that a prosecutor’s investigator conspired with the prosecutor to frame an innocent defendant—though it had one critical distinction from the lacrosse case: the prosecutor in Rehberg did not appear to have formally served as the supervisor of the police investigation, as Nifong did.

Based on their general records (and the first two’s performance in the oral arguments), it seems extraordinarily unlikely that Justices Roberts, Alito, and Thomas would rule against the Georgia authorities. But the other six justices engaged in a wide-ranging and quite interesting discussion—asking challenging questions of both sides—of whether the immunity for grand jury testimony is proper. It’s dangerous to make any predictions based on oral arguments, but the Court’s four more liberal members, along with Justice Scalia, didn’t reject the plaintiff’s arguments out of hand.

In questioning the investigator’s attorney, Scalia, for instance, maintained that as the current structure (immunity for any behavior that’s testified about before the grand jury) perversely seems to invite a police officer to “get himself off the hook” is to “testify,” since “his testimony bathes him clean.” Justices Kagan and Ginsburg seemed particularly skeptical about the concept of letting an appearance before the grand jury provide a catch-all shield to guard against a civil lawsuit.

At Scotusblog, Timothy Coates concluded the following: “The Court’s questions indicate that this case may turn less on the niceties of the common law than the realities of common practice in the criminal courts. If the reality is that grand jury witnesses invariably engage in non-testimonial conduct prior to the proceeding itself –meeting with prosecutors, gathering evidence – that might spawn a malicious prosecution suit in which the subsequent testimony is admitted as evidence of malice, there seems to be little point in granting absolute immunity for such testimony, since erosion of grand jury secrecy and entanglement in litigation would occur in any event. On the other hand, if the Court concludes that potential liability for grand jury testimony may impair the day-to-day functioning of grand juries, and that there are practical differences between grand juries and warrant proceedings, then it could extend Briscoe’s rule of absolute immunity.”

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One prosecutor who must thank her lucky stars about the concept of prosecutorial immunity is Nifong’s successor in position and ethics, Tracey Cline. The N&O reports that the attorney for David Yearwood, one of the defendants profiled in the paper’s “Twisted Truth” series, filed an appeal claiming that Cline withheld considerable exculpatory evidence in Yearwood’s case: "At worst, District Attorney Cline's conduct was deliberate and intentional. At best, District Attorney Cline's conduct was negligent and incompetent. Either way, it is her misconduct that brings us to the situation we face today." The attorney, Heather Rattelade, made clear toward which option she leaned, charging that Cline "engaged in deliberate and deceitful tactics to obtain a conviction at all costs."

As has been her wont, Cline responded to the filing not on the substance but by making wild charges—in this instance, by insinuating that either Rattelade or Durham judge Orlando Hudson(!) have committed a breach of legal ethics by leaking material to the N&O. She offered, of course, no evidence to corroborate her claim.

In the last three contested races for DA in Durham (2006 primary, 2006 general election, 2008 primary), a significant plurality of Durham voters demonstrated at best indifference to and at worst outright support for unethical behavior in the county’s chief prosecutor. So it seems unlikely that Cline will be removed at the ballot box. Will the State Bar act again?

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The Herald-Sun brought news of a Durham resident who has, seemingly for the first time, alleged mistreatment from the Durham DA’s office. And who is the figure? Durham Committee for the Affairs of Black People-endorsed Solomon Burnette—the man who spent time in jail for robbing two Duke students, before distinguishing himself for penning an editorial that seemed to advocate vigilante justice against innocent white members of the Durham community.

In an interview with the H-S, Burnette claimed that he was innocent of a crime to which he pled no contest. The H-S didn’t provide a quote from either the DA’s office or from Burnette’s victims about his after-the-fact change of heart. The paper did, however, reveal that the endorsee had a criminal record that extended beyond robbery: “He also has been convicted of possession of marijuana, possession of stolen goods, operating a vehicle without a license, and common law forgery."

Defending his vigilante column—for which even the NCCU paper chose to apologize—Burnette wildly claimed, “Somebody had to say something . . . I think the article forced people to think in terms that we’re not used to thinking in.” This substance-free defense of indefensible statements recalls the non-defense defenses of their statement that came from the Group of 88.

