Duke lacrosse: Letter to Durham H-S Editor Ashley

Readers' Note: I'm sending Durham Herald Sun Editor Bob Ashley the email below along with a link to this post. I'll offer to publish on the "main page" any reply he makes.

John
_____________________________________________

July 31, 2006

Bob Ashley, Editor
Durham Herald Sun

Re: Your column, "Has the lacrosse case induced insanity?" (July 23)

Dear Editor Ashley:

I blog as John in Carolina. I’ve lived in and around Durham for almost thirty-three years. Like you, I’m a Duke alum.

I publish often on the Duke lacrosse hoax, especially that portion of media coverage that has turned what should have been a fair, thorough police investigation into something hideously different: A series of monumental injustices that have damaged the lives of innocent people and shaken citizens’ faith in Durham’s police, its DA, our court system and much of our area media.

Public opinion was once strongly against the players. Remember the pot bangers? And remember how many approved the Raleigh N&O’s Apr. 2 publication of “vigilante” poster; and your publication on Apr. 9 of the Rev. Canon Dr. Sam Wells’ Apr. 2 Duke Chapel sermon?

Now public opinion has changed and you don’t like it. You blame defense attorneys. You say:

The Herald-Sun [has] tried to consistently remind [readers] that the defense attorneys are releasing just what fragments of the total evidence they choose to make public.

Only “fragments from defense attorneys? What misleading nonsense!

There’s been an avalanche of evidence made public. Almost all of it comes from Nifong and the police, who were forced by law to disclose it.

It’s that evidence that’s influenced public opinion.

You supported gathering DNA from the 46 white Duke lacrosse players. Nifong, whom you endorsed in the primary and continue to support, promised the community the DNA results would identify the guilty.

Public opinion began to shift dramatically in the players favor when the DNA lab results found not a single match to any of them. Attorneys talking didn’t cause that shift; the lab report caused it.

Nifong then ordered a second round of DNA testing.

The only positive match the second round produced was to the accuser’s boyfriend’s semen.

You can’t blame that finding and the further shift in opinion it caused on the defense attorneys unless somehow you're ready to argue one of them is the boyfriend.

The “indentification process” used to “pick any three” has angered and revolted decent citizens. They reacted that way not because of anything the defense attorneys told them, but because they read part or all of the Durham Police Department's own records of its “pick any three” ID procedure.

Here’s how Duke Law Professor James E. Coleman Jr. described and analyzed the procedure:

According to the police account of the identification, however, the police officer who presided over the proceedings told the alleged victim at the outset that he wanted her to look at people the police had reason to believe attended the party.

Thus, the police not only failed to include people they knew were not suspects among the photographs shown the woman, they told the witness in effect that there would be no such "fillers" among the photographs she would see.

This strongly suggests that the purpose of the identification process was to give the alleged victim an opportunity to pick three members of the lacrosse team who could be charged. Any three students would do; there could be no wrong choice. (bold added)

The prosecutor would not care if the pre-trial identification was subsequently thrown out by the court. The accuser would identify them at trial by pointing to the three defendants seated in front of her as the three men who assaulted her. The prosecutor would argue that she had an independent basis (independent of the identifications thrown out) for doing so.

Editor Ashley, there are many tens of thousands of us in Durham, including Herald Sun readers, who don’t need a defense attorney to tell us what to call a police lineup procedure in which “[a]ny three students would do [and there was] no wrong choice.”

We call it a frame-up.

What do you call it?

Sincerely,

John
www.johnincarolina.com