| Blog and Media Roundup - Wednesday, July 31, 2013; News Roundup | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jul 31 2013, 04:36 AM (265 Views) | |
| abb | Jul 31 2013, 04:36 AM Post #1 |
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http://dukecheck.com/?p=15002 osted on July 31, 2013 by DukeCheck On February 11, 2007, a black Duke fraternity, Phi Beta Sigma, held a party off-campus, at a duplex in the Bentwood apartment complex at 405 Gattis Street. Advertised on Facebook, 100 people attended. There were a few white people there, including an 18-year-old Duke freshman from Long Island, New York, Katharine Rouse. Another was a 22-year-old black man from Durham, with no connection to the University, Michael Jermaine Burch. The Durham prosecutor said there was evidence the two were dancing and then making out. Both seemed intoxicated from a punch that was served at the party. Rouse went to the bathroom. Burch followed her in. The two kissed again, and according to the freshman, she told him she did not want intercourse but he would not stop. A search warrant indicates that others at the party — wanting to use the bathroom — could not get in for perhaps an hour, and that they heard “thumping” from inside. Please remember this was 2007, the year after false charges of rape were brought by Crystal Gail Mangum, a black go-go dancer, against three white members of the Duke lacrosse team. And it was two months before the North Carolina State Attorney General would declare the lax players “innocent” and victims of a “rogue prosecutor.” The atmosphere was still tense. The criminal case that grew out of Rouse’s statements did not go to trial. Burch copped a plea on a rape charge, and we will get back to that in a moment. Rouse made a number of legal claims against Duke, and one by one, they were dismissed. The final blow to her lawsuit at the trial court level came last December when a federal judge in Greensboro threw out what remained. Rouse appealed to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, and a three judge panel has just unanimously ruled in favor of the University. For practical purposes, although there can be some legal wrangling including a request to the US Supreme Court for a hearing (good luck), the case is over. We have long had difficulty understanding the legal basis for Rouse’s lawsuit. Duke got some of the lawsuit dismissed in short order because it was filed too late, colliding with the statute of limitations, so some of Rouse’s assertions were never developed in court. Another part seemed to revolve around her voluntary transfer from Duke and then a desire to get back in, which Duke denied. Rouse contends she did not know transferring out did not let her to get back in automatically; Duke disputed that, citing its published policy manual and also advice given her by the Dean who handled her case. (Ironically in other litigation, Duke has maintained its policy manual does not constitute a contract with students) Other parts of Rouse’s lawsuit alleged Duke somehow violated federal law by tolerating an improper atmosphere: it did not penalize the fraternity, it did not help her. All because she was female. But federal law requires a “severe and pervasive” environment to sustain a lawsuit based on sexual discrimination. The best evidence Rouse could assemble revealed that President Brodhead’s refused to meet with her, delegating the task to Vice President for Student Life Larry Moneta; Rouse claimed this lack of presidential attention met the statutory requirements, the Appeals Court disagreed sharply. McLendon fffffAt one point, Rouse’s attorney dragged one of the University’s biggest donors into the case, although not as a defendant, asserting Duke tried to keep the rape under wraps because the house where it occurred is owned by natural gas tycoon ’81, pictured here. McLendon, you know, McLendon Tower. The McLendon Organ. When Vice President for student affairs Larry Moneta learned of McLendon’s connection via e-mail, he immediately forwarded it to President Brodhead with the notation, “Unbelievable.” L-Mo sent this e-mail to at least one other administrator with a clearer expression. “Shit.” (L-Mo should watch his e-mails. In the lax crisis, he sent fellow administrators advice that they had all better get together and agree on the official story; Moneta advised recipients to destroy that e-mail, but some did not) And Burch: arrested on the Duke charges, while out on bail awaiting trial, he was charged with a second rape. And the prosecutor let him to cop two pleas. With time off for good behavior, he got out of state prison last January 27th. Footnotes: Duke started to pay rough with Rouse, demanding she pay more than $10,000 that Duke spent to get copies of legal papers in the case. We have no new information on the status of this. Normally we do not identify victims of crime. Rouse herself stepped into the public eye with an interview with her hometown newspaper on Long Island. |