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Speaking of the Group of 88, one of their lower-profile figures made an appearance last week, in a high-profile case. Laura Edwards was one of 23 historians to sign an amicus brief in Gill v. OPM, a court case challenging Section 3 of DOMA. (Section 3 requires the federal government to treat all married same-sex couples as legal strangers under federal law.) To my knowledge, this filing was the first joint document on a legal matter that Edwards had signed since the Group statement in 2006, in which she and her fellow signatories asserted that something “happened” to false accuser Crystal Mangum; and the clarifying statement of 2007, in which she and her fellow signatories announced that they “appreciate[d] the efforts of those who used the attention the incident generated to raise issues of discrimination and violence,” the stated purpose of the potbangers’ “castrate” protest.

As a major civil rights challenge, Gill is the sort of case in which historians could make a contribution, partly because claims made by advocates of the law are historically shaky, partly because DOMA was all but historically unprecedented (the Supreme Court has sometimes taken a more skeptical view of laws that target minority groups and lack historical precedent). But it was remarkable to see a Group of 88 member—someone who proudly thumbed her nose at basic principles of due process in 2006 and 2007—boldly embracing due process in 2011. It would be a little like a longtime ACLU activist signing onto a brief defending Guantánamo Bay.

A charitable person might suggest that Prof. Edwards, having so massively misjudged the lacrosse case, has become unusually sensitive in its aftermath to violations of due process. A more cynical observer might conclude that Prof. Edwards’ concern with due process depends solely on the race, gender, or sexual orientation of the affected parties.

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Finally, for the latest high-profile case involving college athletics—the arrest of a former Penn State defensive coordinator for widespread sexual abuse of young boys, and the arrest of the university’s AD for allegedly lying to the grand jury investigating the affair—Dan Wetzel’s column expresses my sentiments about the university's conduct more effectively than I could.

But one comment on media coverage of the case. In Sunday’s New York Times, Mark Viera (whose sports reporting I enjoy) wrote the following, regarding the record of Penn State football coach Joe Paterno: “A grand jury said that when Mr. Paterno learned of one allegation of abuse in 2002, he immediately reported it to Mr. Curley. The grand jury did not implicate Mr. Paterno in any wrongdoing, though it was unclear if he ever followed up on his initial conversation with Mr. Curley or tried to alert the authorities himself.

In fact, the grand jury report said something quite different. Here’s the relevant excerpt:

“Immediately,” it would seem to me, means immediately—not the next day. And given that the grand jury report—a report that lays out exactly who reported what, and when, to authorities—makes no mention of Paterno ever reporting the charges to authorities, saying that it’s “unclear” whether Paterno “tried to alert the authorities himself” strikes me as an unusually charitable interpretation of events.

In the lacrosse case, the Times failed because of bias—its editors and chief case reporter, Duff Wilson, embraced a narrative that implied it was the paper’s job to bend over backwards to prop up Nifong’s case. But the paper also failed because sports reporters too often are not sufficiently up to speed about basic legal procedure.

[Update, Monday, 11.23am: In today's Times, Viera has a follow-up story, containing a damning quote from the law school dean emeritus of Duquesne on Paterno's failed moral obligations in the case. The article no longer claims that Paterno immediately reported the allegations to his superiors. There also is no indication that PSU president Graham Spanier plans to resign as a result of the scandal. It seems hard to imagine he could stay on--but, then again, Richard Brodhead is still president of Duke.]

Updates

2011-11-02T19:25:00.002-04:00

A few update items:

(1) Group of 88 extremist Grant Farred is back in the news, after the Cornell student government—with only one negative vote—passed a resolution (unsuccessfully) urging the Cornell administration to reconsider its decision to have Farred chair the Africana Studies Department’s search for a new department chair.

The genesis of the controversy was Farred’s 2010 decision to refer to two female African-American graduate students as “black bitches.” The chair of the student government’s Women’s Issues Committee, who sponsored the resolution, asserted that the appointment of Farred indicates that we don’t have the support of the University in reversing sexism on campus.” Note, of course, the presumption—asserted as unchallengeable fact—that “sexism on campus” at Cornell is so pervasive as to need to be reversed.

