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Lacrosse players lynching


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#1 stocks

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Posted 01 September 2007 - 10:24 AM

Nifong’s conduct in this case is the most unethical of any district attorney I have ever seen; I cannot recall a case in the last 15-20 years in which this many procedural violations were known at this stage of the process.

The media, of course, were not initially quiet: led by the New York Times, early coverage all but had the players tried and convicted. The case fit into a comfortable narrative for a media elite of out-of-control wealthy white athletes violating a poor African-American woman. As the case has collapsed, most media—with the crucial exception of the Raleigh News & Observer and CBS’s 60 Minutes—abandoned interest in the affair, rather than revisiting their early flawed reporting. The New York Times, meanwhile, published a widely ridiculed August article that read more like a public relations piece for Nifong than a piece of journalism. The article contained four out-and-out errors of fact, all of which tilted the story in favor of the prosecution, and all of which the Times refused to correct…

In the first week of the investigation (March 16-23), Duke administrators actively assisted the state. Without informing President Richard Brodhead, administrators demanded from the captains a candid account of the evening’s events, allegedly citing a non-existent “student-faculty” privilege to encourage the captains to disclose any criminal activity. Multiple sources told me that Coach Mike Pressler, apparently acting on orders from above, instructed the other players not to tell their parents about the police inquiry. Meanwhile, Dean Sue Wasiolek arranged for a local lawyer, Wes Covington, to act as a “facilitator” in arranging for a group meeting with police.

Houston Baker, a professor of English and Afro-American Studies, issued a public letter denouncing the “abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed amongst us” and demanding the “immediate dismissals” of “the team itself and its players.” Then, on April 6, 88 members of Duke’s arts and sciences faculty signed a public statement saying “thank you” to campus demonstrators who had distributed a “wanted” poster of the lacrosse players and publicly branded the players “rapists.”

Johnson’s book is called Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case. Nifong would appear to be getting his due. What about the others?

http://www.dinocrat....nly-guilty-one/


I have been reading the fascinating new book by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor on the Duke Lacrosse fiasco entitled, Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case.

The opening chapters describe the milieu at Duke, including the hardcore partying that was going on by both the men and women on campus. There is mention that the Duke women were as horny as the guys there with more than one sorority on campus hiring male strippers (page 2) but this was never picked up in the media (of course not, male strippers for women are considered empowerment, while for men they're sexist).

The book lists these false rape statistics including one from Linda Fairstein, former head of the sex-crimes unit of the Manhattan District Attorney's office who wrote, "There are about 4000 reports of rape each year in Manhattan. Of these, about half simply did not happen" (page 374).

http://drhelen.blogs...-injustice.html
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#2 stocks

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Posted 04 September 2007 - 03:16 PM

By and large, the press did not let the facts get in the way of a good race-class-sex-violence morality play. Thanks in part to the reporting and guidance of Taylor, a NEWSWEEK contributing editor, NEWSWEEK was the first major publication to pick apart the prosecution's case, in an article on June 29, 2006. But the magazine also put mug shots of two of the wrongly charged players on its cover on May 1 and, in the cover story I wrote, clucked at doting parents who do not want to see that their sons could turn into "thugs." Taylor and Johnson show that the players were crude and drank too much, but that they had no prior record of racism or sexual violence.

The authors make the Duke faculty look at once ridiculous and craven. For months, not one of the university's nearly 500-member faculty of arts and sciences stood up to question the rush to judgment against the lacrosse team. So much for the ideal of the liberal-arts university where scholars debate openly and seek the truth. ("This book provides one interpretation," says Duke spokesman John Burness.) The only group that shows any common sense in "Until Proven Innocent" is the student body. Aside from a few noisy activists who assumed the players were guilty, Duke undergrads mostly overlooked the political correctness of their professors.

http://www.msnbc.msn...ewsweek/page/2/
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#3 stocks

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Posted 06 September 2007 - 09:24 AM

There was plenty of wrongdoing, of course, but it had very little to do with Duke's lacrosse players. It was perpetrated instead by a rogue district attorney determined to win re-election in a racially divided, town-gown city; ideologically driven reporters and their pseudo-expert sources; censorious faculty members driven by the imperatives of political correctness; a craven university president; and black community leaders seemingly ready to believe any charge of black victimization.