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| abb | Jul 31 2013, 04:37 AM Post #2 |
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http://www.cotwa.info/2013/07/news-report-las-vegas-woman-sexually.html Monday, July 29, 2013 News report: "Las Vegas woman sexually assaulted by court officer, then arrested for reporting it" Reported here: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/07/28/las-vegas-woman-sexually-assaulted-by-court-officer-then-arrested-for-reporting-it/ Several managers and employees of the Clark County Family Court in Las Vegas are under investigation in the wake of an alleged sexual assault on a woman in court and a subsequent cover-up. According to Las Vegas CBS Channel 8, a court marshal assaulted the woman, then arrested her in front of her two-year-old daughter for creating a disturbance in court as a judge looked on and did nothing. The incident took place in August of 2011. Monica Contreras and her daughter went to family court as part of a routine divorce case. Contreras was approached by a Court Marshal, who ordered her into a side room for a random drug search. The Court Marhal allegedly groped her breasts and buttocks, then ordered Contreras to expose her breasts, at which point she fled into the open courtroom and requested a female marshal. On courtroom video, a confrontation can be seen in which another Marshal arrests Contreras on charges of making false accusations against a police officer. A judge watched and took no action as court marshals allegedly hectored Contreras into recanting her story, then arrested her when she refused to repeat it over the courtroom public address system. The court marshal who allegedly assaulted Contreras has since been fired and an investigation is attempting to find out exactly what happened that day nearly two years ago. The marshal is suing Clark County alleging wrongful termination. I-Team: Cover-Up Alleged in Family Court |
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| abb | Jul 31 2013, 04:40 AM Post #3 |
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UNC professors declare support for faculty leader Jan Boxill Published: July 30, 2013 Updated 8 hours ago Earlier drafts of the faculty report said: “Although we may never know for certain, it was our impression from multiple interviews that the involvement of Deborah Crowder seems to have been that of an athletics supporter who was extremely close to personnel in Athletics, and who managed to use the system to help players by directing them to enroll in courses in the African and Afro-American Studies department that turned out to be aberrant or irregularly taught.” The final version said: “Although we may never know for certain, it was our impression from multiple interviews that a department staff member managed to use the system to help players by directing them to enroll in courses in the African and Afro-American Studies Department that turned out to be aberrant or irregularly taught.” The edits • The first draft of the faculty report said: “Although we may never know for certain, it was our impression from multiple interviews that the involvement of Deborah Crowder seems to have been that of an athletics supporter who was extremely close to personnel in Athletics, and who managed to use the system to help players by directing them to enroll in courses in the African and Afro-American Studies department that turned out to be aberrant or irregularly taught.” • The final version reads: “Although we may never know for certain, it was our impression from multiple interviews that a department staff member managed to use the system to help players by directing them to enroll in courses in the African and Afro-American Studies Department that turned out to be aberrant or irregularly taught.” By Jane Stancill — jstancill@newsobserver.com CHAPEL HILL — UNC-Chapel Hill’s Faculty Executive Committee, including the three authors of a 2012 faculty report about academics and athletics, have issued a statement supporting Jan Boxill, the faculty chairwoman criticized for suggesting revisions to the report. The statement, approved by the committee Monday and signed by 16 professors, expressed “our full support for Jan Boxill throughout her leadership as Chair of the Faculty. We have complete confidence in her judgment and integrity.” Emails published by The News & Observer this month revealed a sometimes heated back-and-forth conversation last summer among three authors of the faculty report and Boxill, who wrote that other professors on the executive committee were concerned about language that “could further raise NCAA issues and that is not the intention.” A change was made, altering a sentence about a former department manager in African and Afro-American Studies, Deborah Crowder, who helped create bogus classes that kept athletes eligible. The rewrite took out Crowder’s name and a phrase that described her as “an athletics supporter who was extremely close to personnel in Athletics.” In an interview Tuesday, Boxill said her suggestion for a revision came from other committee members who, during a session to review the draft, did not like the phrase “athletic supporter,” partly because of its alternative meaning as a “jock strap.” “The committee found that humorous,” Boxill said. “Then someone said, ‘We’re all supporters. Anybody who goes to a game is a supporter.’ ... So they thought about the word booster, and someone said that booster might have a specific NCAA meaning, which was not intended.” Booster, she said, typically conveys a meaning of a person who gives a lot of money to athletics programs to underwrite scholarships and stadiums. “That was clearly not ... the intent of the subcommittee members. That’s not what they wanted to convey, and they expressed that. That was the sole talk of the NCAA, nothing else,” Boxill said. Boxill said she did not remember which members uttered the concerns in a committee meeting last year. The faculty report was the first official review that suggested athletics may have played a part in the UNC-CH scandal involving dozens of lecture-style African studies classes that never met and were heavily enrolled by athletes. The university has repeatedly maintained that the scandal was not driven by athletics because both athletes and non-athletes benefitted from the fraudulent classes. The department’s former chairman, Julius Nyang’oro, and Crowder have been blamed for the fraud, which is still the subject of a probe by the State Bureau of Investigation. Concern over changes The statement of support for Boxill was signed by the three professors who authored the faculty report – Steven Bachenheimer, Michael Gerhardt and Laurie Maffly-Kipp. But last summer, the three bristled at Boxill’s suggestions for changes. At the time, Maffly-Kipp, a religious studies professor, wrote: “Why is it a good thing to remove Deborah Crowder’s name from the report? The fact is, she was close to people in athletics.” Gerhardt, a law professor, wrote to his two colleagues about Boxill: “She is free to disagree with the report as anyone is, but i (sic) cannot believe she has the authority to change what it says. Indeed, apart from her lack of authority to do this, it strikes me as very poor political judgment. Just imagine what the papers will do with that.” In an interview Tuesday, Gerhardt said the 2012 emails do not tell the full story. He said he was out of town, as was Maffly-Kipp, when the executive committee critiqued the wording in the report. So when he and Maffly-Kipp were presented with proposed revisions later, he said, they reacted without a full understanding of the context. After a meeting with Boxill, Gerhardt said, he became comfortable with the editorial change regarding Crowder and didn’t view it as watering down the report. The report’s authors declined to make another change. Free-flow exchange Gerhardt described the emails as a healthy back-and-forth. “I don’t think, at least in retrospect, any of it is very significant, because we really had a great deal of confidence in the process that produced the report. ... I don’t think we’ve ever second-guessed how that final report looks.” Other members of the committee said the editing process may have been prickly at times, but they described it a free-flow exchange. “It’s a very lively group, and people express their opinions very freely,” said Mimi Chapman, a professor of social work. “Sometimes there’s disagreement, and we try and arrive at a solution that everybody feels comfortable with, but there are times where people are clearly dissenting. It’s not a groupthink group by any stretch of the imagination, and it’s not a chair-dominated group where her word is law or anything like that.” Greg Copenhaver, a biology professor and member of the committee, said there was no plot to cover up information to avoid NCAA scrutiny, only to avoid terminology that was misleading. The changes suggested by committee members, he said, were meant to “shed light on a complicated situation, not obfuscate it.” Copenhaver called Boxill “one of the most ethically grounded human beings I know.” Stancill: 919-829-4559 Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/07/30/3070862/unc-professors-declare-support.html#storylink=cpy |
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| abb | Jul 31 2013, 04:47 AM Post #4 |
