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Blog and Media Roundup - Thursday, March 20, 2014; News Roundup
Topic Started: Mar 20 2014, 04:07 AM (230 Views)
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Radley Balko ‏@radleybalko 7h

Tease: I'll have an exclusive tomorrow on a possible innocence case and new allegations of prosecutorial misconduct against Mike Nifong.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-brown-daily-herald/rape-and-the-intoxicated-victim_b_4989242.html

The Brown Daily Herald
Brown Univeristy's daily newspaper

Rape and the Intoxicated Victim
Posted: 03/19/2014 3:06 pm EDT Updated: 03/19/2014 3:59 pm EDT
By Maggie Tennis

Campus rape has been in the news frequently in recent years. This rise in media attention is not because campus rape is anything new, but rather reflects a decline in the societal stigma that prevented coverage of the topic in the past. Sexual assault is and has been a part of campus culture for a long time. But as it becomes a more prominent subject of public discourse, it increasingly includes the alarming practice -- to varying degrees of subtlety -- of victim-blaming.

Some high-profile allegations of sexual assault over the past five years include those in 2008 and 2012 at the Naval Academy, 2012 in Steubenville, Ohio, and, more recently and only now gaining nationwide attention, the videotaped sexual assault of a Vanderbilt University student by four football players this past June.

The first two, at the Naval Academy, involved one victim who passed out and awoke to find she was in the process of being raped, and another who blacked out -- also from too much alcohol -- and discovered that she had been sexually assaulted after hearing rumors and seeing social media posts. The third incident in Steubenville involved high school athletes who undressed, transported, photographed and finally sexually assaulted a drunken teenage girl when she was both semi- and fully unconscious from over-intoxication. The most recent high-profile case of campus rape involved Vanderbilt football players transporting a passed-out classmate from a bar to a dorm room, and then proceeding to assault her. They also photographed and videotaped the act before sending the recordings to friends.

These cases have one crucial aspect in common: In each incident, the victim was heavily intoxicated to the point of unconsciousness.

It's not a coincidence. These victims were targeted precisely because of their level of intoxication.

The idea exists in our culture that if you allow yourself to get so drunk that you black out or pass out, then you are, in fact, inviting inappropriate conduct upon yourself, or that you are even complicit in your own rape. A perpetrator of sexual assault seizes advantage of an unfortunate presumption that a drunken individual has somehow consented to a sexual act simply by becoming black-out drunk. Or even that, by reaching such a state, the drunken individual has forfeited any right to give consent entirely. Armed with this reasoning, the perpetrator concludes that sexual advances on this person would not be considered rape.

Even more disturbingly, this idea is subtly introduced to young people as they mature. Kids -- especially girls -- are warned from a young age to be vigilant around alcohol and potential sexual predators. By their teen years, they are "supposed" to be aware of these dangers. So if they find themselves in situations where they are severely inebriated, certain elements of society rule that whatever consequences befall them are their own fault simply because they were not more careful or self-aware.

One example of this viewpoint is a comment made by athlete Serena Williams concerning the victim of the Steubenville rape case. Williams said, "Why was she that drunk where she doesn't remember? It could have been much worse. ... She shouldn't have put herself in that position."

Furthermore, during the course of the Steubenville trial, thousands used victim-blaming language on Twitter. Such tweets included: "Be responsible for your actions ladies before your drunken decisions ruin innocent lives," "So you got drunk at a party and two people take advantage of you, that's not rape you're just a loose drunk slut" and "...not saying she asked for it, but why did she consume so much alcohol in the first place?"

I believe this form of victim-blaming, in which intoxicated individuals are deemed responsible for what happens to them, enables sexual assault of drunk and, especially, unconscious victims, to occur. Perpetrators of rape permit themselves to see drunk and unconscious individuals as inviting exploitation. It is as if allowing oneself to become that out-of-control drunk can actually be viewed as an implicit statement of consent. Or even worse, perpetrators cease to see their victims as human beings at all.

CNN reporter Poppy Harlow echoed this disregard for the intoxicated victim when she bemoaned the effect of the Steubenville rape incident on the once "promising futures" of the convicted rapists. At the very least, the fact that a public uproar followed her comment shows that we've made some progress in spotting distorted perspectives.

But this event showed that our discussion of victim-blaming has been limited to simply focusing on the necessity of not holding a victim of rape responsible. What we don't discuss is the potential of persistent disregard and disrespect for an intoxicated victim to actually perpetuate rape. Potential perpetrators of sexual assault may, in fact, be able to rationalize their actions based on society's willingness to discount a rape victim's victimhood if he or she was severely drunk at the time of the assault.

This idea deserves more consideration. Indeed, we need to widen our discussion to include the idea that victim-blaming is itself a cause of continued sexual assault. And then, we need to work harder to end all forms of blaming and de-personalizing the victim, both on our campuses and then in greater society.

Ultimately, increased education and awareness about the dangers of alcohol or the wrongness of rape is unlikely to end sexual assault on campus. And neither should it be the duty of potential victims to dress a certain way or be "careful" at parties and around alcohol. And, unfortunately, simply continuing to instruct students to respect consent will not be enough. What we also need is universal recognition that sexually touching -- or photographing or filming -- of another person without their conscious and enthusiastic consent is unquestionably and indubitably wrong.

