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Statistics, and damn lies
Topic Started: Feb 28 2010, 10:32 AM (269 Views)
Quasimodo

from the Eckstrand suit) :

The Committee claimed that lacrosse team members were responsible for 50% of student noise violations in the period studied. This conclusion depends upon the plainly false premise that there were a total of 4 noise ordinance violations involving Duke Students in the period studied (two of which were issued to members of the lacrosse team).

The Committee claimed that 33% of open container violations were issued to lacrosse players. This conclusion depended upon the false premise that there were only 3 open container violations involving students (one of which was a lacrosse player).

The Committee Report led reporters to broadcast to local and national audiences that, at Duke University, lacrosse players were responsible for 50% of noise violations and 33% of open container violations.

As the members of the Committee and the University knew or should have known, the 7 students charged, arrested, and dragged from their home at 203 Watts in the fall of 2005 accumulated 7 noise violations and 7 open container violations in one day.

A host of favorable statistical conclusions were readily available to the Ad Hoc Committee that it did not report. By way of example, all of the “incidents” allegedly involving lacrosse team members over the five-year period studied by the Committee:

None involved assaults of any kind.
None involved injury to any person.
None involved fights or affrays.
None involved threats of any kind to anyone.


846. As planned, the Ad Hoc Committee Report was issued three weeks after it was commissioned: the day before the election. Further, two Duke students had already been indicted. Both Seligmann and Finnerty had irrefutable digital alibis.

Seligmann released the fundamental elements of his alibi to NBC reporter Dan Abrams who detailed it to a national audience the day after his indictment was made public, well before the Ad Hoc Committee Report was produced. Weeks earlier, Plaintiffs’ defense counsel had offered the digital evidence of innocence to Defendant Brodhead or his designee. Plaintiffs’ defense counsel’s paralegal had prepared a power point presentation of the alibis and the evidence that gave the lie to the fingernail myth, the injuries myth, and the alias myth.

While Defendant Brodhead and the other CMT Defendants “eagerly awaited” the Ad Hoc Committee’s Report, they willfully ignored the digital alibis and the photographic evidence that proved Mangum’s nails were already off and her injuries were already present during the dance.

Brodhead did not even avail himself of the option to have investigators with the Duke Police Department review that evidence.

[Probably because he already KNEW there had been no rape and that the accused were INNOCENT; but according to the game plan he had to avoid learning that. MOO)]

At the time the CMT Defendants forced the conclusion of the Ad Hoc Committee’s investigation, two Duke students had been indicted for a crime that never happened, a third student’s indictment was imminent, and the remaining 44 team members were under a continuing public threat of indictment on an accomplice theory.

The Ad Hoc Committee Report was unveiled in a press conference attended by virtually every national and local media outlet, which were told extemporaneously by Chairman James Coleman that the “pattern” of behavior of the team members was “deplorable.”

There was no evidence to corroborate Mangum’s account. The jury would convict or acquit based upon which witnesses they believed were credible. The Ad Hoc Committee Report, coupled with James Coleman’s gratuitous remarks at the nationally televised press conference, peremptorily impeached the character and credibility of every defense eyewitness (except Pittman) whose testimony would compete with Mangum’s at the trial on her accusations.

Further, the Ad Hoc Committee Report, with scant, if any, evidence, ratified the premises of Gottlieb’s sensationalized application for the NTID Order: that the team hung together, roamed in “packs,” abused alcohol and behaved deplorably when they
did so.

The Ad Hoc Committee Report aided Nifong, Himan, and Gottlieb in perpetuating the world-wide condemnation of the team, and ratified Defendant Brodhead’s statement to the Chamber of Commerce on April 20, 2006: “If they didn’t do it, whatever they did was bad enough.” It was nearly a slogan.


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Quasimodo

(from the Ekstrand suit) :


The press accounts of the Ad Hoc Committee Report revealed how grossly misleading the Committee Report was. For example:

On May 1, 2006, NBC reported that the University’s report “found that alcohol abuse is a major factor behind [the lacrosse team’s] disciplinary problems both on and off campus”

On May 2, 2006, a New York Times article opened, “‘Deplorable,’ said James E. Coleman Jr., describing how team members behaved when they drank excessively.”

On May 1, 2006, ESPN reported that the University’s report concluded that “the team needed strict monitoring because of a history of problems tied to alcohol.”

On May 3, the Raleigh News & Observer wrote that “a large number of the members of the team have been socially irresponsible when under the influence of alcohol.”[/b]

Early in May, the Durham Herald Sun wrote an editorial entitled “Alcohol Abuse and Rape Related.”

[Where is the outrage in the HS over the railroading of three innocent "temporary" Durham residents?]

