Duke lacrosse: How important is the Gang of 88?

The American Conservative looks at the intellectual foundations of the Gang of 88.

Rotten in Durham
How Duke’s academic mandarins became a lynch mob

They take the same tack as the Weekly Standard in concentrating on the actions of the faculty and administration in the perpetuation of the travesty in Durham.

Duke's Tenured Vigilantes
The scandalous rush to judgment in the lacrosse "rape" case.

I think that putting the Gang of 88 at the front and center of the story creates grave distortions. It is both true and interesting that a bunch of college professors decided to use a criminal case to advance their ideological agenda. KC Johnson is right that by encouraging Nifong they betrayed the ideals of the academy.

It is odd to see vigilantes with tenure; it is not odd at all to see a high-profile case draw vigilantes. At Duke the professors behaved badly but they behaved badly by acting like us.

A point John Grisham makes in his most recent book is directly relevant:

The journey also exposed me to the world of wrongful convictions. Something that I, even as a former lawyer, had never spent much time thinking about. This is not a problem peculiar to Oklahoma, far from it. Wrongful convictions occur every month in every state in this country, and the reasons are all varied and all the same-- bad police work, junk science, faulty eyewitness identifications, bad defense lawyers, lazy prosecutors, arrogant prosecutors.

This is an aspect of the case that many commentators on the right brush aside. Mike Nifong and Durham are not unique in trying to railroad innocent men.

A coterie of commentators have entertained themselves for months over at the News and Observer blog: taunting the paper for its early coverage of the case. In particular, they are rightly critical of the March 25 story that was based on an interview with the accuser. (“Dancer gives details of ordeal”)

It was a bad story, but it was not bad because the N&O made a special effort to get the lax team. It was bad for the same reason most crime reporting is bad: the reporters were trying to grab headlines with a touching story when they were operating with limited knowledge and were dependent on their sources in the police department and the DA’s office.

That’s the thing. In many ways the media handled this story like they do most crime stories. The shaky logic, the reliance on rumors, and the lachrymose posturing about the suffering of the victim is nothing new to anyone who has ever watched Nancy Grace. The lax players were denied the presumption of innocence by the media, but hey, that is the way of the tabloid media. Innocent until proven guilty makes for bad television and boring news copy.

See also:

Atticus Finch doesn't work here

A crime the press doesn't care about