Maggie Tennis challenges you to promote and celebrate consent.
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http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/03/fac-at-carols-0320

Faculty Athletics Committee meets for dinner at Chancellor Folt's house
By Bradley Saacks | Published 10 hours ago

The members of UNC’s Faculty Athletics Committee raised their glasses Wednesday for a toast in the dining room of Chancellor Carol Folt’s house.

“To hard work and getting things done,” Folt said in her toast.

Chairwoman J oy Renner said she wants the committee to be more transparent in the upcoming months in the wake of an athletic scandal that has shed negative light on the University in the last few years.

“I think we are ready to let people know where we are at and what we think about it,” Renner said.

Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Jim Dean acknowledged that the public should know what the committee has been working on but wanted to ensure time is taken to maintain accuracy.

“As a team, we would rather make sure we are right...than just frenetically running around like a game of whack-a-mole,” he said.

Folt agreed with Dean, stating that the University had provided the public a large amount of information about the scandals.

“It’s not like we haven’t given oodles of very specific information to every news agency,” Folt said.

“We cannot control what they put in the newspapers, the articles that are written... but we can respond, and we have.”

Dean also spoke of working Vice Chancellor of Communications and Public Affairs Joel Curran into the equation, describing the task with a well-known metaphor.

“It is like we are trying to change the tires of the bus while it is rolling down the road,” Dean said.

The committee also discussed the new student-athlete exit survey that has been drafted. The survey would be given to athletes that are leaving the University to evaluate their academic experiences.

The draft was examined by the committee to ensure the survey would incite responses that will maximize the amount of data collected.

Although the survey will be treated seriously, Renner said that this year’s results are a piece in the puzzle.

“This is not an ‘end all, be all’ where we are going to publish a paper on it...we just want to get a pulse of the current situation from the student-athletes themselves,” Renner said.

While the committee saw the benefits of having a completely anonymous survey, Athletic Director Bubba Cunningham said there has to be some kind of method in which the specific student-athlete could be named.

“I know the committee wants to do things anonymously, but if we do it anonymously and there is an NCAA violation reported, then I need to follow up with the student-athlete in question but can’t because he or she is anonymous,” he said.

Near the end of the meeting, Renner spoke on the progress the committee has made as well as what she is still trying to figure out.

“People have heard me say ‘I don’t know’ if we can be a research one university and a competitive division one athletics program,” Renner said.

university@dailytarheel.com
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http://www.cotwa.info/2014/03/reuters-news-reporting-unjust-to-man.html

Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Reuters news reporting unjust to man accused of sexual assault

Language matters, especially in news stories about high profile sexual assault cases. Readers assume that reporters have investigated the case and have a handle on the truth, so the words chosen by the reporter are important because they guide the reader's assessment of the case.

In a Reuters news report by Tom Ramstack about the court martial trial of a Midshipman, the story includes this sentence: "Reuters does not report the names of sexual assault victims."

The story should have stated that "Reuters does not report the names of sexual assault accusers." While the story elsewhere uses the word "alleged" in connection with the supposed sexual assault, Reuters needs to be consistent. By branding the accuser a "victim," Reuters suggests -- subtly or not so subtly -- that the accused is guilty of sexual assault, and that is most unjust. We once persuaded the New York Times to change a story because of the same error. See here.

The American news media often does a very poor job of remaining objective in reporting allegations of sexual assault (the Hofstra debacle is a case in point). The Reuters article about the Midshipman reports on comments made by the prosecutor in his opening statement of the trial. It would have been helpful if Reuters had made it clear to its readers that such comments are not evidence in any sense, and that the prosecution will have the burden of supporting those assertions with actual evidence at trial. Many cases are lost because the prosecution is unable to support allegations made in opening arguments with evidence.

Prof. Alan Dershowitz, a titan of criminal law, has made a persuasive case against anonymity. Here's what he wrote about the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case: "The prosecution presented its case in public as if there were no doubt about the alleged victim’s credibility or the complete guilt of the alleged offender. In fact, one very important implication of the Strauss-Kahn case was this: the press is dead wrong not to publish the names of alleged rape victims. It is absolutely critical that rape be treated like any other crime of violence, that the names of the alleged victims be published along with the names of the alleged perpetrators, so that people who know the victim or know her reputation can come forward to provide relevant information. The whole manner in which this case was handled undercuts the presumption of innocence, and the same goes for many other cases like it. By withholding the name of the alleged victim while publishing perp photos of the alleged assailant, the press conveys a presumption of guilt. The next time I have to defend a case where there’s any chance of a perp walk, I’m going to federal court to demand an injunction against it."

Dershowitz previously said this on the subject: "People who have gone to the police and publicly invoked the criminal process and accused somebody of a serious crime such as rape must be identified." Moreover: "In this country there is no such thing and should not be such a thing as anonymous accusation. If your name is in court it is a logical extension that it should be printed in the media. How can you publish the name of the presumptively innocent accused but not the name of the accuser?"

Feminist Naomi Wolf has many interesting arguments why rape accusers shouldn't be anonymous. Among other things: "It is wrong – and sexist – to treat female sex-crime accusers as if they were children, and it is wrong to try anyone, male or female, in the court of public opinion on the basis of anonymous accusations. Anonymity for rape accusers is long overdue for retirement."
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http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-19/ncaa-faces-fresh-antitrust-challenge-as-march-madness-begins
NCAA Faces a Fresh Antitrust Challenge as March Madness Begins
By Paul M. Barrett March 19, 2014

The National Collegiate Athletic Association can’t catch a break. Even as March Madness unfolds, with its joyous tribal rituals and lucrative corporate sponsorship, the NCAA’s legal troubles mount. The latest threat: a fresh antitrust lawsuit filed in federal court in New Jersey on behalf of football and basketball players who allege that the association and five top conferences run a “cartel” that generates billions of dollars in revenue while capping the compensation of athletes.