The co-director of Africana Studies, David Harris, dismissed concerns with Farred’s appointment, which he deemed an “administrative service” and which he—almost hilariously—implied gave Farred little power to shape the future direction of the department. (Harris is a 1997 Ph.D. with several book chapters and articles, but without a scholarly monograph. He has served as Cornell’s interim provost; his course list includes “Race and Policy”; “Research Seminar in Race and Ethnicity”; “The Demography of Race”; “Racial and Ethnic Identity”; “Introduction to Social Inequality”; “Elementary Statistics”; and “Race, Class, and Social Policy.”) Harris also denied that Farred’s role in chairing the search would make it harder for Cornell to recruit quality applicants. “We are a month away from deciding who we will bring in to interview and I have yet to hear people say [that] ‘I am concerned about coming here because of Grant,’” he said. “What I am hearing is that people are concerned about Cornell because of all the negative press … I think that has a much greater effect on our search.”

Harris’ statement confirms guidance I once received from a long-time mentor in the battle for academic freedom on campus: even in a campus dominated by the race/class/gender trinity, he reminded me, in the end, race trumps all. And certainly applicants to chair an Ivy League Africana Studies Department would recognize as much. So despite the oft-stated concern among the politically correct campus left with sexism, it seems entirely plausible that no applicants would have any trouble with Farred, despite his sexist statement—since, in the end, his status as a race-based demagogue is almost without parallel at Cornell.

And, not to belabor the obvious, it’s worth pointing out that no one at Cornell has even attempted to offer an explanation as to why the university would choose a figure who had slandered students at his previous university while deeming students from his current school “black bitches” to run such an important search.

(2) False accuser and accused murderer Crystal Mangum has been deemed mentally competent to stand trial—in some ways, a surprising ruling given the extent of her mental difficulties.

Additionally, the accused murderer’s request to reduce her bail was denied. Mangum, remarkably, had based her claim on a desire to see more of her children—the same children who were in the other room as she attempted to set fire to her previous boyfriend’s bathroom.

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(3) Finally, a follow-up on Lubiano-Chafe student/Group of 88 apologist Melissa Harris-Parry, and her remarkable argument that as a practitioner of “black feminist scholarship,” she can rely on “experiential knowledge” as significantly as actual evidence in constructing arguments.

A point from her recent book provides a sense of how such “experiential knowledge” works in practice. Among Harris-Perry’s other claims was the following, about the origins of the Group of 88 statement: “Less than a year after Hurricane Katrina revealed patterns of festering racial inequality and prompted national conversations about black citizenship, these eighty-eight members of the Duke faculty chose to frame the lacrosse scandal as a disaster. In the long shadow of Hurricane Katrina, this choice is an important clue to the multiple meanings associated with the rape accusation. In this context,‘disaster’ evokes a sense of unequal vulnerability to supposedly neutral processes. The faculty members were drawing a link between the abandonment of black citizens in the aftermath of Katrina and the sense of vulnerability that many black men, white women, and especially black women felt on Duke's campus.”

As with Harris-Perry’s general interpretation of the Group and its critics, the Katrina-Group statement traces its roots to the unsubstantiated claims of former Africana Studies chairman Charlie Piot. And, of course, linking the Group’s statement to Katrina provides a way of removing some of the tarnish from the faculty’s actions: if the Group’s protest derived from the horrors of Katrina, it would seem, the Group should be seen as noble critics of an indifferent or even racist American state.

There is, of course, only one problem with Harris-Perry’s claim: there’s no actual evidence to link the Group’s statement with Katrina. In the 15 sentences from the Group’s statement that appeared in the faculty’s own words, no mention was made of Katrina. In the e-mail sent by the statement’s author, Wahneema Lubiano, soliciting membership in the Group, no mention was made of Katrina. In the alleged statements from anonymous alleged students quoted in the ad, no mention was made of Katrina.

But, of course, Harris-Perry doesn’t need “evidence” to advance her arguments. She is, after all, a practitioner of “black feminist scholarship.”

MSNBC Analyst: Respect the Group of 88's "Feelings"!

2011-10-24T00:01:00.012-04:00

Few people have attempted to defend the Group of 88—perhaps because no credible defense of the rush-to-judgment faculty “activists” exists. Indeed, as the case to which they had attached their reputations imploded, nearly all Group members refused to comment on why they signed the April 2006 statement, which committed them not only to a common interpretation of the criminal case (something “happened” to false accuser Crystal Mangum) but also to a joint path forward (“turning up the volume” regardless of “what the police say or the court decides”).

The apologists generally have come from one of two groups: (1) those with a professional interest in cozying up to the Group; and (2) those with a personal connection to one or more Group members. Melissa Harris-Perry falls into the latter category—she’s a Duke Ph.D. (1999) who studied under Group of 88 stalwarts William Chafe and Wahneema Lubiano. Harris-Perry currently is a professor of political science at Tulane, where she heads the Project on Race, Gender, [ed: of course] and Politics in the South. The project’s inaugural event? A public lecture by none other than the Group’s own Karla Holloway.

