Mike Nifong, the malicious rogue prosecutor in the Duke rape case, has just finished serving 24 hours in jail for criminal contempt. He was sentenced to jail for intentionally lying to the court when he told a judge that he had turned over all DNA evidence to the defense. Nifong, disbarred last June for more than two dozen acts of misconduct, could have been sentenced to 30 days in jail.
While the families of the defendants and their lawyers felt justice had been done, I most certainly do not agree. His having been disbarred aside, considering what Nifong cost the defendants and their families over the course of a year, he deserved nothing less than the maximum sentence of 30 days in jail. 24 hours? Shit, that's not even a slap on the wrist. That's just a little pat. Paris Hilton served 23 days for something less serious than lying to the court.
Nifong, currying the votes of Durham county blacks for his reelection as District Attorney, rushed to judgement on false accusations of rape by a black stripper against three white Duke lacrosse team members. During daily news briefings, this rogue prosecutor publically villified the accused. His reelection campaign turned into a malicious prosecution because, from the begining and for months thereafter, he chose to ignore mounting evidence that the stripper was lying and that the accused were innocent.
The three lacrosse players will always carry the stigma of accused rapists, the result of Nifong's misconduct, despite their having been officially exonerated of any criminal wrongdoing. During the course of a year, the services of lawyers cost the families of the defendants several million dollars. There was justice in Nifong's disbarrment, but not enough. The 24 hour jail sentence constitutes a gross miscarriage of justice.
There have been other gross miscarriages of justice in this case, among them the conduct of "The Group of 88," that of the loudmouth reverends Al Sharpton and Jessee Jackson, and that of the hyper-active media. 88 Duke faculty and staff members led by professors from the African and African-American Studies department, took out a full page ad in Duke's student newspaper villifying the lacrosse players as racist and sexist white privileged hooligans.
These left-wing academics constituted a lynch mob. Even after the accused were exonerated, each of the 88 refused to even consider an apology or a retraction of their racially charged statements, Instead, they broadened their condemnation to include all of the campus as a center of racism and sexism. Tenure and academic freedom notwithstanding, they should have all been fired for fanning the flames of racial hatred. Their continued employment at Duke is a gross miscarriage of justice.
Al Sharpton and Jessee Jackson were quick to jump on the anti-Duke bandwagon. Their presence at demonstrations for "racial justice" in Durham helped to further fan the flames of racial hatred. Any peep out of them since the exoneration of the accused? Not a word. Instead of being condemned as race baiters, these two continue to be rewarded with appearances on television news programs. And, the leading democratic presidential candidates continually suck up to these two charlatans.
Sharpton continues to be a frequent guest on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews and on that network's Tucker Carlson show. Matthews and Carlson slobber all over themselves whenever he appears on their shows, despite his checkered past - his leading roles in the 1987 Tawana Brawley hoax, in the 1991 Crown Heights riot, and in the 1995 deaths of eight people following a demonstration he led against the Jewish landlord of Freddie's Fashion Mart. Sharpton and Jackson's part in the Duke rape case without any meaningful rebuke, constitutes a gross miscarriage of justice.
The print and television media covered this story with the zeal of a feeding frenzy, devoid of any semblance of fairness or objectivity. Their coverage, including that of the New York Times, quickly helped to convict the falsely accused in the court of public opinion. The media pictured Durham as a great racial divide with privileged whites oppressing poor blacks. When the accused were exonerated, the media did a quick fade-out. No apologies on television or in the printed press - another gross miscarriage of justice.
To a lesser extent, the failure to prosecute the accuser, Crystal Gail Mangum, is also a miscarriage of justice. And the Duke administration - which immediately fired the lacrosse coach and cancelled the lacrosse season, and then suspended the accused students - got off way too easy. I cannot recall another case with so many miscarriages of justice.
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