Scott Soshnick of Bloomberg News elaborates:

Four athletes filed an antitrust complaint on the eve of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament seeking to bar the association and five “power conferences” from enforcing rules that ban colleges from competing financially for players and limit payments to tuition and related fees.

The antitrust suit, if successful, may lead to bidding wars for top high-school talent. It joins a separate case, scheduled for trial in June, in which athletes seek to overturn an NCAA rule barring college players from profiting from their names, images and likenesses. Recent lawsuits over head injuries and scholarship caps also attack the NCAA.

“This is yet another danger to the current model of current athletics,” said Gabe Feldman, director of the Sports Law program at Tulane University in New Orleans. “This becomes an instantly credible threat to the NCAA.”

On top of the courtroom assaults, the $16 billion-a-year college sports industry is also grappling with the campus scandal of the moment: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has brought in a special outside counsel to re-investigate a long-simmering debacle involving the steering of basketball and football players into fake lecture classes that never met. The academic fraud at UNC, which has led to the indictment of a former chairman of the school’s black-studies department, is particularly troubling because of North Carolina’s sterling educational reputation.

How to make sense of this season of heightening turmoil within the NCAA? One way to understand what’s going on is to regard it as a breakdown in belief in the ideal of the “student athlete” in the revenue-generating sports of football and men’s basketball. According to this model, talented athletes provide entertainment (from which their universities—and television networks and merchandise marketers—derive ample revenue) in exchange for a subsidized education and, in a tiny percentage of instances, a shot at a pro career. Student athletes in this model don’t realize the market value of their services as measured in hard cash.

If the college sports industry delivered on its promise of a quality education, the traditional model might make sense. I emphasize might. A growing number of current and former college athletes are agitating for something more than that education, especially since so few of them can expect to make a post-campus living from shooting baskets or tackling opponents.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that a poor kid wants to trade on his football prowess for a scholarship and a degree. Who’s to say he shouldn’t have that opportunity? And why shouldn’t television networks get to sell some advertising while footwear companies hawk sneakers and alumni shout themselves hoarse?

That all might be fine if, in fact, the young athlete got a real education. Here’s where the fake-classes scandal collides with the suits demanding cash compensation for college athletes. The North Carolina experience suggests that—even at schools with strong academic traditions—some football and basketball players are getting cheated out of what they have been promised.

Mary Willingham, an academic adviser at UNC who formerly worked closely with athletes struggling to maintain their eligibility, has spoken out about the fake classes at Chapel Hill as well as the unrealistic expectations placed on gifted football and basketball players who arrive with limited classroom skills. Her story is at the center of a recent Bloomberg Businessweek cover article, and she has provided a sworn declaration in one of the legal actions pending against the NCAA: the suit in California trying to defeat the association’s prohibition on college players profiting from use of their names and likenesses in video games. Willingham’s nine-page declaration (PDF) makes for bracing reading.

Here’s a taste:

The college football and basketball players I worked with sometimes earned a degree, but they did not get an education. They simply did not have equal access to a real education because the academic experience for athletes is separate and unequal. They arrive unprepared and remained unprepared because of institutional priorities. They did not have access to all courses and degree programs. … At UNC, there are roughly 80 majors in the college of arts and sciences. But athletes in the profit sports predominantly pursue three majors—Communications Studies, Exercise and Sports Science, and African American and Diaspora Studies. … Part of this is a result of institutional denial: I was often told at UNC that ‘we don’t do remedial instruction here.’ But another cause of the separate and unequal treatment to which profit-sport athletes at UNC are subjected is the NCAA imperative to stay ‘eligible,’ educational consequences aside. In my experience, football and basketball players are ushered through a special curriculum constructed just for them. The courses in that curriculum, though they usually make no sense as a coherent course of study, have one thing in common: They are known to be easy, manageable, or friendly, and they therefore ‘help’ athletes, and the compliance office, with eligibility.”

Food for thought while munching popcorn, sipping a beer, and cheering your team’s progress to the Final Four.
Barrett_190
Barrett is an assistant managing editor and senior writer at Bloomberg Businessweek. His new book, Law of the Jungle, which tells the story of the Chevron oil pollution case in Ecuador, will be published by Crown in September 2014. His most recent book is GLOCK: The Rise of America’s Gun.
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http://www.dukechronicle.com/articles/2014/03/20/southern-coalition-social-justice-unearths-evidence-durham-police-misconduct-racial-profiling

Southern Coalition for Social Justice unearths evidence of Durham police misconduct, racial profiling

By Aradhna Madireddi | March 20, 2014
The Durham Police Department has come under fire from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice and Durham Fostering Alternatives to Drug Enforcement Coalition following claims of racial profiling and unethically paying informants.

The SCSJ and Durham FADE Coalition have unearthed evidence that the DPD pays unconstitutional conviction bonuses to undercover informants in drug cases, creates license checkpoints for drug interdiction and uses federal grant money to fund undercover marijuana buys in black neighborhoods.

Assistant Chief of Police Jon Peter denied the accusations that the department racially profiles drug arrests after two attorneys produced documents that marijuana arrests have increased 70 percent since Police Chief Jose Lopez took office, with the vast majority of those arrested being black.