Defendant Burness delivered an advance copy of the Ad Hoc Committee Report to City of Durham Defendants so they could prepare statements for the press conferences. . .

The myth of Plaintiffs and their teammates as out-of-control, aberrant, abusers of alcohol, with a history of “deplorable” behavior persists up to the present day, as does the belief that the alleged incident at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. represents a microcosm Duke in Durham. By way of example:

In a lecture in Williamstown, Massachusetts, during the Spring of 2007, then Duke Professor Grant Farred stated: “The Duke lacrosse program is indicted here not for what it did, on the night of the 13th of March, 2006, or for what its members did not do that night, but for its past behavior, a blemished past made even uglier.” Farred added that “ the history of the lacrosse team is the history of being inhospitable....At the heart of the lacrosse team’s behavior is the racist history of the South.” Farred’s lecture was promoted with a poster capturing Plaintiffs running behind yellow and black “crime scene” tape.


On October 26, 2007, WGHB’s Greater Boston host Ellen Rooney declared that “We don’t know what happened in the Duke case. We never will.... Something happened.”
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Quasimodo


(from the Ekstrand suit) :



(Hence the Duke authorities can be alleged to have cooperated in the following : )


Making false public statements to vilify Plaintiffs at the apex of their vulnerability in the criminal justice system;

convening University “ad hoc” committees for purposes of unearthing accounts and other evidence of historical misconduct alleged to have been committed by Plaintiffs and their teammates as a rogue prosecutor is threatening indictments of every team member as principals and accomplices in crimes that never occurred;

provide those investigative committees with skewed, unreliable data designed to generate an official statement from the Committee damning the conduct of Plaintiffs and their teammates conduct as “deplorable” among other entirely unsupportable conclusions, despite substantial evidence inconsistent with such conclusions;

willfully refusing to be presented with irrefutable evidence of innocence concerning Plaintiffs and every member of the team in order to perpetuate the public condemnation, continue waging a collaborative media campaign to peremptorily impeach the credibility of Plaintiffs and their teammates at a time when they are all putative defendants and witnesses for the defense;


[There has still not been a university committee formed to examine Duke's protection of its students' civil liberties when those liberties came under attack. . . Where are all the civil libertarians on the faculty? ]



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Quasimodo



XXXVII. THE CHAIRMAN’S DIRECTIVE SPAWNED AN “AD HOC” INVESTIGATIVE COMMITTEE TO IMPEACH PLAINTIFFS’ CHARACTER AND CREDIBILITY AS PUTATIVE WITNESSES, CRIMINAL DEFENDANTS, AND CIVIL PLAINTIFFS.

On the eve of the primary election, the Chairman delivered to Nifong the credibility he needed amid a faltering prosecution to narrowly win the election. He did so through the publication of the University’s “Ad Hoc” Committee’s report on the history of the Lacrosse Team’s “deplorable” conduct.

President Brodhead publicly announced the formation of the Ad Hoc Committee on April 5, 2006, the same day Plaintiffs’ and their teammates’ season was cancelled and their coach resigned.

In an interview with WRAL’s Kelcey Carlson Brodhead again emphasized that Duke had no power to investigate the criminal allegations

[Wrong. See below. Duke police certainly had that power, and had used it in previous instances. In addition, there was no bar to Duke conducting a disciplinary investigation on its own--one which could have demonstrated before the public that DNA had conclusively proven the innocence of the accused, and that Mangum had also ruled out the accused in her IDs.
However, Duke's chosen course of action was to assist the DPD and Durham DA in
pressuring the accused to accept a plea bargain-MOO]


but that “enough behavior [was] known and is acknowledged that the day has come..., as the President of this University,... to step up and take some serious steps in response to what is clear in front of us.”

Brodhead announced the University’s intention to investigate the Plaintiffs’ and their teammates’ past in search of prior bad acts.
Whatever “evidence” the investigation produced would be used to impeach Plaintiffs’ and their teammates’ credibility as witnesses and/or defendants in the criminal prosecutions and the subsequent civil actions they assumed the team members would bring against the University.

Like Nifong’s prosecution of Plaintiffs, the conclusion of the Committee Chairman, James Coleman, lacked a factual basis.

The Committee was charged with investigating the “history” of the lacrosse team’s conduct, synthesizing irregularly kept “data” of such conduct, taking formal, public
testimony about the team’s conduct, evaluating the evidence and its reliability, and drawing conclusions about the “history of misconduct.”

[Did they mention the Katrina contributions? Mentoring local kids? ]

Like Nifong’s investigation of Plaintiffs, the Chairman gave the Ad Hoc Committee three weeks to compete that work, so that it could be presented in a nationally televised press conference prior to the primary, in order to assure Nifong’s election and the continuation of the case to trial and convictions.

