Responding to Send U.S. Justice Department to NC comments

Yesterday I posted Send the U.S. Justice Department to North Carolina.

Here I want to respond to parts or all of comments on its thread.

Commenters' remarks are in italics; mine are in plain

Let's begin - - -

Seeing the absolute lack of concern by our elected officials, state and federal, for issues such as this makes me ashamed to be a Tarheel. I have asked both United States Senators, my own State Senator, and one of the Republican gubernatorial candidates to speak out about the grand jury system that allowed indictments to be returned based on bald-faced lies by two police officers who have been proven to be serial perjurers. So far, no response from any of them. One of them, Liddy Dole, proved she didn't even know what had occurred in her own state! This is not a partisan issue--Democrat and Republican alike are clueless.

We can agree NC leaders of both parties – with few exceptions - have been reluctant to ask the Justice Department to investigate the travesties which have been uncovered.

But I don’t think it’s because they’re clueless, although Sen. Dole certainly was at one point during the Duke frame-up attempt.

I think a lot of factors explain why the DOJ hasn’t yet come in, and in fact has refused a request from NC AG Roy Cooper that it do so in the Duke frame-up attempt, and what Cooper and the rest of us know is an ongoing cover-up of the framing attempt.

The major factor working against a DOJ investigation of the Duke/Nifong/Durham travesties is the skin color of the victims. If their skin was black instead of white, DOJ would have been here long ago.

Then again, if their skin had been black, they wouldn’t have been frame-up victims in the first place, would they?

I think even Mike Nifong and Duke's board of trustee chair Bob Steel will tell you that.

Where were all those "liberals" in the Duke lacrosse case?

Many of them were very busy in 2006 enabling the frame-up attempt, stirring racial passions, and working hard in Mike Nifong’s primary and general election campaigns.

Recently many of those same people have been working hard to help Sen. Barack Obama, the self-described "post racial candidate," win the presidential primary race and former Nifong crony and current chief assistant district attorney Tracey Cline win the remainder of the DA's term to which Nifong was elected but later forced to resign following his disbarment.

While the accused were not going to be on death row, thirty years can be a slow death. As for the US Justice Department, it continues to disappoint. It can go after Scooter Libby for a non-crime, but it sees nothing wrong when DA's frame innocent victims.

I’m very sorry to say you’re right. We’ve got to work to change things, so that in the future you won’t be right.

And the sooner the better, with a broad mandate to investigate misconduct by all elected and appointed NC officials. Got to start somewhere.

I think you’ve put your finger on another reason the DOJ hasn’t come in. There were so many connected to the framing attempt and the ongoing coverup that once you start looking into it there’s no telling where it will lead. This wasn’t just a case of a single rouge prosecutor hiding say the fingerprints of someone else who was at the crime scene and had a motive. The Duke/Nifong/Durham framing attempt and cover-up involves many in Durham and at Duke and perhaps elsewhere.

The Justice Dept. will race to investigate a suspected hate crime almost anywhere; but nothing in the world can get it to investigate Durham.

I'm disillusioned, disappointed, and disgusted.

I don’t blame you for feeling as you do. Some smart people tell me they think there’s no chance the DOJ will ever investigate the Duke/Nifong/Durham case.

But others, equally as smart, speculate the DOJ might still come in if there’s discovery and a trial that reveals what many people think they’ll reveal – a systematic, extensive frame-up attempt and cover-up by certain police, a DA and some of his staff, and Duke University trustees and senior administrators, plus lower echelon Duke employees who were pressured by Duke higher-ups to do things they’d not otherwise have done.

In that case these folks reason, public pressure might be so great as to force the DOJ to launch an investigation.

I thank each of you for commenting.

John