"Durham really stood out like a sore thumb. It had one of the largest racial disparities in the state, with respect to African American drivers," said Ian Mance, a Soros Justice Fellow and civil rights attorney from SCSJ who created the report.

He noted that SCSJ uploaded search data from the State Bureau of Investigation database. From a total of more that 15 million recorded traffic stops, he said it was clear that Durham had an abnormal stop practice, with a very high rate of stopping African American drivers.

Following this red flag that DPD's practices fell outside of the norm, the SCSJ began investigating more of the department records.

One of the most disturbing finds, Mance said, was that the department pays secret cash rewards to drug informants based on the effectiveness of their testimonies or cooperation.

Although it is DPD's policy to pay informants for working on these higher level cases, an official statement maintained that the amount of these bonuses does not depend on if a conviction is achieved.

"The Durham Police Department denies any unethical or illegal activity as it relates to the paying of bonuses to confidential informants," the statement read. "The Police Department has never paid for convictions, only cooperation through case completion."

In a memo obtained by The Chronicle from Peter to Chief Assistant District Attorney Roger Echols dated Feb. 18, he noted that it is a common law enforcement practice nationally to not pay confidential informants until after trials are concluded.

"I have no concerns about there being integrity issues related to bonus payments for [confidential informants] after case completion," the memo stated.

The department is asking their police attorney to review practices to ensure that there are no procedural or legal issues in how they handle informants and their payment.

"They haven't had a lot of time to respond. We threw a lot of information at them in a very short period of time. I want to give them the opportunity to review the information and do their own investigation before we do anything further," Mance said.

A June 2012 study written by Frank Baumgartner—Richard J. Richardson Professor of political science—alleged racial disparities in traffic stops, searches and arrests in Durham. In the study, he reported that in Durham county, black drivers were 162 percent more likely to be stopped for a seat belt violation than a white driver.

"Statewide, blacks are 77 percent more likely than whites to be searched for identical offenses, while Hispanics are 96 percent more likely to be searched," the study read. "Representing not just a sample of police stop-and-search activity in North Carolina, but all stop-and-search activity statewide over more than 3,800 consecutive days, the report provides powerful evidence of profiling and differential treatment of minority drivers."
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/373753/neo-porn-feminists-j-delgado

March 20, 2014 4:00 AM
The Neo-Porn Feminists
Or, how the Left destroyed feminism.
By A. J. Delgado


It turns out that, in the rock-paper-scissors game of liberalism, “not judging” beats out “true female equality.”

The good folks at Politically Correct Central recently ran into a problem: Their incredibly useful “don’t judge!” mantra (which they have mercilessly hammered us with for many years now) ran into an obstacle: What happens when a woman willingly engages in the porn industry? Liberals, who once decried porn (and rightly so) as a male-dominated nightmare that objectifies women and exploits even its willing participants, have suddenly tiptoed backwards in the wake of Belle Knox, a Duke University freshman who gladly stars in porn films to cover her tuition costs.

What to do? thought the puzzled liberals. Standing against the sex industry would sound too “Christian Right”; also, criticizing the woman would effectively be siding with the frat boys who outed her — and, if there is any demographic we liberals hate, it’s male Duke students. (Remember the Duke-lacrosse case?) So, they concluded, let’s not be judgy.

Thus we suddenly found ourselves clicking on bizarre headlines — and watching equally confusing TV segments — in which liberal pundits and writers suddenly were perfectly okay with an industry that is anathema to their alleged values.

But the debate over feminism — what it means, as well as who can claim the feminist label —​ had been steaming for quite some time and was bound to explode sooner or later. You see, along the way, feminism became an inconvenience for the Left. Case in point: Some of its favorite celebs, who could always be counted on to publicly slam the Right or Western values, were all too happy to behave in sex-object ways that would make even the worst Mad Men misogynist say, “Tone it down.” Madonna and Miley Cyrus come to mind.

Thus, feminism’s definition needed to be twisted, contorted, and —​ basically — changed. And change it did: It became so elastic that the rubber band finally snapped and no one knows what the heck feminism means any longer.

Enter poor, confused Katy Perry. The pop starlet rocketed to fame by singing about kissing a girl even though she is not gay or bisexual, thus falsely usurping LGBT sexuality for material gain; she parades around in dresses three sizes too small; and she obsesses over boyfriends — all behaviors that you would think would make a true feminist recoil in horror. But Perry, who had stated in 2012 that she was not a feminist, this week (at the urging of a publicist, no doubt) proudly declared herself one: “A feminist? Um, yeah, actually. I used to not really understand what that word meant, and now that I do, it just means that I love myself as a female and I also love men.”

Huh?

Bless her heart, though — can we even blame Perry for her confusion? Should we not instead blame the Left, which has taken feminism from one extreme — man-hating, bra-burning hysterics — to another, in which rough, submissive sex on camera, in exchange for money, is now considered edgy and a breaking of yet another glass ceiling?