Like Nifong, Coleman began his investigation on television and radio programs. He explained to NPR, for example, that Duke University had its own Police Department with all the capabilities of any municipal police department; and he intended to use the Duke Police Departments’ vast resources to aid him in his investigation.

[Ergo, Brodhead was wrong when he said Duke couldn't investigate? Or did Brodhead merely mean that it lacked authority? In any event, Duke certainly had the authority to investigate for purposes of its own student disciplinary committee; and as Coleman states, it had the capabilities for doing so.]

On television and news programs broadcast throughout the state and region, in local papers, including The Chronicle, Coleman asked for people with knowledge of Plaintiffs’ prior misconduct to come forward to testify before his committee.

[Nothing like poisoning the jury pool. . . But summoning witnesses before a disciplinary committee--where they might have presented exculpatory evidence and proven the innocence of the defendants and the falseness of the accusations, was evidently too difficult. What better proves the intentions of Duke than the actions of this Ad Hoc committee, and the failure to conduct a genuine investigation? ]

No one, it turned out, could offer personal knowledge of any incident of misconduct.

[I thought the lacrosse team was notorious on campus for its bad actions?]

Those who testified told the Committee of a team that, year after year, is comprised of kind, respectful, young men who take their academic obligations seriously.

In the absence of evidence of misconduct, the Chairman directed the manufacture of evidence that would.

Defendants Moneta and Bryan provided false and misleading statistics and a body of misleading data for the Committee to use in drawing the preordained public conclusion that Plaintiffs and the members of the men’s lacrosse program routinely engaged in “alarming” conduct, they roamed in “packs,” abused alcohol and behaved “deplorably” when they did.

The Committee admitted that it lacked a body of data relating to Duke students generally, and it was therefore not possible to make a meaningful comparison of the lacrosse team to Duke students . Then, inexplicably, the Committee proceeded to make comparative judgments, finding the lacrosse players’ conduct to be aberrant when compared to students who do not abuse alcohol, and consistent with the conduct of those Duke students who do abuse alcohol.

Notably, no member of the lacrosse team was among the scores of students the University reported as having so abused alcohol that emergency medical intervention was required.

(snip)

Defendants Moneta and Bryan were aware that the Committee was relying upon them to provide accurate, reliable data; and, yet, Moneta and Bryan knowingly provided data to the Committee that were wholly unreliable and could only lead to false and misleading conclusions.

[Could a university administration have acted WORSE towards students whom it knew were wrongfully accused? What was the focus of the university's response? CONSIDER THE PR ASPECT. ]
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MikeZPU

Quasimodo
Feb 28 2010, 10:41 AM
(from the Ekstrand suit) :



(Hence the Duke authorities can be alleged to have cooperated in the following : )


Making false public statements to vilify Plaintiffs at the apex of their vulnerability in the criminal justice system;

convening University “ad hoc” committees for purposes of unearthing accounts and other evidence of historical misconduct alleged to have been committed by Plaintiffs and their teammates as a rogue prosecutor is threatening indictments of every team member as principals and accomplices in crimes that never occurred;

provide those investigative committees with skewed, unreliable data designed to generate an official statement from the Committee damning the conduct of Plaintiffs and their teammates conduct as “deplorable” among other entirely unsupportable conclusions, despite substantial evidence inconsistent with such conclusions;

willfully refusing to be presented with irrefutable evidence of innocence concerning Plaintiffs and every member of the team in order to perpetuate the public condemnation, continue waging a collaborative media campaign to peremptorily impeach the credibility of Plaintiffs and their teammates at a time when they are all putative defendants and witnesses for the defense;


[There has still not been a university committee formed to examine Duke's protection of its students' civil liberties when those liberties came under attack. . . Where are all the civil libertarians on the faculty? ]



Okay, this got my blood boiling again ... unbelievable stuff.

Brodhead won't look at the evidence of innocence because he doesn't
want to be judge and jury (or whatever pathetic excuse he gave for his
unwillingness to listen to any evidence of innocence), BUT he has
ad-hoc committees issuing reports vilifying the LAX players based on
grossly-distorted, highly misleading statistics.

He also made platitudinal statements about deferring to the justice system
BUT then why issue any reports about the LAX players until the justice system
had resolved the case?

Why did he listen to the 911 call by Kim? and, worse, yet, publicly comment on it? Wasn't that 911 call "evidence"?

Brodhead is a liar with a mean streak.


Edited by MikeZPU, Feb 28 2010, 06:50 PM.
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