Duke lacrosse “Wanted” and “Vigilante” posters played an important role in fueling the witch hunt and its monumental injustices. The posters helped inflame public opinion, provoked hate groups and unstable people, and endangered the players who were the posters’ targets.
In any request for a change of venue, in a trail that may follow and in other legal actions the poster will be used in evidence. So for anyone who will follow those proceedings as well as for everyone just wanting to know how such as wildly improbable hoax could have been believed by anyone with at least a room temperature IQ, knowing something about the posters is important.
Next Wednesday I’ll begin a three post series about the posters.
Here’s some of what the series will cover:
While many people use “Wanted” and “Vigilante” interchangeably suggesting they are one and the same, they’re not.
“Wanted” is the description of what is really a series of at least four posters produced by Durham CrimeStoppers.
All “Wanted” posters are text only; they offer cash rewards for information; and they are identified as having been produced by Durham CrimeStoppers, an organization that reports its independent of Durham’s Police Department, although the DPD has assigned Cpl. David Addison to work with CrimeStoppers. Addison produced the CS posters.
The first “Wanted” poster, produced and distributed in late March, is the subject of a request by an attorney, Alex Charns, acting on behalf of an unindicted lacrosse player for a public investigation by DPD into the production and distribution of the first “Wanted” poster and a full public apology by the City of Durham to the entire lacrosse team which Charns claims was libeled by the poster.
If, as DPD says, CrimeStoppers is a separate organization, why is Charns saying DPD should do an investigation and Durham City make an apology?
Charns contends CrimeStoppers is really part of DPD.
“Vigilante” is used to describe a poster which the Raleigh News & Observer published and distributed in photo form on Sunday, April 2. The N&O’s “Vigilante” poster differs in very important ways from the “Wanted” posters.
The “Vigilante” poster contains face photos of 43 white Duke lacrosse players; it is not a solicitation for information for money; it was posted on buildings on Duke campus and circulated in neighborhoods near campus; and it was published anonymously as “Vigilante” posters traditionally are.
Cpl. Addison is quoted on the N&O’s “Vigilante” poster. He was also quoted in the N&O’s inflammatory, grossly biased and now discredited March 25 “anonymous interview” story
In an interview in late May, DPD Maj. Lee Russ told me DPD would like to find out who produced and circulated the “Vigilante” poster.
There were then as now rumors in the community pointing to different sources for the “Vigilante” poster. Russ volunteered that no one in DPD had any connection to producing it.
For many months I’ve pressed the N&O for more information about a number of aspects of its publication of the “Vigilante” poster.
I really can’t tell you I’ve gotten much from the N&O. But I continue to ask for information.
I hope you come by and read the series.
Saturday, December 02, 2006
“Wanted” and “Vigilante” posters
Posted by JWM at 3:26 PM
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10 comments:
John, this past week I ran into a friend at the local grocery store (our city is about 1,100 miles from Durham) and we started talking about the Duke Hoax. Her daughter had graduated last spring and was a scholarship athlete. My friend's husband is a litigator with over thirty years of experience practicing law with a firm that is in the Vault top 100 firms. He is not someone who overreacts. My friend told me that the situation in Durham was so toxic for the students that her husband had seriously considered hiring a local attorney- just in case. They simply did not know how bad local matters would get and they wanted their daughter to be safe. In the end, they did not hire an attorney in Durham, but it is telling that they thought about doing so.
I think we have all forgotten just how horrifying the situation in Durham was last spring. I'm gratified that you are reexamining the "Wanted" and "Vigilante" posters.
John, the issue of the posters is one that needs to be revisited again and again. These people created a crisis situation, and then placed a number of people in danger of their lives.
What is most telling here is that the very worst offenders have been the ones who are most highly rewarded. The Gang of 88 has de facto succeeded in taking over the university by getting everything they want with the "campus initiatives" and by the AAAS receiving departmental status. Furthermore, it is the Gang of 88 that still is demanding trial and conviction despite the fact that many, if not all, Duke faculty members know that the rape charges are false.
What we have witnessed at Duke is nothing short of a coup, and right in the middle of the whole thing were the vigilate posters. Think about this: a university has been taken over by rogue faculty members who have based everything they are doing on a Big Lie.