Belle Knox bemoans the “patriarchal” society at Duke, yet praises the (male-dominated, male-fantasy-tailored) porn world as “empowering” and something from which she derives “unimaginable joy.” Come again? And therein lies the ugly paradox of liberals’ so-called feminism. For every magazine issue with an article railing against objectivization of women as merely physical parts, there is a cover featuring a woman with her breasts popping out of a dress; for every woman who chants “Sistas doin’ it for themselves!” and “​We don’t need a man!” there is a woman shrieking at a divorce hearing that she is entitled to half of all her husband’s assets after only a few short years of marriage; for every feminist claiming that marriage is antiquated, there is another whose entire career was made possible by the man she married; for every Beyoncé op-ed about the need for wage equality, there is a lyric where her husband gladly uses the word “bitch.”

What happened to a solid definition of feminism, namely “a simple, pure belief in the equality of the sexes”? It has given way to the more useful notion of “not judging”: Nowadays, anything a woman does (provided, of course, she isn’t one of those pro-life nutcases!) is fantastic and worthy of acclaim — criticisms not wanted.

Feminists (whatever that means) may exist, but one thing is certain: They are not those who come bearing the title, be they “empowered” porn-star university students or pop divas. The warning “Beware of false prophets” has never seemed so necessary.

The “don’t judge” sentiment has wrought a shameless society, in which degrading acts are hailed as feminist. A 27-year-old American medical student is now auctioning off her virginity, hoping to bring in $400,000. A few short years ago, feminists would have railed against this; but now? Don’t judge! Don’t be a hater! This sentiment is routinely drilled into us via pop culture, e.g., Miley Cyrus’s “Can’t Stop” lyrics, complete with a reminder that “only God can judge ya, forget the haters!” (and even a shout-out to the females doing a line of blow in the bathroom). Gloria Steinem, where art thou?

Would we be surprised, at this point, to see an op-ed by a self-proclaimed feminist who argues that sleeping with her married boss for a promotion is “liberating” and “empowering”? These days, we should simply ask that if you tell folks you’re a feminist, you should at least have a rational definition of what that is. Or, rather, let’s not even bother: Liberalism already destroyed it. Feminism was just too inconvenient to keep around.

— A. J. Delgado is a conservative writer and lawyer.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/20/darryl-howard-and-the-rampaging-prosecutor-durham-learns-little-from-duke-lacrosse-debacle/

Darryl Howard and the rampaging prosecutor: Durham learns little from Duke lacrosse debacle
By Radley Balko, Updated: March 20 at 12:11 pm

When Darryl Howard was convicted of murder in 1995, he cried out ”I didn’t do it!” then sobbed in open court. He has maintained his innocence ever since.

“As a defense attorney, there are times when you aren’t sure if your client did it, and there are times when you’re pretty sure he did it, but you defend him anyway, because that’s your job,” says Woody Vann, Howard’s trial attorney. ”This case has always haunted me because I never believed that Darryl Howard committed those crimes.”

Howard was never going to win any citizenship awards. He was a low-level drug peddler, a petty criminal, and something of a nuisance. On several occasions he had been arrested for selling small quantities of drugs. He had also been cited for trespassing more than 70 times, many of those in Few Gardens, a housing project in Durham, North Carolina.

But for all his problems, there has never been much compelling evidence that Howard is a murderer. Howard was convicted of killing a woman named Doris Washington and her 13-year-old daughter Nishonda in November 1991. The two were found dead in their Few Gardens apartment. Howard was convicted both for their murders and for subsequently setting a fire to their apartment to cover up the crimes. Despite indications that both women had been sexually assaulted, no DNA or biological evidence connected Howard to the crime scene. He was convicted entirely on eyewitness testimony, much of which was vague, contradictory, or later recanted.

Now, newly discovered evidence further argues for Howard’s innocence. In court papers filed this week, the Innocence Project reveals that DNA testing of a rape kit taken from Doris Washington found some sperm that went undetected during the initial investigation. That sperm is a match to a career criminal, not to Howard. Attorneys for Howard have also uncovered evidence that prosecutors in the case may have withheld important exculpatory evidence, including a credible statement from an informant days after the murder who attributed the crimes to a local gang, not to Darryl Howard.

Discovery of the memo, which was known to police and should have been known to prosecutors, shows that the state failed to turn over relevant evidence pointing to Howard’s innocence. But the contents of the memo also suggest that Howard’s prosecutor not only put on perjurious testimony from a police investigator, he then used that evidence to give false statements in court himself.

Perhaps most interesting of all is just who that prosecutor was: Michael Nifong, then an assistant district attorney for Durham County. Nifong of course would later be appointed, then elected district attorney, and then make national headlines in 2006 when he falsely charged three Duke University lacrosse players with sexually assaulting a stripper. In 2007 Nifong was disbarred for his handling of evidence in that case. He was also found in contempt for making false statements about the case in court.

But Howard’s incarceration spans a period of time over which several scandals have raised questions about the dispensation of justice in Durham County. In 2010, a report commissioned by the North Carolina attorney general and follow-up investigations by the Raleigh News & Observer uncovered widespread corruption and malfeasance in the state’s crime lab, including in many cases from Durham County. Fallout from that scandal contributed to the removal of Nifong’s successor, District Attorney Tracey Cline, in 2012. Prosecutors are rarely ever removed from office for misconduct. For it to happen twice, in the same county, within five years is extraordinary. (The Washington Post was unable to reach Mike Nifong or Tracey Cline. The office of interim Durham District Attorney Leon Stanback did not respond to several requests for comment.)

