| Viewing Single Post From: Blog and Media Roundup - Saturday, July 4, 2009 | |
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| abb | Jul 4 2009, 04:27 AM |
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http://heraldsun.southernheadlines.com/durham/4-1178164.cfm City, Duke argue for lacrosse case dismissals By Ray Gronberg : The Herald-Sun gronberg@heraldsun.com Jul 4, 2009 Bookmark and Share DURHAM -- Lawyers for the city have joined Duke University in arguing that a new U.S. Supreme Court ruling should prompt the dismissal of all or most of the civil rights claims stemming from the Duke lacrosse case. The court's May ruling, handed down in a terror-war case, stands for the idea that "pleadings in federal court must be plausible, no matter what the cause of action," the city's legal team told the federal district judge who's reviewing three lawsuits filed by members of Duke's 2005-06 men's lacrosse team. The problem that creates for the players is that their lawsuits implausibly attribute to the actions of police and city officials whatever meaning happens to best serve their case, the lawyers argued. The players "with perfect 20/20 hindsight" fault how police collected and weighed evidence as they investigated stripper Crystal Mangum's false claim she'd been raped at a March 2006 team party, they said. The only consistency in their argument is to attribute to each action by police or city officials "an underlying wrongful purpose: multiple independent conspiracies, malicious intent on the part of investigators and unconstitutional city policies ratifying such conduct," they said. But the actions they criticized are "also consistent with a far more obvious, mundane and innocent scenario: police doing the best they could to faithfully execute their investigatory duties under trying circumstances," one of the city's recent filings said. The city's lawyers were reacting to U.S. District Judge James Beaty Jr.'s invitation to comment on the Supreme Court's ruling in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, an opinion court observers are now saying could be the most significant the justices handed down this year. The court blocked a Pakistani's attempts to pursue claims against former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller. The Pakistani, Javaid Iqbal, was detained after 9/11 and allegedly abused while in detention. A 5-4 majority headed by Justice Anthony Kennedy modified the usual rule that judges, when weighing dismissal motions in civil rights cases, have to accept as true all factual claims the side filing the suit makes. That assumption many times ensures that a suit survives long enough for both sides to undertake discovery -- preparing for a trial by swapping documents and conducting interviews, assembling in the process the evidence that bolsters or negates a lawsuit's underlying claims. The city is trying to block that, by arguing that the players' worst-case rendition of events is exactly the kind of legal argumentation the Supreme Court barred Iqbal from making against Ashcroft and Mueller. For example, the city's lawyers defended the Police Department's decision to search the room of lacrosse player Ryan McFadyen after learning he'd sent out an e-mail to teammates purportedly threatening to hire strippers and kill them. McFadyen's lawyer, Bob Ekstrand, has argued that the e-mail was a joke, a play on the book and movie "American Psycho" that was easily recognizable to teammates who'd studied it in class. The problem with that argument, the city's lawyers say, is that it assumes or claims police were somehow in on the joke. But in reality, given Mangum's claims, "this graphic and violent e-mail suggested, at a minimum, the need to investigate further," they said. Similarly, the city's efforts to curb off-campus problems in the Trinity Park neighborhood "is more readily explained as an understandable response to complaints from neighboring residents" than as an animus-fueled campaign to discriminate against Duke students, as many of the players would have it, the lawyers said. Beaty in inviting lawyers to address the Iqbal case gave both sides a chance to response. Briefs from the players' lawyers are due later this month. |
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| Blog and Media Roundup - Saturday, July 4, 2009 · DUKE LACROSSE - Liestoppers | |
8:42 PM Dec 4