Unlike nearly all members of the Group, Harris-Perry has some national visibility, thanks to her position as a frequent MSNBC commentator and a columnist for The Nation. In the latter capacity she recently penned an article that provided some insight into her race-obsessed thought process—exactly what could be expected from a Ph.D. student of Chafe and Lubiano. Her column accused white liberals of a “more insidious form of racism” than traditional, anti-black electoral racism for allegedly failing to back President Obama in the same percentages as they did President Clinton in 1996.

This absurd analysis was too much even for writers at traditionally left-leaning Salon. Joan Walsh, while quickly noting how much she considered Harris-Perry a professional friend, nonetheless gently observed that her friend “doesn’t mention any white liberals by name, nor cite polls showing a decline in support for President Obama among white liberals.” In other words: Harris-Perry had no evidence for her argument. (As will be seen, the Duke Ph.D. doesn’t seem to have problems with arguments lacking in empirical evidence.) Gene Lyons was less constrained by the trappings of collegiality. He argued that the Harris-Perry essay “resembles a photo negative of white racist thought . . . Turning everything into an issue of ethnic identity . . . appears to be Professor Harris-Perry’s stock in trade . . . Maybe academia isn’t the only place in American life where it’s possible to call people bigots and expect them to prove their innocence. But it’s definitely one of a very few . . . [I]f Harris-Perry expects people to defer to her Ph.D., she needs to raise her game.” And these criticisms, again, came from people generally sympathetic to Harris-Perry’s ideological goals.

But, even though I was an Obama supporter in 2008 and will remain so for 2012, Harris-Perry doubtless would dismiss me, too, as an insidiously racist white liberal. After all, I have publicly expressed horror with the Obama administration’s hostility to due process in higher education and my deep disappointment with the President’s indifference to the 2009 plebiscite that annulled the marriage equality law in my home state of Maine.

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Harris-Perry’s defense of the Group of 88 comes in her recently-published book, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. Here’s how the Duke Ph.D. introduces the lacrosse case:

A woman lies about being sexually assaulted. The young men she accuses are assumed by both the press and the legal system to be guilty. A powerful institution bends to the public assumption of guilt and collaterally punishes a group of young men associated with the accused. The legal system eventually exonerates these young men. In the aftermath of the findings of innocence, the false accuser and those who uncritically accepted her honesty are subjected to public ridicule, just as they had earlier subjected the young men to ridicule.

The passage’s superficially neutral structure initially seems reasonable. Harris-Perry frames the case as the sum of two events: (1) the accusation and its response; and (2) the subsequent criticism (“public ridicule”) of Mangum and her validators.

Only by pondering a bit does Harris-Perry’s insidious (to borrow a word) false equivalence emerge. The initial event—the “crime”—did not occur. The second event—the embrace and exploitation of Mangum’s tale (including, although Harris-Perry carefully avoids mentioning it, by much of the faculty) despite increasingly solid evidence to the contrary—did occur. Yet Harris-Perry treats the two sets of reactions as equivalent: “the false accuser and those who uncritically accepted her honesty are subjected to public ridicule, just as they had earlier subjected the young men to ridicule.”

Even given Harris-Perry’s false equivalence, one might think that such a prominent public intellectual would be curious as to why many members of the media, the local prosecutor, and professors at Duke were so inclined to believe a false accuser. Or why a “powerful institution”—an institution of higher learning, no less, an institution supposedly devoted to pursuit of truth and knowledge—bowed to the mob.

Yet Harris-Perry offers no interest in these issues. Instead, she focuses on what she seems to see as the real victims of the case: her mentors and their pedagogical allies. She wants to know what motivated the critics of Mike Nifong and the Group of 88, and she wants to critically analyze their writings. Given that she sees racism everywhere, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to figure out what she’s going to argue.

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Here’s how Harris-Perry introduces the handiwork of her onetime mentor, Professor Lubiano:

The social disaster [Group of 88] ad argued that the faculty had gained important insights about the case and its social and cultural meaning by listening to the testimonies of students. This epistemological claim was scorned as ridiculous when the weight of DNA evidence showed that Crystal Mangum was being dishonest about the sexual assault. These black women professors, their students, and their faculty colleagues were told to be ashamed of ever believing that their own experiences, beliefs, and feelings [emphasis added] were valid.