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http://frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/murder-and-double-standards/ Murder and Double Standards Posted By Matthew Vadum On July 31, 2013 @ 12:59 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | No Comments [To order David Horowitz and John Perrazo's Black Skin Privilege, click here.] Few Americans outside of Knoxville, Tenn., know about the case of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, two young people who were kidnapped, savagely assaulted, raped, and murdered by people of a different race. If Christian and Newsom had been black, and they had been raped, tortured, and murdered by a group of white people, the victims’ names would be painfully seared into the national psyche by the media’s saturation coverage of the atrocities and their aftermath. The reason the case attracted so little media attention was because Christian and Newsom were white. All of their attackers were black. Somehow investigators concluded that racial hostility was not a factor in the crimes. “If this wasn’t a hate crime, then I don’t know how you would define a hate crime,” said Newsom’s mother Mary. “It may have started out as a carjacking, but what it developed into was blacks hating whites. To do the things they did, they would have to hate them to do that.” It’s worth looking back at this case now to see what we can learn from it. Two weeks after so-called white Hispanic George Zimmerman was found not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin, a black teenager, there is still no end in sight to the self-righteous pontifications of leftists, politicians, race industry profiteers, and the mainstream media. They all want us to have a national conversation on race. They’ve been pushing this notion for decades, even though race is discussed all the time everywhere in American society. Even though incidents of race-based discrimination have become almost as rare as four-leaf clovers in recent decades, we are constantly told minorities are little better off now than they were during the era of Jim Crow. Violent crimes involving persons of different races or ethnic backgrounds tend to become national news only when the victim is a member of a minority group. This is because the radical left-wingers who serve as cultural gatekeepers don’t like to give oxygen to stories that challenge their preconceived, politically correct notions of how society works. Agenda-setters dislike stories that deviate from their preferred narrative. They will lie and distort in order to shoehorn inconvenient events into their bigoted worldview. This is why Americans have been told over and over again that the Tea Party movement is violent and dangerous, while Occupy Wall Street is gentle and benign. This is why we are told Republicans are greedy, heartless, and racist, while Democrats are selfless, compassionate, and color-blind. But not all stories can be twisted beyond recognition and used to support the leftist party line. No amount of spin-doctoring can alter the facts of the case of Christian and Newsom, murdered at the ages of 21 and 23, respectively, so they must be ignored. The unspeakably abominable crimes committed against the couple received media attention in the Knoxville area but have been subjected to an almost total media blackout at the national level because the facts are inconvenient. What was done to the two young innocents is stomach-churning. Last year cable TV commentator Nancy Grace, who previously served as Special Prosecutor in the Atlanta-Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney’s office, told viewers that the particulars of the case were “truly some of the goriest details of murder that I’ve ever heard.” A prosecutor’s aide fainted during the trial when the county medical examiner provided gruesome details about how the two victims died. The story began the evening of Jan. 6, 2007, when Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23, who were to attend a party, went missing. Knoxville police said Christian’s sport utility vehicle had been carjacked. (WATE-TV has a helpful, brief summary of the case on its website.) Newsom’s body was found the next day near railroad tracks. Christian’s bound body was found two days later in the trash. She had been forced to watch her boyfriend being raped. At trial Dr. Darinka Mileusnic-Polchan, who performed autopsies on the two bodies, gave evidence. Newsom’s unrecognizable body was found face up, his feet and arms bound, she testified. He had been gagged with a sock and blindfolded with a bandana. His upper body was burned and his ankles were charred. Newsom had been shot in the neck and the back. A separate gunshot to his head caused “instantaneous death.” Newsom’s anus was torn up and bruised, which indicated “anal penetration.” He was sodomized by means of an object before being sodomized by a person. Seminal fluid was found in his body but it did not contain sperm cells. DNA tests were inconclusive as to the origin of the semen. He had walked barefoot to his death, wearing only his underwear. He had been raped one of two hours before he died, Mileusnic-Polchan said. “This is not just a rape,” she said. “This is the blunt trauma where an object comes in contact and severely damages the tissue. The depth of the injury was so grave there was no way that just the regular rape could inflict this.” Christian’s body was found in a fetal position, wrapped in five garbage bags in a trash can. A small white plastic bag was found around her head. The young woman died of suffocation, the medical examiner