Friday, September 08, 2006

Duke lacrosse: A little peek inside the DPD

I was over at Johnsville News last evening reading the defense motion filed August 25 by attorneys for the three Duke students Duke’s President, Richard H. Brodhead, is eager to see put on trial.

The lengthy, detailed motion is well worth a read. I’m not going to say much about it. I’ll leave analysis and commentary to others more knowledgeable in legal matters than I.

And all of you can form your own conclusions as you wish.

But I do want to call one paragraph in the motion to your attention; and then ask you a question.

Here’s the paragraph :

12. On May 26, 2006, Durham Police Department Major S. Mihalch sent a memo to DPD personnel involved in the investigation of these cases directing them "to print and produce to Major L. Russ all email messages sent to or received by you from March 13, 2006 to the present which relate in any way to: the disturbance reported as occurring at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. on or about March 13, 2006, and the rape reported at 3457 Hillsborough Road on or about the same date." The memo gave its recipients a response deadline of June 5, 2006,and went on to threaten disciplinary action for noncompliance. The memo also required anyone who did not provide copies of e-mails to certify they had not, in fact, sent or received any such e-mails.
Now, folks, what’s the trust level like at your work sites?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, the disturbance at 610 probably produced zero e-mails, and there was no rape reported at 3457 Hillsborough road, so what the heck was this memo for?

Anonymous said...

The disturbance at 610 being Kim's false 911 call, and 3457 Hillsborough road being the Kroger.

Anonymous said...

This is a layup question John! If Mihalch wanted to find any emails exchanged within DPD he only had to go to the person in the IT department that backups up their email system each day. This person may be referred to as the "custodian" of the data files. Mihalch would ask the custodian to retrieve all the email sent or received within the specified period by any employee. (If you recall, Duke's email custodian was ordered to produce relevant emails in this fashion). This is expressly permitted since virtually all organizations have email policies that state emails exchanged on the org's email system aren't subject to privacy rules. To cull the list of emails down to those of interest, you could search the contents for such key words as "rape, 'ho, Duke, lacrosse, hooligan, frame, hoax, hide, lie, stonewall, Nifong, Blinco's, etc". If the email was exchanged solely to and from an independent mail service such as Hotmail, DPD would be entirely dependent upon the integrity of their employees to produce copies of such emails. Most likely, incriminating emails would be deleted. Deleted emails from a service like Hotmail can be retrieved with a court order for a very short period. After that you are out of luck. What are the odds that one of the purposes of Mihalch's directive was to "remind" the key players at DPD that they should delete any incriminating emails from their personal accounts? Shouldn't the defense ask for a Court Order directing the DPD custodian to turn over copies of the emails rather than depend on what may be produced voluntarily?

JWM said...

Anon "Well, the disturbance .. . "

You ask, "so what the heck was this memo for?"

That's a great question I missed.

But you may get an answer if you read until I get to the third Anon commenter here.

Anon "The disturbance at 610 ..."

Too bad more people in March couldn't have seen what you're skewing.

Anon "This is a layup question John!"

Tomorrow a.m. I'm posting on your comment which is so much more than a "layup question."

Thanks for putting it out there.

To all three Anons.

Thank you for commenting and I hope you come back by noon tomorrow.

John

Anonymous said...

One of the things that has gone on in the background of this case has been the growing criminal conspiracy among people who are in the government, be they police, city officials, and personnel from the DA's office. When I use "criminal," I mean so in the historic sense of the word, not as slang.

We are seeing a number of people desperately trying "to get our story straight," as opposed to getting at the truth. While the feds will have no stomach to bring RICO charges or such against the principals in this conspiracy, I hope that a lawsuit is on the horizon.

Again, if we were to start ticking off the various crimes committed by the "investigators" and others in this case and were to write them down on paper, deforestation of North America would be the result.

William L. (Bill) Anderson

Anonymous said...

How can the governor, Democrat Easley, stand by while this Nifong-Gottlieb travesty continues?

JWM said...

To Bill Anderson,

I know we're both sorry you may very well be right about crimes committed in this matter by people with sworn duties to uphold the law.

Thank you for all you've done to point that out at http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson-arch.html

To Anon "How can the governor..."

You ask a very important question I can't really answer except to say I think if given a second chance after this November's election Governor Easley will appoint a very different kind of person DA.

Thank you both. I hope you keep commenting.

John