Leave aside the wildly incomplete nature of Harris-Perry’s description—that the most inflammatory aspects of the ad (something “happened” to Mangum; thanking the protesters for not waiting; committing to action regardless of what the police or court found; falsely claiming official endorsement from several Duke academic departments) came not from professors “listening to the testimonies of students” but in the voices of the signatories themselves.

And, even, leave aside the outright inaccurate nature of Harris-Perry’s description—the ad’s claims initially were “scorned” as “ridiculous” not because of evidence emerging that Mangum had lied, but because the signatories abandoned the academy’s traditional fealty to upholding due process.

Instead, consider the final sentence of the passage. In Harris-Perry’s world, the “feelings” of professors (or at least of “black women professors”) must be considered “valid”—because, as the Duke Ph.D. explains, “black feminist scholarship assumes that experiential knowledge has equal weight with empirical evidence.” How this rationale would excuse the Group members who weren’t black feminist scholars Harris-Perry never reveals.

In any event, despite Harris-Perry’s extraordinary downgrading of the importance of “empirical evidence” in the academic process, institutions of higher learning are supposed to pursue knowledge; they should not function as validators of “feelings,” even of “black women professors.”

That said, Harris-Perry’s rationale does represent an argument for “diversity” hires: academic qualifications can be deemed less important if the goal is to hire professors who will sympathize with the “feelings” of sensitive minority groups on campus, even if that means publicly attacking other students at the school. By these standards, Wahneema Lubiano—she of the perpetually-forthcoming manuscripts—is a potential Pulitzer Prize winner.

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Harris-Perry’s concern for the “feelings” of “black women professors” informs her criticism of Until Proven Innocent—although she can’t manage to faithfully reproduce the book’s critique of the academic culture that spawned the Group of 88. The book, she claims, argues against “taking race and gender seriously as objects of academic inquiry.” Neither the book nor the blog, of course, ever made such a claim. The blog did critically examine some of the poor scholarship produced by race/class/gender-oriented faculty at Duke; and both the blog and the book did contend, repeatedly, that groupthink oriented around these themes has become extremely powerful not only at Duke but at most campuses, and that the effects of this groupthink explain the “activist” faculty’s rush to judgment on the case.

UPI, Harris-Perry fumes, also termed the Group of 88 “ungrateful, unpatriotic, and dangerous to the impressionable students they teach.” It’s not clear how the book could have portrayed the Group as “ungrateful,” even if had such an intent. Nor did the book even remotely touch upon the Group members’ patriotism; it would have been absurd to have done so. And both the book and the blog quite consciously stayed away from the “impressionable minds” argument. Beyond the obvious—if Lubiano teaches anything like she writes, it’s hard to imagine her leaving much of an impression on anyone—that line of criticism, most closely associated with David Horowitz’s indoctrination claims, is one I have publicly, and repeatedly, rejected. Yet much like previous Group apologists, Harris-Perry seems determined to assume that anyone who criticized the Group must have operated from Horowitzian motives.

But, in the end, Harris-Perry sees her role less as fighting David Horowitz than in providing (in Lyons’ words) a “photo negative of white racist thought.” On paper, Stuart Taylor and I don’t present inviting targets. Harris-Perry concedes that we never targeted professors based on their race or gender: while we criticized black women such as Lubiano or Holloway, we were “equally virulent in [our] critique of white male professors such as William Chafe or Peter Wood.” And she further understands that we “reserve our most virulent attacks for Nifong, a white man.”

But when “empirical evidence” won’t do, it’s time to employ other approaches to insinuate racism. By noting that Nifong’s political interest in the case came in his appealing to the black vote, Harris-Perry contends that UPI “implicate[d] the corrupting influence of black political power.” The book’s critiques of both academic and local political culture, Harris-Perry concludes, “contain powerful racial implications.” Indeed, she implies, our words tried to leave “black women professors” on Duke’s faculty with a sense of “shame.”

Under Harris-Perry’s anti-racist framework, how would any criticism of Nifong, or the Group of 88, ever have been possible? The Duke Ph.D. doesn’t claim that UPI, in having “carefully trace[d] the professional résumés and personal conduct” of several Group members, got anything wrong in its analysis of their writings, or that the book wrongly argued that the Group members’ race/class/gender agenda explained their decision to exploit Mangum’s claims for their own ends on campus. Harris-Perry doesn’t dispute the findings of UPI (and many others, including the State Bar) that Nifong’s political ambitions were linked to his unethical behavior, and that the only way he could win (in both the spring and fall 2006 campaigns) was through obtaining disproportionate black support.