But missing from all of those scandals was any effort to assess the breadth and scope of their reach. Even after Nifong and Cline were removed from office, public officials in Durham County showed little interest in an audit or investigation into the damage they may have done. Part of that may be due to Durham County’s politics and the lingering legacy of the Duke case. With its mix of academic progressives and working class blacks, Durham is arguably the most left-of-center county in the state. (In the 2012 presidential election, Obama received 76% of the vote in Durham County — his best showing in the state.) The lacrosse case of course featured several well-to-do white men accused of raping a low-income black woman. That set the stage for an unlikely lineup up adversaries, as progressive groups, academics, feminists, and racial justice activists sided with the overzealous prosecutor, while the political right lined up behind the accused.

But prosecutorial misconduct is rarely a one-off phenomenon. If it has happened once with a prosecutor, or within a particular office, it has probably happened before. And in Durham, a county that’s 40 percent black and 7.5 percent Latino, the victims in those other cases are far more likely to be people like Darryl Howard than wealthy white students on a college lacrosse team.



The Investigation

In the early hours of November 27, 1991, firefighters responding to reports of smoke at the Few Gardens complex found the bodies of 29-year-old Doris Washington and her 13-year-old daughter Nishonda. Both had been severely beaten. Nishonda had been strangled to death. She also had scratches and tears on her mouth and abrasions on her back. Her mother Doris died of a blow to the abdomen that tore her liver and caused massive internal bleeding. Doris Washington too had bruises and abrasions over much of her body.

There was also evidence that both women had been sexually assaulted. Both were found nude, lying face down on a bed. Doris was found with what the medical examiner called “blood-tinged fluid” in her vagina. Her vagina had also been lacerated near her cervix. The medical examiner concluded that the laceration could only have been made by something that had been inserted into her vagina. The autopsy revealed no sperm in Doris, although 20 years later, a crime lab would examine a vaginal swab taken at the time and find enough intact sperm to produce a DNA profile. As for Nishonda, the medical examiner found semen in both her rectum and her vagina, and estimated that it had been deposited within the previous 24 hours.

A few days after the murders, Durham police received a compelling tip from an anonymous informant. The tipster told police that Doris and Nishonda “were probably murdered” because Doris owed around $8,000 to some drug dealers “from either Philadelphia or New York.” The informant added that dealers had left four bags of drugs in Doris’ apartment, per an agreement with her. They returned to find that the bags were missing drugs. According to the informant, the dealers then raped and strangled Doris. When Nishonda “unknowingly walked in,” they did the same to her.

The informant’s tip was especially credible because at the time the police received it, the media hadn’t yet reported that either woman had been sexualy assaulted. In fact, a handwritten note on the memo’s ledger from another officer directed at Det. Darryl Dowdy, the officer who investigated the murders, read: “Dowdy: There may be something to this. I don’t remember any public info on the rape.”

The note was also credible because at the time, a gang called the New York Boys were building a drug pipeline down the east coast, and had begun to infiltrate Durham. Part of their distribution involved cutting deals the occupants of housing projects to either sell drugs for them, or to allow their apartments to be used as storage or drop points. Few Gardens was part of their plan. Just a few years later, seven of the New York Boys would be indicted for a series of murders in Durham resulting from an ongoing fight over turf.

Doris Washington was one of the Few Garden residents who was both selling drugs for the New York Boys and allowing them to use her apartment. She also had cocaine in her system when she was murdered. In a particularly tragic twist, local newspapers reported in 1992 that in the days leading up to the murders, Nishonda Washington had asked for help, both from the director of a local community center and from the county’s Department of Social Services. She told them her mother owed money to a group of drug dealers. The community center director told Durham’s Herald-Sun that the girl “thought she was going to be killed.”

But Durham police had a difficult time tracking down a suspect. Months passed with no arrests. The police put out Crime Stoppers alerts for information about the killings. By March 1992, North Carolina Gov. John Martin issued a proclamation promising a $10,000 reward for any tip leading to the arrest of Doris and Nishonda Washington’s killer or killers.



The Case Against Darryl Howard

About six months after the murders, Det. Dowdy visited Darryl Howard in the hospital. Ironically, Howard was in the hospital because he himself had been shot in the back several times by a member of the New York Boys. He lost a kidney in the attack. According papers filed by Howard’s attorneys, Dowdy wasn’t interested in investigating the attack on Howard, but instead wanted to ask Howard about two other shootings that may have been committed by the same member of the gang. Howard grew frustrated at Dowdy’s lack of interest in his own shooting, and discussion between the two grew heated. Howard had by then heard more about the murder of Doris and Nishonda Washington and, according to court transcripts, told Dowdy during that visit that he believed the New York Boys had committed the crimes.

For reasons that are unclear, that seemed to put Dowdy onto Howard for the Few Garden murders. Several more months passed with no arrests. Then in November 1992, nearly a year after the murders, Dowdy had Howard arrested and charged with two counts of first degree murder for the deaths of Doris and Nishonda Washington, plus an additional charge of arson for attempting to burn down the apartment. At trial, the murder charges were reduced from first- to second-degree.

The case against Howard was based on testimony from a number of eyewitnesses. According to Nifong, Doris Washington sold drugs for Darryl Howard, and Howard killed her because she owed him money. When Washington’s daughter walked in during the murder, he had no choice but to killer her too. He then called his brother Harvey, who helped him set fire to the apartment.

