Anderson on the Hoax

Early on in the Duke-Nifong Hoax Case professor and columnist William Anderson began calling attention to the travesties and injustices of DA Mike Nifong and certain Durham police officers. Anderson says their actions reflect a corrupt justice system in Durham that's representative of a corrupt justice system in America.

I wouldn't go as far as Anderson in faulting America's court system but he's certainly on target when he points out how often police, prosecutors and the courts fail to deliver justice or even an approximation of it. And in the case of the three young man wrongly indicted in Durham, those failures have been especially egregious.

Anderson’s posted a column explaining why the Hoax Case matters so much to him. I hope you give it a look.

Anderson’s column reminded me I hadn’t put up a post I’d written a week ago about his previous column. So I'm posting it now, just below this.

My week old post's a “hats off” to Anderson for asserting a standard of justice now rejected by people like Duke’s President, Richard H. Brodhead, Durham Herald Sun editor Bob Ashley and Duke’s faculty “Group of 88.”

John
_________________________________________

Post title: “Anderson: Against and For”

Not-Duke Professor William “Bill” Anderson writes often on what he calls “The Duke Non-Rape case.”

Bill recently wrote:

[The] courtroom is a place where we are supposed to find that thing called "truth," at least how truth applies to the events being examined.

Obviously, it often is difficult to find "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," given human limitations and the predilections of people to lie, but nonetheless those people who are officers of the court and those who testify under oath are expected to be truthful….

Furthermore, the rules of the courtroom require prosecutors to present a truthful rendition, or at least a reasonable account, of what occurred. For example, if I am on trial for robbery, the prosecutor first must establish that an actual robbery occurred, and, second, that I was the one who committed the act. He or she is not legally free to concoct an event that never occurred, and then pick me out at random to bring charges.

That prosecutors might do such a thing does not change the fact that such conduct is illegal.

How do you feel about what Anderson is saying? Do you think he’s right? Or are you against what he’s saying?

Let’s do a “for and against” and then wrap the post.

Against: Shadee Malkulou, a Duke senior and Women’s Studies and Cultural Anthropology double major. In the Durham Herald Sun Malkulou recently wrote:

”Much of the emphasis on [the lacrosse players’] ‘innocence’ has ignored the gender and racial prejudice of the March 13 party. If nothing else, Nifong is holding the lacrosse players accountable for that; and as a woman at Duke who knows just how much these men get away with, I’m thankful.”

Malaklou’s position is clear. She approves of Nifong ignoring people’s “innocence” when he uses his police and court powers to punish people she wants punished.

Now, speaking for what Bill Anderson wrote we have Winston Churchill who in 1902, while sitting in his first Parliament, took up the cause of a group of Royal Military College cadets who’d been punished as a group for “remaining silent” regarding a series of arson fires. The cadets, twenty-seven in all, were sent down from the college without any individual inquiries or hearings.

In a letter to The Times of London, Churchill invoked on the cadets’ behalf what he reminded readers were the “three cardinal principles” of equity:

“that suspicion in not evidence; that accused should be heard in their own defense; and that it is for the accuser to prove his charge, not for the defendant to prove his innocence.”

Wrap:Lately when I've read Churchill’s words,

“and that it is for the accuser to prove his charge, not for the defendant to prove his innocence.,”

I've thought of Duke President Richard H. Brodhead’s belief that a trial is the place where three young men will have the burden to be “proved innocent.”

If Churchill were here, he would remind President Brodhead and others such as Durham Herald Sun editor Bob Ashley and Raleigh News & Observer editorial page editor Steve Ford there’s a name for countries where the trial burden is on the accused to be “proved innocenct.” They’re called “police states.”
________________________________________________
Source note: The Herald Sun, as far as I know, never put Maluklou's op-ed online. It ran in the H-S on Nov. 19. Regarding the Sandhurst episode and Churchill's letter, I relied on Martin Gilbert's Churchill:A Life (pgs. 148-149. It's still in print and available at many public libraries.



http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson153.html

http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson152.html