It seems that using “empirical evidence” to point out the above facts constitutes inappropriate racial insensitivity. In Harris-Perry’s world, because of the moral justness of their cause, race/class/gender faculty on campus—or those who pander to black voters outside the ivory tower—must be sheltered from criticism. Any other course, alas, might disrespect their “feelings.”

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At its most basic level, Harris-Perry’s book reinforces one of the basic critiques of the academy featured in this blog. In the case, Harris-Perry’s race-obsessed, evidence-thin analysis most closely resembles that of the Committee for Justice for Mike Nifong. Yet while the Committee is widely, and appropriately, viewed as a laughingstock in the legal community, Harris-Perry and her pedagogical allies are mainstream voices in the academy, and dominate most humanities and some social science departments.

And that outcome, to borrow a phrase, is nothing less than shameful.

The Peterson-Burnette (and Cline, in 2012?) Slate

2011-10-16T20:48:00.007-04:00

[Update, Tuesday, 10.28am: Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People-endorsed candidate Solomon Burnette writes in: "Many folks have seemingly problematic histories. perhaps you should ask where myself [sic] and Ms. Peterson stand on the issues critical to this election, doing yourself and your readers a service. issues relating to education, immigration, affordable housing, and unemployment are important in this election and i, for one, have a history of engaging these issues in Durham as an artist, activist, and an academic. Ad hominim [sic] attacks are often a way to avoid critical questions. Cheque [sic] out my platform at www.solomonburnette.com."

It seems to me that a conviction for robbing Duke students, plus a written call for race-based vigilante justice, goes well beyond a "seemingly problematic histor[y]"; indeed, as I pointed out in the post, such a "history" would be disqualifying for any political committee with a rudimentary sense of ethics. Nor am I clear how pointing out such a candidate's "problematic" background constitutes an "ad hominim [sic]" attack.

That said, if I were in Endorsee Burnette's shoes, I too would want to speak about immigration (a topic, obviously, on which the Durham City Council has no policy role) rather than my background of written vigilante threats against innocent people and criminal activity against members of the Durham community.]

The N&O continues its detailed—and deeply disturbing—explication of how “justice” is practiced by Durham County “minister of justice” Tracey Cline. Andy Curliss’ articles today reveal a district attorney abusing her office through over-charging (in the hopes of pressuring defendants to accept plea bargains) and taking exceedingly weak cases to court (in apparent fidelity to Cline’s conception of her job as a “victims’ rights” advocate).

Prosecutors around the country over-charge to obtain plea bargains, but the N&O’s reporting indicates that Cline has employed the practice in an unusually blatant (and ethically dubious) fashion. And regarding the idea of bringing people to trial whose cases long before should have been dismissed, Cline’s conduct has been even less defensible. An analysis by N&O reporters found that Durham’s conviction rate on felony trials is the lowest of the state’s ten largest counties. Perhaps that’s because of cases like the below:

Torico Edwards . . . was acquitted by a jury after 30 minutes of deliberation on charges he broke into a home and stole a necklace.
Jurors said it was clear Edwards was at a shopping mall at the time of the crime
"The prosecutor," said juror Jade Russell of Durham, "really didn't prove anything."

Forcing likely innocent defendants to go through the expense and emotional punishment of a trial to give the “victim” a sense of justice is not an appropriate use of the judicial system. But in Tracey Cline’s office, it’s par for the course.

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Cline doesn’t come up for re-election till next year, but despite the record of unethical behavior laid bare by the N&O, she would seem to have little to worry regarding an endorsement from the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People. As demonstrated in the committee’s recent City Council endorsements, skin color appears to be the committee’s sole criterion. Indeed, by the standards of the Durham Committee’s 2011 endorsements for City Council, Tracey Cline is a paragon of reasonableness and justice.

In this year’s City Council races, even Durham’s resident savant of political correctness, (white) Council member Diane (Nifong ’06!) Catotti, couldn’t snatch the Committee on the Affairs of Black People’s endorsement. But two of the three choices distinguished themselves as extremists even among the ranks of extremists in the Durham of 2006-7.