But the eyewitness accounts that were supposed to back up this narrative were inconsistent, often contradictory, and in most cases came from witnesses with credibility problems of their own. Moreover, there were no eyewitnesses who claim to have seen Howard actually commit any of the crimes for which he was charged. Instead, the state put on witnesses who claimed to have seen Howard arguing with Doris Washington on the day she was killed, or who saw him near the apartment. Howard and Washington did know one another, and did argue, but Howard’s attorneys say their arguments were over Washington’s methods of drug dealing, which sometimes involved recruiting women into the drug businesses, then encouraging them to prostitute themselves. One of those women was Howard’s girlfriend at the time.

Among the state’s lineup of witnesses:

One friend of Washington’s who lived in the same apartment complex — and also had an extensive criminal record — said she heard Howard threatened to kill Washington shortly before the murders.
Two other witnesses, both of whom knew Howard at the time of the murders, testified that they had seen him in or around Doris Washington’s apartment shortly before she was killed. But both of those witnesses also gave statements to police shortly after the murders in which they only claimed to have seen a man. They didn’t mention Howard by name. It seems odd that they wouldn’t recall that detail until a year or more later.
Several witnesses also claimed to have seen Howard leaving Doris Washington’s apartment while carrying a TV on the night of the murders. This fit with the state’s theory that Howard had stolen property from Washington to compensate himself for the money she owed him. The problem: There was no TV missing from Doris Washington’s apartment.
Some witnesses said they saw Howard walking with a man near Washington’s apartment shortly before the murders, while other said it was a woman.
One witness who called seeking the Crimestoppers award said she heard Howard loudly proclaim at a bar, “I killed the bitch,” in the days following the murders. But no one else at the bar came forward to say they’d heard him say anything of the kind.
Another witness, who also had a felony record, also claimed to have heard Howard threaten Washington. But years later he recanted, claiming that Det. Dowdy had coerced him.

In fact several witnesses claimed to have been coerced by Dowdy before, during, or after the trial. Given that the state’s entire case rested on statements from witnesses, those accusations are significant. Another of them was Angela Oliver, whom Nifong at one point called his ”most important witness.” Oliver implicated Howard in a recorded statement she gave to police in October 1992, shortly after she had been arrested for prostitution.

While locked up, Oliver told the police that Doris Washington owed Darryl Howard money, and that hours before the murders, she and Howard had gone to Washington’s apartment to collect. She said that Washington couldn’t pay. Oliver said Howard then threatened to kill Washington if she couldn’t produce either his money or his drugs when he returned later that evening. When they returned later that night with Howard’s brother, Harvey, Oliver told police that she saw Howard strike Washington with his gun. She said she then stood outside the apartment, where she heard Washington scream. According to Oliver’s statement, Howard then told his brother that they “had to burn them up,” and the two set the house aflame.

But at trial Oliver took it all back. She said that almost all of the statement she gave to police in October 1992 was false. Instead, she said Det. Dowdy had threatened to charge her as an accessory to murder unless she agreed to implicate Darryl Howard and his brother. Oliver’s recantation was abrupt enough that the state actually had to treat her as a hostile witness. At one point she said in court, “{y}ou can’t force me to come and tell something I didn’t see.”



A Hitch in the State’s Case

Judging from the note left in the ledger of the internal memo about the statement from the anonymous informant, it seems fair to say that the police at least initially believed that Doris and Nishonda Washington were sexually assaulted before they were murdered. Their injuries certainly suggest as much, as does the fact that they had been stripped nude. There’s also another document obtained by the Innocence Project that appears to have originated from the DA’s office: a handwritten note that refers to the fact that Nishonda had taken a shower prior to the attacks, which would mean that the semen found in her anus likely came form an attacker. The note adds for emphasis, “whoever did this had anal intercourse w/ her.”

But about seven months after Howard’s arrest, Nifong’s office ran into a problem: Results from the DNA testing on the sperm found in Nishonda Washington’s rectum came back, and they excluded Howard as the source.

Such test results might have persuaded a conscientious prosecutor to at least consider the possibility that he had charged the wrong man, especially considering the statement from the informant. At the very least, it would seem to mean they needed to change their theory, and consider the possibility that Howard didn’t kill the women by himself. But Nifong proceeded with the case against Howard as planned, trying him and only him for murders and the arson. (Howard’s brother Harvey was initially also charged for the arson; that charge was later dropped.) The state proceeded on the theory that either the women weren’t sexually assaulted, or that if they had been, the assault or assaults weren’t connected to the murders.

At trial, Det. Dowdy tried to explain away the DNA results. He told jurors that the 13-year-old Nishonda Washington had run off with her boyfriend the week before the murders. So the sperm in her rectum, the state theorized, must have come from the boyfriend. This alleged boyfriend never provided an affidavit, was never asked to testify, and Dowdy never explained how he discovered that the two had been together. Nifong returned to Dowdy’s testimony about the boyfriend in his closing argument, in order to dissuade the jury from considering that the girl may have been sexually assaulted by the same man or men who killed her.

“I would submit to you that a 13-year-old who can be gone for five days with her boyfriend is not somebody for whom sex is going to be an unknown subject,” Nifong said. The prosecutor who a decade later would be hailed as a champion for victims of sexual assault was here suggesting it was more likely that a 13-year-old had engaged in anal and vaginal intercourse than that she had been raped.

Dowdy also testified at trial that his murder investigation never even considered the possibility that the women had been sexually assaulted, a point Nifong also reemphasized in his closing argument. This is clearly contradicted by the internal memo about the statement from the informant, the note written on the memo from another officer to Dowdy about how the “rapes” weren’t yet public information, the handwritten note about the shower, and the fact that Dowdy himself had written up an affidavit to collect Howard’s DNA for comparison to any DNA profiles that might come from the rape kits.

