From the AP:
District Attorney Mike Nifong was disbarred Saturday for his “selfish” rape prosecution of three Duke University lacrosse players – a politically motivated act, his judges said, that he inexplicably allowed to fester for months after it was clear the defendants were innocent.
“This matter has been a fiasco. There’s no doubt about it,” said F. Lane Williamson, the chairman of the three-member disciplinary committee that stripped the veteran prosecutor of his state law license.
Even Nifong and his attorneys supported the decision, though the veteran prosecutor refused to admit to the end that no crime occurred at a March 2006 lacrosse team party.
The committee said Nifong manipulated the investigation to boost his chances of winning his first election for Durham County district attorney. In doing so, he committed “a clear case of intentional prosecutorial misconduct” that involved “dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation.”
[…]
Appointed district attorney in 2005, Nifong was in a tight race for the office when a stripper told police she was raped at the party.
“At the time he was facing a primary, and yes, he was politically naive,” Williamson said. “But we can draw no other conclusion that those initial statements he made were to further his political ambitions.”
During the ethics trial, Nifong acknowledged he knew there was no DNA evidence connecting Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty to the 28-year-old accuser when he indicted them on charges of rape, sexual offense and kidnapping. Nifong later charged Dave Evans with the same crimes. But months later, state prosecutors concluded the three players were “innocent” – a fact Williamson hammered home on Saturday.
“We acknowledge the actual innocence of the defendants, and there’s nothing here that has done anything but support that assertion,” Williamson said.
Well, they may be “innocent” of the actual crime of the actual rape of their actual accuser, but let’s not go getting too self righteous, Mr Williamson.
After all, no one has contested the ancillary charges, with their attendant suggestions of culpability, that defendants were, indeed, guilty of being WHITE, MALE, AND PRIVILEGED — something that certainly can’t be said for others attending Duke who weren’t accused of actual rape of an actual accuser, an ontological truism that the now-cleared defendants continue to use to their advantage.
Like, for instance, getting themselves cleared of false charges.
Better they’d not been able to afford decent counsel and gotten railroaded into jail by a politically motivated prosecutor on the word of an unreliable witness for a crime they didn’t commit. Because then they’d see what it’s like to live like the unprivileged, unwhite, unmales who aren’t fortunate enough to share in the defendants (undeserved) societal largesse.
And that would have sent a shot across the bow to all those white males of privilege that their days of avoiding jail for simply not committing a crime are OVER! — a message sent by a relatively unprivileged cabal of 88 Duke professors, professional / academic race and class hustlers, a District Attorney in Durham County, mainstream journalists, and those who were at one time selected to work on the campaign of a presidential candidate out of North Carolina.
BECAUSE OF THE HYPOCRISY!
Looks like the perm link is working. Nice job.
Oh yeah, and I’d hate to be Nacy Grace’s lawyer’s interns this week.
It’s ALIVE!
Kewl…superscripts.
So, I’ll just add this edit:
WHITE, MALE, AND PRIVILEGEDtm
Superscripts apparently not working, Jeff.
My money says the gang of 88 gets away unscathed. One would think that serious academics would expell the charlatans before the entire monopoly of higher education crumbles. It’s a lucrative racket for many – funded research, tenure, relatively light workloads, and a monopolistic tollbooth for all the professions.
Well, it’s very good news that they have hoofed the crook Nifong off the Bar. But I do devoutly hope that the 3 abused students will pursue Nifong and the Cabal of 88 until they can genuinely see the error of their ways and apologise for their vile behaviour.
The gang of 88 comitted a crime, actually several crimes (individual slander is a crime) against the students of Duke. Surely someone can and will file criminal charges against each of them. Being a professor (even a phony professor) does not give automatic imunity from punishment. The big loser in the future is and will be Duke. People can no longer trust or respect anything or anyone there. Firing the 88 would be a start at regaining the trust of the American people. As usual the Duke administration is hiding it ‘s collective heads in the sand.
Let’s not forget the truthiness of the charges. Which is practically evidence.
"And that would have sent a shot across the bow to all those white males of privilege that their days of avoiding jail for simply not committing a crime are OVER! "
A few years ago, The Jakarta Post published a letter from a politician defending his police for having shot dead a man who was just going about his business. In it he raised the unsanswerable question, "Do the police have to wait until a crime is actually committed before they act?"