Victoria Peterson, co-chair of Mike Nifong’s citizens’ committee, distinguished herself during the lacrosse case by (a) participating in a march organized by an ADL/SPLC-designated hate group, the New Black Panthers Party; (b) urging participants at this march to burn down the lacrosse captains’ house; and (c) personally threatening Mary Ellen Finnerty during Nifong’s ethics trial, resulting in Peterson’s ejection from the proceedings.

But those events only constituted Peterson’s highlights. She began the case by insinuating that Duke Hospital had conspired to produce false DNA results and ended it by marching with Nifong to jail, carrying a sign testifying to Nifong’s “goodness” and “integrity.” Peterson also crusaded for accused murderer Crystal Mangum, rudely interrupting the judge at pretrial hearings on Mangum’s arson charges.

(Peterson, I should note, spreads her hate around: talking about gays and lesbians, who she suggested are all cross-dressers, the Durham Committee’s endorsee claimed that as a result of the “gay lifestyle,” “many of them are infected with diseases,” and if “they are not infected with diseases . . . they will be, even women.” Despite the typically anti-gay views of North Carolina’s African-American community, these views are extreme.)

Imagine if, after an allegation of black-on-white crime prompted a visit from the KKK, a future City Council candidate had shared the platform with the KKK Grand Dragon. How, we might speculate, would the Durham Committee have reacted to one off its rival committees endorsing such a candidate?

Then there’s the Committee’s endorsement of Solomon Burnette, NCCU Class of 2007. That name should ring a bell to people who followed the case closely. Burnette came to NCCU after experience with the other side of the criminal justice system—he spent more than a year in jail, following a conviction for robbing two Duke students at gunpoint.

After the attorney general exonerated the three falsely accused players, an enraged Burnette took to the pages of the NCCU paper. In “Death to All Rapists,” Burnette issued an ill-concealed call for vigilante justice. “The ‘facts’ of the case,” proclaimed the Durham Committee endorsee, “should not matter to us because even if we are unsure of sexual assault, these supremacists have admitted to sexually, racially and politically denigrating these women.” Burnette’s analysis of the case: “White people still rape us and get away with it. The only deterrent to these legally, socially and economically validated supremacist actions is the fear of physical retribution.” The column subsequently vanished from the paper’s website, but remains available through the Wayback Machine.

Again, imagine the Durham Committee’s reaction if a political committee endorsed a white convicted robber who then had written an op-ed recommending vigilante justice against two black people?

Burnette and Peterson seem unlikely to win seats on the Council; even in Durham, the bigot vote doesn’t seem quite large enough to bring their candidacies over the top. But the fact that the Durham Committee endorsed them should permanently discredit the organization.

Accountability, Ct'd.

2011-10-10T22:06:00.003-04:00

A major theme of this blog has been the lack of accountability, especially for the professors who betrayed the academy’s traditional fealty to due process or who mistreated their students. Indeed, the opposite of accountability has occurred, as Group of 88 members (Farred, Baker, Payne) were hired away for more lucrative positions elsewhere; another Group member, the dissembling Cathy Davidson, even received a nomination from the Obama administration to a minor federal post. At Duke, several Group members received appointments to deanships and other administrative positions.

Along those lines, take a look at the list of 2010 and 2011 teaching award winners at Duke. Of the four teaching awards designated by the administration (which, of course, includes several Group members), seven professors were selected in 2010 and 2011. Three of the seven—Mark Anthony (“thugniggaintellectual”) Neal, Laura Edwards, and Margaret Greer—signed the Group of 88 statement.

And the selection for the 2011 University Scholar/Teacher of the Year, which “recognizes an outstanding faculty member for his or her dedication and contribution to the learning arts and to the institution”? None other than William Chafe.

That would be the same William Chafe who: (1) suggested that the whites who kidnapped, beat, and murdered Emmett Till provided the appropriate historical context for interpreting the lacrosse players’ behavior; (2) compared events of the Duke students' party to Hurricane Katrina; (3) as Nifong's case collapsed, falsely implied that his criticism focused entirely on excessive alcohol use by Duke students; (4) in early 2007 refused to apologize and reaffirmed his support for the Group statement; and (5) wildly (and, as he subsequently admitted, without possessing any evidence) charged “bloggers who have targeted the ‘Group of 88’” of “sending us e-mails and making phone calls wishing our deaths and calling us ‘Jew b-’ and ‘n-b-’.”

A figure with that record is Duke University's 2011 University Scholar/Teacher of the Year.