October 09, 2007
Parsing The Duke Lacrosse Suit
Stuart Taylor Jr. is a legal columnist with National Journal and the co-author of a book on the Duke lacrosse case.
The lawsuit filed on Friday by the three Duke University lacrosse players falsely accused of rape has been miscast by some critics.
Some see the undoubtedly aggressive, if not unprecedented, lawsuit [PDF] against the city of Durham, N.C., disgraced former District Attorney Mike Nifong, and other officials as a pointless vendetta. Some might also see the suit as a cynical bid for self-enrichment, or even as a legally far-fetched effort to punish the good citizens of Durham.
They're wrong on all counts, or so it seems to me. After spending the better part of a year working on a book about the Duke case and related matters, I have no doubt that Dave Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann will amply prove the heart of their claims, which are as follows:
The prosecution of the lacrosse players over the course of a full year was "one of the most chilling episodes of premeditated police, prosecutorial, and scientific misconduct in modern American history." As many as 10 Durham police officers and two hired DNA experts along with Nifong "knew that these charges were completely and utterly unsupported by probable cause, and a total fabrication by a mentally troubled, drug prone exotic dancer whose claims, time and time again, were contradicted by physical evidence, documentary evidence, other witnesses, and even the accuser herself. In their rush to accuse, Defendants willfully ignored and were deliberately indifferent to overwhelming evidence of Plaintiffs' actual innocence." "Instead, Defendants used the accuser's inconsistent and demonstrably false allegations as fuel for a media campaign to obtain indictments and win a hotly-contested election at the expense of the three innocent Duke lacrosse players. With a community and a nation thus inflamed and clamoring for indictments of Duke lacrosse players, but with no evidence that any players had actually committed a crime, Defendants set about to fabricate such evidence [and] conspired to conceal... exculpatory evidence in order to charge and convict Plaintiffs on 'facts' they knew to be untrue."
Critics of the lawsuit ignore the mountain of evidence that is already in the public record supporting each and every one of these allegations.
Is the lawsuit mainly an effort to further humiliate and bankrupt Nifong, the now-disbarred, jailed-for-a-day, rogue DA who was the chief orchestrator of the bogus case?
Hardly. Nifong is the least important defendant, in the sense that everyone knows his career is finished. The other individual defendants have more at stake: 10 Durham police officers, up to and including the top brass, and two allegedly corrupt DNA experts whose private lab was hired by Nifong. None has been punished. All remain on the job.
Is the lawsuit just a bid for self-enrichment by the three plaintiffs? Well, they do hope to recover a lot of money as compensation both for their ordeals and for the damage to their names; their now-spurned settlement offer reportedly included a demand for $30 million.
But a large award of compensatory and punitive damages might also be the best way to get the attention of a city government whose criminal justice establishment the lawsuit alleges to be rotten from top to bottom. And it might help deter other police departments from similarly dishonest conduct.
In addition, the lawsuit, like the spurned settlement offer, seeks to force Durham to submit to a very long list of court-supervised criminal justice reforms for the protection of all defendants, which in that area tend to be black and poor. And if the city ends up agreeing to such reforms, it will reduce the amount of money it has to pay the lacrosse players.
The proposed reforms include putting the Durham Police Department into virtual receivership for 10 years, with a court-appointed monitor empowered to hire, promote and fire police personnel from the chief on down, as well as to set policies. More specific proposed reforms include measures to increase the reliability and prevent manipulation of: scientific evidence, including DNA testing; identification procedures, including lineups; the training of new officers; and the establishment of an independent citizens committee to review complaints of police misconduct.
It's hard to think of another private lawsuit against a city that has demanded such sweeping reforms and so many millions of dollars. But it's also hard to think of another city whose criminal justice system has performed so execrably.
Indeed, the ugliest aspects of Durham's administration of justice may not even come to light until dragged out into the open by the blizzard of subpoenas that the lacrosse players' high-powered lawyers, Brendan Sullivan and Barry Scheck, are itching to serve.
Posted at 11:03 AM
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