Dartblog

The Duke Rape Case continues to founder, as District Attorney Mike “Ahab” Nifong does anything and everything to press his case for essentially political reasons—he rode the case to victory in his Democratic primary months ago, and from the start has been under pressure from a few professors at Duke who were largely responsible for creating the frenzy to begin with. The latest news? Nifong failed fully to disclose the results of a DNA test months ago. We learned a while back that the exotic dancer accusing the lacrosse players of raping her had no trace of their semen inside her. What Nifong did not tell us is that she had several other distinct male samples inside her. She will soon give birth.

The other late breaking news is that Nifong’s photo line up was unusually constructed. The three men charged with rape (though the whole team, I hasten to note, has been tarred by activists at Duke) were charged not on the basis of any peculiar physical evidence implicating them, but because the accusor picked them out of a photo line up. But now comes news that the photo line up failed to include random strangers, which is standard practice in such things. Defense attorneys have filed a motion, citing numerous failed identifications and this abberant procedure, to prevent both the photo line up and an in-court identification (wherein the alleged victim, from the stand, would point to the accused sitting at the defendant’s bench) from being used at trial. If the motion succeeds, the case will die.

There are frivolous rape charges filed with great frequency. But as long as justice prevails in those cases, I am very sympathetic to the argument that their quantity should be gainsaid in the interest of successfully prosecuting real rapists, who commit a crime second in heinousness only to homicide. That is to say, even if rape has a higher incidence of false plaints, each should be looked at in ignorance of that fact.

The far more interesting stories here are those of Nifong, a rabid opportunist who may at last face criminal charges or disbarment, and the Duke professoriate, elements of which are largely responsible for simmering the case to national attention, stoking Nifong, and fomenting wild racial tension on the Duke campus. In the thick of the accusal, I was on the phone almost daily to students at Duke, and it is quite clear that a few activist professors were interested in prejudging the entire lacrosse team, and in—damn the facts—throwing someone in jail. Why? They wanted to sell the notion of “white privilege,” so crucial is it to their social justice curriculum. It is quite a racist proposition, really. The idea is that, when a crime like rape is committed, you’ve got to look to the white kids because their pigmentation and their majority status causes them to feel unrestrained in their behavior toward fellow humans, paving the way for sick plunderings such as rape.

That sounds like an exaggeration, and would that it were. The public bills, such as the one seen above, were inflammatory and unfairly accusatory. But they wither under the long shadow of a brimstone-seared letter written by Duke English Professor Houston Baker. Baker’s three-page missive, as released by local television station WRAL, is a ramshackle catalog of impossible presumptions and accusations. He accuses the Duke administration of engaging in “a tepid and pious legalism with respect to the disaster of recent days,” which, he says, is “the actual harm to the body, soul, mind, and spirit of black women who were in the company of Duke University lacrosse members as far as any of us know.” He continues that Duke has “veritably given license [to athletes] to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech, and feel proud of themselves in the bargain.”

The response Duke offered to the allegations, which included a resignation, suspensions, and cancelling the lacrosse season, are not sufficiently moral responses to what Baker calls “drunken white male privilege loosed among us.” “How many more people of color,” he asks, “must fall victim to violent, white, male, athletic, privilege before coaches… and administrators… damn the unconscionable?”

And while Baker proselytizes for racial unrest, and while he preaches a strange moral high road to the Duke community, he has no trouble mentioning on the first page that fifteen of the Lacrosse players had faced misdemeanor charges for drunkenness in the past. Baker does not mention—and would likely abhor the mention as racist—the accuser’s having attempted to run down a police officer following a high-speed chase in 2002, according to a police report.

At the end of the letter, as one might imagine, Duke English Professor Houston Baker demands that the coaches, the team, “and any of its agents” be dismissed from Duke.

But, these last few months having profitably passed us, and cooler heads having prevailed, we now know that Professor Baker, and not the Duke lacrosse players, is the one laboring under race-based delusions of privilege.

N.B. Professor Baker was hired away from Duke by Vanderbilt in May.