The New Scottsboro Boys
In the Duke lacrosse rape case, DNA testing hasn’t panned out in spite of the victim’s claim no condoms were used. The allegations made by the victim that she was strangled and beaten didn’t pan out in the medical exam, there were no bruises or other evidence consistent with that kind of attack. The victim’s business partner’s first response was that no rape occurred, certainly not the drawn out torture session alleged, because the victim was only alone with the Lacrosse players for five minutes. She has a habit of accusing people of gang rape – which is possible but for some reason the police don’t follow up on her accusatons in the past. Two of the three players accused have proof of being elsewhere at the time she accuses them of raping here. So what is the community response, to what increasingly looks like a railroad job, among African Americans in Durham? According to a member of the local defense bar:
“They’d say, ‘Give her her day in court. What do you have to lose? If you lose, at least the jury made the decision.’ So he’s kind of stuck.”
Yeah, that’s about right. What the hell? What does the prosecutor have to lose? If he loses at trial, no biggy. He can rail against the judges, and maybe run for judge next time around. If he wins – whether it’s justice or not – the good people of Durham can rest easy knowing that no white boy can defile one of their pure flowers. This ain’t the plantation any more, and everybody has to know that.
Of course if you’re the accused, and if you’re innocent, and the evidence makes it look like you’re innocent, yet you still get convicted. . . it’s no big deal if you’re life is wrecked. You’re a white boy from a wealthy family, so you got it coming. Right?
There is a terrible irony here, that the very people in Durham most upset – sometimes with good reason – about abuse at the hands of police and prosecutors, appear to be urging payback. There’s a term for threatening a community uprising if the police and courts fail to deliver a swift conviction based on nothing more than the community’s desire to see it: Lynch Mob.
Am I the only person who looks at this case, and sees echoes of the Scottsboro Boys?
BTW, the NY Times coverage of this case is lovely. They mention that the above quoted member of the defense bar defended the victim for “joyriding.” Sounds innocent, kind of like speeding, right? Joyriding is a lesser included offense of felony theft, auto, just in case you were wondering.
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The white defendants "lives being ruined" by a not guilty verdict? In what kind of America would that occasion itself? Only in one that makes the arguments of the most unsophisticated
white segregationists circa 1960 seem prescient.
I'd go so far as to say the legal reasoning was shite; there was no need to go with social pseudo-science (long since discredited) as an argument on which to base a ruling, given that the plain text of the Constitution was sufficient basis for the outcome. "Equal means equal, and 'separate but equal' has proven in reality to be anything but equal; the 80 years' experiment in separate but equal has failed" would have been holding enough to do the trick. But this is a technical legal matter.
I would have a very hard time calling Brown v. Board 'wrong,' in fact I believe that while the legalism of the case was a sort of gutless effort to avoid eviscerating earlier opinions, and an effort to avoid engendering conflict, it was a supremely moral moment for a court that too often champions immorality under the guise of advancing an oddball, 'living, breathing' constitution.
The trick with Brown, I believe, is to acknowledge that it did good and did right, but to accept that we have to rein in the judicial abuses engendered by subsequent justices seeking to make every case an issue decided by subjective morality of the judge. Yeah, I have a very hard time calling Brown 'wrong.'
There is much more at stake here, Al, than the freedom of three young men. Think of the thousands of Korean merchants whose businesses will be destroyed, let alone the dozens of Americans who will be killed, if our civil rights activists do not get the verdict they demand. Keep in mind that officials are not dealing with small children here. These are big and numerous children, and they better get their way.