We Find the Defendant "Affluent." The Sentence Is Crucifixion.

Like an awkward “huh?” after the punch line of a joke, comes a startling and enlightening postscript to the Duke rape hoax; stark testimony that, even after every detail of this sick farce was excruciatingly flayed in the headlines for an entire year, there are still those who choose not to “get it,” and a reminder that the infrastructure that made it happen is intact.ABC’s Terry Moran has dashed off a mind boggling blog entry that demonstrates his remorseless, unchanged embrace of the same twisted mythology that made him and many of his colleagues into willing accomplices in the attempted lynching of three innocent men, Duke University students David Evans, Reade Seligmann and Colin Finnerty, for false accusations of rape.
Don’t feel too sorry for the Dukies, Moran counsels us. They had it coming because they’re rich, white, male, capitalist imperialist pigs.
No, seriously.
Honest.
His commentary on these innocent victims of criminal prosecutorial misconduct, racial discrimination and a media lynch mob is actually titled "Don't feel too sorry for the Dukies".

For real.
His is mindset that has propelled this entire travesty in which the Duke students, were repeatedly flogged as monsters even as they were threatened with prison for a crime which, it was painfully obvious early on, they did not commit.
This started in March of last year. During involuntary committment to a mental facility, stripper Crystal Mangum made up a story about some guys raping her at a Duke lacrosse team party at which she had been hired to strip. “Some” was a number ranging from three to twenty. She couldn’t identify any of these supposed attackers in repeated photo lineups until Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong, hot to make a splash in his campaign for reelection, staged a ludicrous final one that violated Durham’s and North Carolina’s rules for lineups. That gave him his three victims and Nifong’s cynical spectacle was off and running as he conducted one press event another, declaring his intent to “get” the innocent students.
Growing numbers of ambulance chasing news operations smelled blood and swarmed in to cover the story.
New York Times sportswriter Selena Roberts set the standard for the template two weeks after Crystal Mangum’s crime when she unleashed a bilious piece of libel “When Peer Pressure, Not a Conscience, Is Your Guide.” The column equates the victims of Nifong’s games to gang members protecting their secrets. Roberts smears the Duke students in terms that would do Lenin proud.

“The season is over, but the paradox lives on in Duke's lacrosse team, a group of privileged players of fine pedigree entangled in a night that threatens to belie their social standing as human beings.”

The screed treats the unproven claims as established fact, then lumps them into the same category as a litany of unrelated allegations of misconduct, gross and trivial, authentic and apocryphal, attributed to student and pro athletes dating back years. These non sequiturs she stirs together in a sewer of psychobabble.

"there is a common thread: a desire for teammates to exploit the vulnerable without heeding a conscience."

Roberts even tried to turn the absence of any witnesses whatsoever into a sign of a grand conspiracy, a “code of silence”
Except that here was no “silence.”
The players did speak. They simply told the truth. They were innocent.
Mangum’s fellow stripper at the party that night, an unlikely signatory to any Duke “code of silence,” said the whole rape story was “a crock.”
And the DNA evidence, which Nifong illegally kept from the students’ lawyers, vindicated all three of them.
Nonetheless the victims were dragged through the sewer for an entire year at collossal expense in legal fees. Finally, Nifong was bounced from the case, an investigation into his criminal misconduct took form and North Carolina’s Attorney General Roy Cooper dropped the charges. Cooper’s declaration that the three young men were “innocent” (as opposed to some mealy mouthed tapdance about their guilt “not being proven”) was unequivocal and extraordinary.
They didn’t do it and they didn’t deserve the ordeal through which they were put.
Case closed?

Far from it.
Because, against this parade of outrage, Moran steps forward with his stupefying claim: It was no big deal. No harm done and, hell, they deserved it anyway.

“But perhaps the outpouring of sympathy for Reade Seligman, Colin Finnerty and David Evans is just a bit misplaced. They got special treatment in the justice system--both negative and positive. The conduct of the lacrosse team of which they were members was not admirable on the night of the incident.”

 He's co-anchor of Nightline, ABC's iconic news program and once one of America's most respected.
We shouldn’t care about the obscenity inflicted on these men, Moran lists his arguments, because....1) They were members of the team which engaged the strippers in the first place.A practice with millions of customers, hiring strippers may be sleazy, but it’s not a crime. It’s certainly not rape and… and… nobody has ever claimed that the three students, out of 46 players on the Duke lacrosse team, were in any way involved with hiring them. Here Moran makes a pathetic attempt to apply vague guilt by association, association with something inconsequential at that.
2) The team specifically requested at least one white stripper.
This means anything at all? As we’ve heard exhaustively, the Duke lacrosse team is, in fact, overwhelmingly white. Could you imagine the furor if they’d asked for two black strippers? Meanwhile, again, the three victims in this hoax had nothing to do with hiring Crystal Mangum to strip. Again, an attempt at guilt by association with… nothing.3) During the incidents, racial epithets were hurled at the strippers. If this ever happened at all, and there is absolutely no credible source that says it did, what does it have to do with the accused? “Epithets were hurled.” Moran doesn’t even try to say the accused Dukies were the ones doing the hurling. He just makes the assertion and lets it hang there.4) Colin Finnerty was charged with assault in Washington DC, in 2005.And this has what to do with his co-defendants? Or with an accusation of rape in 2006? Now Moran’s just scrabbling for any kind of dirt to fling.
But he tells us everything we need to know… about himself… with

5) ...his defining points. These are the only true offenses of which Moran can accuse the Dukies and, one must admit, he's got them here.