I thought this was very funny at the time and sent copies to all my friends to frame for their lavatory walls.
Butbutbut! Such litigation would create a Chilling Effect on Free Slander! …er, Speech. I meant Speech. Really.
The Gang of 88 fear no legal consequences of their very public slander, because of that Truthiness™, Carin.
Damn. HTML entities don’t work.
Phooey!
I love the little pop-up link windows, btw.
Better yet, Scrapiron, file the defamation case against the university. Those professors were using their authority and position as professors when they made their defamation and the university (for all I know) had not repudiated their statements. If a hefty payout is made by the university I predict that future contract negotiations with the professoriate will be darned interesting.
I can’t believe that no one has made a Crazy 88s reference yet!
Also, note that 88 is a number of evil in Japanese culture.
I do hope that punishment for simply not being one of the favored classes (i.e. being a disfavored class) becomes law. Maybe that will finally light a fire under enough people to get something done for the better. Call me a dreamer. And a revolutionary.
The Duke faculty and their supporters in the blogosphere use the language very prettily, and can generate all kinds of smokescreens more or less at will, but their entire position can be summed up in the jury-instructions of some redneck prosecutor sometime in the Fifties: Shoot fahr, they’s niggahs, they’s bound t’be guilty of sump’m. Reversing the polarity doesn’t improve the sentiment, nor does expressing it in polysyllabic euphemism.
Who knows?
With Nifong’s punishment, maybe we’ve seen the last of high-profile Republican corruption for awhile. Let’s hope.
Hmm. What happens if I stop it before the script to build the “comment box” loads?
One wonders, one
wonders.Works pretty well, actually. Still no underline, but it’s possible to get paragraphs, and I don’t use underlines much anyways. But there’s a window — if I wait too long, the script loads regardless of whether or not I’ve mashed the [stop] button in Firefox.
…but if I time it right, it’s just fine. A genuine reason to prefer dial-up to a high speed connection, by gum. Let’s try some HTML:
Special characters: Trade™, copyright©, and of course the ever-popular blank: !
I’m using the
strikethrusymbol in the box. Ditto the underline symbol.But no Turing Word. A genuine lack, which I’m sure will be addressed in due time. Kudos for the work so far; Rome wasn’t debugged in a day.
Regards,
Ric
Jeff —
I’m sure you are, and looking at the source, your posts and a few others’ have the HTML in all the proper places. It’s my browser configuration, of course. Something is causing the script to fail to put some things in, and letting it put other things in the wrong places — e.g., when I try to multiple-indent it doesn’t nest the blockquote commands, just strings the open/close tags one after the other.
It fails to matter. The backup works, and the workaround of stopping the script before it loads is no more burdensome than old-style posting was. Take your time, and it’ll all come together if you don’t obsess over it.
Regards,
Ric
Geez, I take a few days off and the furniture has been rearranged!!
BTW, Dennis Prager is ripping Duke Univ. right now about this.
I haven’t had time to check out what the Vagina Warriors are saying, if anything. Life’s too short.
And JeffG? Hope you had a great Dad’s day.
I like the RSS feed for comments. Very snazzy.
Links on some of the older posts to other posts within PW (like on this page ?p=6385) link to the home page. Or at least that’s where I land.
Your mileage may vary.
David
Yay, Thank You Jeff.
When I first saw it, I kind of thought this implementation was creepy, but after reading a few posts I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m just creepy and the new site is way cool.
Thank You, Too for fulfilling my request to put the commentors names first, I’ve already started the habit of just automatically skipping the retard brigade’s comments. I’d send you a cookie if I knew where to send it.
Good Work!
The old urls have changed. I don’t know how we’re going to correct that, to be honest with you.
For what it’s worth, though, the link David provides takes me to an older post.
I blame the Jews, to be honest. (Formatting test)
Yes, that link takes you to an older post. But the other older posts linked from that page don’t work out so well. At least not in Internet Exploder 6 (which is what the office currently has installed).
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seocoode
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Convicting without DNA evidence is so 19th century.
Eat me.
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Your wordpress stuff is all working OK. Never got the hang of some of the plugins myself!