"Until Proven Innocent" is a stunning book. It recounts the Duke lacrosse case in fascinating detail and offers, along the way, a damning portrait of the institutions--legal, educational and journalistic--that do so much to shape contemporary American culture. Messrs. Taylor and Johnson make it clear that the Duke affair--the rabid prosecution, the skewed commentary, the distorted media storyline--was not some odd, outlier incident but the product of an elite culture's most treasured assumptions about American life, not least about America's supposed racial divide

The vitriolic rhetoric of the faculty and Durham's "progressive" community--including the local chapter of the NAACP--helped to intensify the scandal and stoke the media fires. The New York Times' coverage was particularly egregious, as Messrs. Taylor and Johnson vividly show. It ran dozens of prominent stories and "analysis" articles trying to plumb the pathologies of the lacrosse players and of a campus culture that allowed swaggering white males to prey on poor, defenseless young black women. As one shrewd Times alumnus later wrote: "You couldn't invent a story so precisely tuned to the outrage frequency of the modern, metropolitan, bien pensant journalist." Such Nifong allies--unlike the district attorney himself--paid no price for their shocking indifference to the truth.

http://www.opinionjo...a/?id=110010564
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#4 stocks

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Posted 07 September 2007 - 09:45 AM

This shameful conduct was rooted in a broader trend toward subordinating facts and evidence to faith-based ideological posturing. Worse, the ascendant ideology, especially in academia, is an obsession with the fantasy that oppression of minorities and women by "privileged" white men remains rampant in America. Its crude stereotyping of white men, especially athletes, resembles old-fashioned racism and sexism.

Can this trend be reversed? The power of extremist professors will continue to spread unless mainstream liberal academics, alumni and trustees stop deferring to them and stop letting them pack departments with more and more ideologically eccentric, intellectually mediocre allies.

As for the media, the case shows the need for editors and watchdogs to remind journalists that they are supposed to be in the truth-telling business and that truth emerges from facts and evidence.


The case did feature one hero, who showed how academics as well as journalists should behave: Professor James Coleman of Duke Law School. Long a champion of liberal causes, Coleman broke ranks with his guilt-presuming colleagues after Brodhead named him to lead a committee investigating the team's culture. Yes, the report Coleman's committee issued in May 2006 said that some lacrosse players drank unlawfully or excessively and had committed such petty offenses as having noisy parties. But alcohol aside, the report was a stunning vindication. Team members had "performed well academically"; respected the Duke employees with whom they came into contact; behaved well on trips; supported current and former African American players; and had no history of fighting, sexual assault or harassment, or racist slurs.

The media long ignored this portrayal, which did not fit their mythical story line. Coleman later became the first -- and for months the only -- Duke figure to publicly denounce Nifong's violations of the players' rights. The media long ignored that, too.

Stuart Taylor is a National Journal columnist and Newsweek contributor. KC Johnson is a history professor at Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center. They are co-authors of "Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case."


http://www.washingto...7090602271.html
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#5 mss

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Posted 07 September 2007 - 12:27 PM

:( Sadly, TRUTH does not sell papers nor TV ratings. :angry: mss
WOMEN & CATS WILL DO AS THEY PLEASE, AND MEN & DOGS SHOULD GET USED TO THE IDEA.
A DOG ALWAYS OFFERS UNCONDITIONAL LOVE. CATS HAVE TO THINK ABOUT IT!!

#6 Rogerdodger

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Posted 08 September 2007 - 08:48 PM

A long time ago, a famous ruler asked "What is truth?" Then he washed his hands.

#7 stocks

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Posted 21 October 2007 - 08:38 AM

Yesterday, I was called to jury duty. When the judge
informed the 200 potential jurors that our case is
about rape, I knew I would get out of it. Those who
had no hardship or impartiality issues had to go
downstairs for processing. Then, the judge called each
of the rest of us, alone in the courtroom, to argue his
or her case of hardship or partiality.

I walked to the lectern to announce this: "Your honor,
I am an internationally known men's rights activist. I
have written extensively about rape and have appeared
on TV and radio to discuss it. I cannot be impartial in
this case because:
1) I believe the rape-shield law is unconstitutional
(the accuser in my would-be case is Jane Doe: nonsense!)
2) At least 50% of rape accusations are bogus
3) Women who falsely accuse men of rape (such as Crystal
Gail Mangum in Durham, NC) are never prosecuted
4) In a court of law, men are presumed guilty and women
are presumed innocent.
The prosecution and defense attorneys had no objection
to my swift exit, as you can imagine. You should have
seen the looks on their open-mouth faces.

http://www.TheNoNonsenseMan.com
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#8 stocks

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Posted 29 October 2013 - 08:12 AM

By and large, the press did not let the facts get in the way of a good race-class-sex-violence morality play. Thanks in part to the reporting and guidance of Taylor, a NEWSWEEK contributing editor, NEWSWEEK was the first major publication to pick apart the prosecution's case, in an article on June 29, 2006. But the magazine also put mug shots of two of the wrongly charged players on its cover on May 1 and, in the cover story I wrote, clucked at doting parents who do not want to see that their sons could turn into "thugs." Taylor and Johnson show that the players were crude and drank too much, but that they had no prior record of racism or sexual violence.