Does anyone think that the medical school, the engineering school, the law school, and other schools at Duke are going to be immune from what the Gang of 88 is unleashing? Right now, most professors who think these people are frauds don't want to have to join a messy, bloody fight.
Academic training generally does not prepare one to go to the barricades, but the various Gang of 88 programs were born in activism and continue to be basically activist entities. There is no real academic "scholarship" going on in those programs, just basic marxist claptrap.
This is a very sad moment, and I do not blame the lacrosse team for that. We can sit back and watch the death of a former great university.
John-
Looking forward to your series. Can you post links to the texts of the posters (original and revised Crimestoppers, and "Wanted").
John: Great information, as usual. Do you know if anyone is suing the N&O over the publication of the so-called vigilante poster? And do you know who wrote or approved the headline on the Neff-Niolet-Blythe story this morning?
Thanks John
I'm looking forward to your three post series on this matter.
John, here's a 'Reader's Corner' entry in the N&O dated early April. Just FYI for your poster entry efforts next week:
Tuesday, April 4, 2006
The lacrosse team poster
A number of readers objected to The N&O’s publication Sunday of a poster showing photos and names of members of the Duke lacrosse team. These callers and e-mailers said the photo on page 20A unfairly spotlighted those members of the team who did not participate in the reported sexual assault and may have put them in danger of recrimination.
“If two or three did something wrong, I don’t agree with putting everyone’s name or picture in,” said Jordan Allegood of Wilson.
“The publication of these photographs is not only unfair but dangerous to the young men involved,” said Everett E. Dodd Jr. of Raleigh. “Will your newspaper not be satisfied until some vigilante egged on by your reporting harms a Duke student or team member?”
The poster had been distributed widely around Durham and the Duke campus last week. Melanie Sill, The N&O's executive editor, said the picture came to The N&O during the weekend and she'd have preferred that it receive more scrutiny before being published.
I agree. I think the pictures didn't add anything to the coverage and contributed to a perception of unfairness. The New York Times, it should be noted, also reprinted a portion of the poster.
Posted at 04:42 pm by Ted Vaden in Readers' Corner
7 comments | Permalink
http://blogs.newsobserver.com/readers/index.php?title=the_lacrosse_team_poster&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
10:42 Anon:
re: links to the posters themselves - good place to start looking is TalkLeft's documents thread -
http://forums.talkleft.com/index.php/topic,3.0.html
Interesting post on the old Court TV board, fortunately cached by Google:
http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:9wTlx4bItvcJ:board1.courttv.com/showthread.php%3Fs%3Dece602d16505d54afef10f63c5e07dd0%26postid%3D7866490+nbc+17+crimestoppers+flier&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=3
LieStoppers thread w/ lotsa poster info:
http://z9.invisionfree.com/LieStoppers_Board/index.php?showtopic=558
Original wording of one of the versions of the poster(s) (my head is starting to hurt! :)
http://southernstudies.org/facingsouth/2006/04/police-need-tips-on-duke-lacrosse.asp
Since the Group of 88 used Duke money to advertise, offices, computers and offices to produce their slanderous statment, it should be investigated if any of the Duke 88 or their radical students used Duke copiers, computers or supplies or Duke money to produce the "wanted posters".
Reiterating what I had said earlier, I believe Duke is unsalvageable as an institution of learning. I will hope they are successfully sued into nonexistence, and that certain administrators and "group" are unemployable in any field.
I know many Duke Alumi will think the above far too harsh, but you must remember Duke is not the university you attended. If you value the prestige of your Alma Mater, your only hope of retaining it is if this current obscenity masquerading as a university dies before it destroys the hard won reputation Duke has enjoyed. For these cretins currently wielding de facto control will trash that reputation. Duke will become a joke.
Better to be dead as a well thought of victim than to be a laughable politically correct victimizer sinking into ridicule.
Just my $.02. However, to those that say most Duke faculty and staff are not the ones doing it, I say they weren't the ones standing tall and opposing the thugocracy of Duke, either, with just one or two notable exceptions.
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