said. Christian’s body was found to have tears, bruising, and swelling in her genitals and around her anus. There was also evidence of blunt force trauma. Christian was raped several times, vaginally, rectally, and orally and kicked in the vaginal region before she was forced into the garbage can. There were blows to her head and her arms had been handled with force. Her body showed carpet burns. Bleach had been poured down Christian’s throat in what appeared to be an effort to destroy any residual DNA that might be used as evidence. DNA from two unidentified men was also found in Christian’s underwear, raising the possibility that two persons not charged in the case were involved in raping her. DNA from the man thought to be the group’s ringleader, LeMaricus Davidson, was found on a vaginal swab from a rape kit that authorities used on Christian’s body. Davidson, Letalvis Cobbins, and George Thomas were arrested a few days later and charged with murdering the couple. Later, Cobbins’ then-girlfriend, Vanessa Coleman, was also charged with murder. Davidson, Cobbins, Thomas, and Coleman were convicted in county court under state law. (The county indictment may be viewed here.) A fifth defendant, Eric DeWayne Boyd, was convicted in federal court for being an accessory after the fact and hiding Davidson. All five defendants were black. When the murders were first reported, the celebrated syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. mocked white people who complained about the lack of popular outrage over the crimes. He ended one of his screeds with, “Cry me a river.” Pitts, who recently began a virtually fact-free column with “I am Trayvon Martin,” wrote in 2007 that the Christian-Newsom murders generated “mewling noises from that subset of my white countrymen who feel put upon by big, bad racial minorities.” He described such put-upon whites as part of a “lunatic fringe.” When Obama was inaugurated for the second time this past January, Pitts opined absurdly that Obama, who rarely misses an opportunity to inject race into even the most random of public discussions, had “assiduously ignored” race and was “mute” on the subject. Pitts, by the way, is no marginal figure. He won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary in 2004. His views more or less represent the journalistic mainstream in this country. Al Sharpton, who has eclipsed Jesse Jackson Sr. as America’s leading race hustler, didn’t take up the case of Christian and Newsom. He did take up the cause of the late Trayvon Martin, creating a firestorm of controversy where none existed. More than anyone else, Sharpton’s Alinskyite agitating pushed authorities in Sanford, Fla., to pursue second-degree murder charges against George Zimmerman. Sharpton claimed racism was a factor even though local and federal investigations failed to uncover even a shred of racial animus on Zimmerman’s part. But an absence of evidence never stops a dedicated community organizer from stirring the pot. Sharpton, a racial arsonist known for leading angry followers into violent confrontations against whomever he happens to be targeting at the moment, became a national figure in 1987 by participating in the Tawana Brawley case, a racially charged gang rape hoax. Sharpton falsely accused prosecutor Steve Pagones of participating in the gang rape of a young black woman that never actually happened. Pagones won a libel judgment against Sharpton. It’s not like cases involving forcible sodomy make Sharpton uncomfortable. If the victim isn’t white, he leaps into action. Sharpton and his National Action Network launched a crusade for justice for Abner Louima, a black immigrant, after he was assaulted and sodomized with a broom handle by New York City police officers in 1997. Louima was actually a victim and the perpetrators were held accountable. Sharpton, whose transgressions against his fellow man have been ably documented by Carl F. Horowitz of the National Legal and Policy Center, also took up the case of Michael Mineo, a young tattoo artist reportedly of Puerto Rican descent on one side. Mineo is an unsavory character whom the left-wing Huffington Post described as “a pot-smoking thief and a gang member who has a Crips tattoo across his stomach to prove it.” Mineo’s ordeal, which turned out to be fantasy, took place the same year Christian and Newsom were cruelly killed. Mineo claimed police sodomized him with a police baton. Originally he claimed that the instrument of torture was a police radio antenna. The police officers were acquitted at trial and Mineo’s civil suit against them failed. Mineo’s civil case was so weak he was ordered to pay the three officers’ legal expenses. In the end Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom are likely to be footnotes at best in the history books, remembered only in their communities. They didn’t have publicists like Sharpton and Pitts to shape their public image. |
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11:41 AM Jul 13