The authors make the Duke faculty look at once ridiculous and craven. For months, not one of the university's nearly 500-member faculty of arts and sciences stood up to question the rush to judgment against the lacrosse team. So much for the ideal of the liberal-arts university where scholars debate openly and seek the truth. ("This book provides one interpretation," says Duke spokesman John Burness.) The only group that shows any common sense in "Until Proven Innocent" is the student body. Aside from a few noisy activists who assumed the players were guilty, Duke undergrads mostly overlooked the political correctness of their professors.

http://www.msnbc.msn...ewsweek/page/2/


First came the Duke lacrosse rape scandal, then came Trayvon Martin


"If I had a Son: Race, Guns, and the Railroading of George Zimmerman"

'If I Had A Son' tells how for the first time in the history of American jurisprudence, a state government, the US Department of Justice, the White House, the major media, the entertainment industry and the vestiges of the civil rights movement conspired to put an innocent man in prison for the rest of his life. All that stood between Zimmerman and lifetime internment were two folksy local lawyers, their aides, and some very dedicated citizen journalists, most notably an unpaid handful of truth seekers at the blogging collective known as the Conservative Treehouse

I could barely put this book down; read it from cover to cover. It was a real eye-opener.

Carefully written, and meticulously referenced with primary sources, this book details what appears to be a malicious, deceitful, and sloppy prosecution of Mr. George Zimmerman. After being thoroughly investigated by the Police and the FBI, and having no charges brought against him, political pressure from a spectrum of activists took him to trial.

But there was no case against him. His account of being beaten within inches of serious injury or death was credible, and verifiable through witnesses and physical evidence. His claims that Mr. Martin seemed to be "on drugs" was backed up by a the coroner's report.

And the claims against Zimmerman--that he was a "racist" and a "wannabe-cop" were provably false. Zimmerman himself is of Afro-Latin descent, and he had a record of opposing and protesting police brutality in his neighborhood, for example in the case of a Sherman Ware. He even had worked with the local NAACP prior to his assault from Trayvon Martin to fight racial injustice.

The prosecution told one bald-faced lie after another. Even the "little brother" that Trayvon allegedly went out to shop for wasn't his brother at all, but the son of his father's mistress--Mr. Martin being married to a different woman who is not Trayvon's mother. The defense wasn't able to use concrete evidence of Trayvon's propensity for violence, drug, abuse, and theft.

The fact that our President shamefully compared the death of Trayvon Martin to a hypothetical murder of his own hypothetical son was shameful. And doing it before the trial--in an attempt to subvert or taint a jury--is antithetical to the principles our Nation is based on.


http://www.amazon.co...=If I Had a son
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#9 stocks

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Posted 21 November 2013 - 10:09 AM

Three “Knockout” Attacks Reported In Philadelphia Area

Videos from cities around the country show people being punched and beaten at random.
The attackers are calling their crimes a game, the goal being to knock out the victim with one punch.

Mark Cumberland is a victim of a “Knockout” assault.

“Someone asked me for a cigarette and by the time I got my hands out my pocket I was getting hit by four kids.”

He says, “It was hard seeing and I’m still having trouble breathing and swallowing.”

Cumberland was walking out of a Fox Chase pizza shop on November 11th when he was attacked.

“There’s no reason at all. I mean, I didn’t get robbed, they didn’t take nothing from me. They just beat me up.”


An elderly man was also attacked when he was mowing his lawn outside of his home.

Bruce Myer, a neighbor of the elderly victim says, “A kid came up to him and just punched him in the mouth. He ended up laying in the street with his lawnmower.”

The only apparent motive in these attacks, as in all “Knockout” attacks, is to inflict injury on a random victim.



http://philadelphia....ladelphia-area/
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#10 stocks

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Posted 21 November 2013 - 10:27 AM

Three “Knockout” Attacks Reported In Philadelphia Area

Videos from cities around the country show people being punched and beaten at random.
The attackers are calling their crimes a game, the goal being to knock out the victim with one punch.

Mark Cumberland is a victim of a “Knockout” assault.

“Someone asked me for a cigarette and by the time I got my hands out my pocket I was getting hit by four kids.”

He says, “It was hard seeing and I’m still having trouble breathing and swallowing.”

Cumberland was walking out of a Fox Chase pizza shop on November 11th when he was attacked.

“There’s no reason at all. I mean, I didn’t get robbed, they didn’t take nothing from me. They just beat me up.”


An elderly man was also attacked when he was mowing his lawn outside of his home.

Bruce Myer, a neighbor of the elderly victim says, “A kid came up to him and just punched him in the mouth. He ended up laying in the street with his lawnmower.”

The only apparent motive in these attacks, as in all “Knockout” attacks, is to inflict injury on a random victim.



http://philadelphia....ladelphia-area/


New York City police authorities are investigating a series of unprovoked physical attacks in public places on people who are Jewish, in the form of what is called "the knockout game."


Read more: http://www.realclear...l#ixzz2lIIrMRlF
Follow us: @RCP_Articles on Twitter
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Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.