“The young men were able to retain a battery of top-flight attorneys, investigators and media strategists.
As students of Duke University or other elite institutions, these young men will get on with their privileged lives. There is a very large cushion under them--the one that softens the blows of life for most of those who go to Duke or similar places, and have connections through family, friends and school to all kinds of prospects for success.”

And there it is.
With an entire year’s hindsight, Moran hangs onto the central premise that made this entire grotesquerie happen from the start.
We must hate them for no other reason than that they are “privileged.”
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Moran even tries to invoke “justice” by whining that being wrongly targeted by a district attorney happens to lots of people.

“And, MOST IMPORTANT (all caps in his original post), there are many, many cases of prosecutorial misconduct across our country every year.”

No.
There are not. Not like this.
Cases of overzealous, mismotivated or mistaken prosecution certainly do occur, but the Duke lacrosse players were subject to the most gross, cynical, manipulative, dishonest and ultimately criminal prosecutorial malfeasance imaginable.
Nifong was out to play an entire deck of race cards in his campaign for reelection, and facts be damned. He figured three white trophies on his mantle would score him points with, not black voters, but those black voters so hopelessly contaminated and seething with racial animosity that they would cheer at seeing the ruin of some white kids who were on their way to stellar and productive lives.
More importantly, other victims of bad prosecutions don’t have battalions of partisan co-prosecutors in the media all over the country spewing out venom against them
If not for those swarms of depraved anti-American ideologues slavering to tell a story that matched their script, and Nifong’s desire to give them one, this entire outrage would never have gotten past “Miss Mangum, are you really sure that’s what happened?”
Moran helpfully brings up this week’s exquisite counterpoint to the Duke hoax scandal as he condemns the victims in their “privilege.”

“They are very differently situated in life from, say, the young women of the Rutgers University women's basketball team.”

Why yes, they certainly are.
By all means consider the Rutgers women’s basketball players and their tangle with shock jock Don Imus. In his trademark shtick, long notorious for constantly pushing the envelope into the outrageous and offensive, Imus let fly a harsh aesthetic judgment of the Rutgers women's basketball team using some common, racially-tinged, colloquialisms.
For which he immediately delivered an apology.
For which he immediately delivered an obsequious, groveling, dirt eating, posterior kissing, self flagellating series of apologies.
We're talking a time frame of hours.
He was fired within a week.
Nifong, for his part, unapologetically pursued his malicious racial game playing for months. And that was even after the DNA evidence had established there was no proof the players raped Crystal Mangum and after Mangum herself had changed her story repeatedly.
At that point what cause did Nifong have to accuse these young men of anything? Zero, zip, nada.
No evidence and no witness, not even an accuser as Mangum’s credibility quickly approached zero. And yet he still kept at it. Even when the truth about the DNA tests was forced into the open despite his illegal withholding of the evidence, Nifong insisted on continuing his groundless assault, trying to charge the players with everything BUT rape.
This was not just any garden variety case of a prosecutor bending the rules a little to get a conviction. This was a grotesque political game in which questions of innocence or guilt were consciously and criminally ignored.
...and explicitly for reasons of race.

Also don't forget that when the Rutgers players were jibed, targeted with an insult, the press rallied to their defense, savaging Imus. When the Duke players were falsely accused and unjustly threatened with decades in prison, they were the ones attacked.
"Differently situated" indeed.

No the Dukies’ persecution really was different.
It was also a textbook demonstration of the culpability of people like Terry Moran and Selena Roberts.
Mike Nifong may well lose the DA job he fought so dirty to keep. He may be disbarred and even criminally prosecuted.
He should be. The first measure of real justice for the three victims will come when he’s marched off in handcuffs.
But justice won’t truly be done until his accomplices are held to account too.
Moran's hateful rant is a priceless sign that those accomplices are still at large. They also remain unrepentant in their desire to destroy.
Likewise unchanged are their virulent and poisonous delusions that society's best, brightest and most productive can only have achieved by wrongdoing and must be brought low, their perverse caricature of rooting for the underdog, their bizarre credo that somehow "might makes wrong.”
The hostility endures like a trap waiting to snap its jaws on a new victim next time.
And make no mistake. There will be a next time.
Moran's unrepentant embrace of his sick premise is stark, gut churning proof.
Six months from now if another stripper, or waitress, or prostitute, accuses another innocent college student of rape, expect the exact same spectacle to unfold... just as long as the student is white and the accuser is someone, anyone, of color. Hell, if a minority gets into a fender bender with a white college student, expect these bastards to rush forward again, torches and nooses in hand.
Oh, there is a lesson to be learned all right.
Never never NEVER expect a fair hearing in the kangaroo court of the anti-American newsrooms.
Moran does society a service. His frank betrayal of his true prejudices, at a time when most of his disgraced fellow travelers are prudently lying low, provides a valuable lesson on how deep and strong their derangement runs.

April 12, 2007