But the more disturbing component in all of this is the strong possibility that the informant memo was never turned over to Howard’s attorney. Woody Vann, Howard’s trial attorney, says he destroyed his file on Howard’s case years ago. (Attorneys often throw out old case files, and Howard was convicted nearly 20 years ago.) Because of that, Vann says he can’t say “with 100 percent certainty” that Nifong never gave him the file. But he adds, “This was a double homicide. That memo would have been powerful exculpatory evidence, probably enough for an acquittal. I have to say that if it had been turned over, I certainly would have seen it, and I certainly would have used it.”

Vann conceded at trial that Howard and Washington knew one another, but noted there was no evidence that Washington ever sold drugs for Howard, as the state claimed. Vann also pointed out there was no biological evidence from Howard found at the scene, no incriminating evidence found on Howard (he was arrested the day after the murders for trespassing), and no witnesses who could say they saw Howard committing the crimes.

The jury wasn’t convinced. They found Howard guilty. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison for each murder, and another 40 years for the arson. His appeals were unsuccessful. In the meantime, Mike Nifong was elected Durham County District Attorney. And James E. Hardin, Jr. — the DA who oversaw Nifong at the time — went on to become a judge.



”The Durham Way”

There is of course a chance that Mike Nifong did turn the informant memo over to Woody Vann, and that for some reason it just never got to him. It’s also possible that Vann himself overlooked the memo, in which case he’d be guilty of ineffective assistance of counsel — which still gives Howard a strong argument for a new trial. Because Vann’s file no longer exists, there’s simply no way to know for sure.

But Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project points to the Duke lacrosse case, and what the public would later learn about Nifong. “When you see that kind of misconduct once, it has likely happened before,” Scheck says. “Behavior that egregious is typically the work of a serial offender.”

K.C. Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College in New York who co-wrote a book about the Duke lacrosse case, agrees. “I’m absolutely certain that Mike Nifong didn’t just wake up one day during the Duke lacrosse case and decide to start committing misconduct. He must have done it previously.”

It is also at least possible that while Det. Dowdy and the Durham police department clearly knew about the memo, they never turned it over to Nifong, in which case Nifong would look more incompetent than malicious. But this was a major piece of exculpatory evidence in a murder trial. And because it was never turned over, Nifong elicited false testimony from Dowdy on the witness stand. Nifong reiterated those statements in his closing argument. Nifong was either complicit in the lie, or was deficient enough in his job that the police department and Dowdy felt they could get away with lying to him. Neither scenario reflects well on Nifong.

But events since the Duke lacrosse case also point to a broader problem in the Durham District Attorney’s office, the Durham police department, even to the state of North Carolina as a whole. As a defense attorney in nearby Wake County put it, “North Carolina has a lot of problems. But Durham has problems even for North Carolina.”

“It has always been an odd DA’s office,” says K.C. Johnson. “There’s a lot of turnover. The ones who stick around for a long time — people like Nifong, Cline, or Freda Black — tend to be where you find the problems. I’d say that at best, they were indifferent to their ethical obligations.” (Freda Black was a longtime prosecutor in the office and a political rival of Nifong — she ran against him in the 2006 Democratic primary.)

In an alternate universe, the mixed-up politics of the Duke lacrosse case — with progressive groups and personalities largely lining up with the prosecutor, and conservative groups and personalities largely lining up with the defense — might have presented a unique opportunity. Once it was clear that the players were innocent, and that Nifong had lied and withheld evidence, conservatives could perhaps have had their eyes opened to the inadequacies of the criminal justice system, and been brought on board to move for reform. Progressive groups could perhaps have seen that the DA regime they had been supporting had duped them, and realized that if the office culture could produce the sort of behavior apparent in the Duke case, it was likely affecting how prosecutors approached their other cases, most of which involved people from Durham’s low-income and minority communities.

But that isn’t how it played out. National personalities on the right like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh railed about the case for months, then all but ignored the criminal justice system once it was over.

When the Duke lacrosse case first began to break, Duke President Richard Brodhead asked Duke law professor James Coleman to write up a report on the lacrosse team. Coleman, who is black, came back with a report that contradicted the negative portrayals of the team in the media and among civil rights and feminist activists. He also became a vocal critic of Nifong and the culture within the Durham DA’s office.

That report earned Coleman praise on the right. But he now says he’s disappointed with how supporters of the lacrosse team simply moved on once the case was resolved. “I had hoped that the people of influence who were attracted to this case — the players and their families, the conservative groups, the commentators who were drawn to the injustice — I had hoped they would have used it as an opportunity to subject the criminal justice system to a searing review. It’s as if they believe the only bias in the system is against wealthy white college students.”

It wasn’t any better on the other side. The North Carolina NAACP and faculty at both Duke and the historically black North Carolina Central University cast early lots with Nifong, who then trumpeted the case to help him win his first election for district attorney. As it became increasingly clear that Nifong had overstepped his authority, the state NAACP urged the public to remain silent so as not to bias the investigation. Critics like Johnson noted at the time that keeping quiet wasn’t exactly the sort of activism for which the group was known, and that the group had supported Nifong despite clear evidence that the case embodied criminal justice abuses that the state NAACP had condemned in other cases. The “Group of 88,” a collection of academics from Duke University, took out a full-page newspaper ad early in the investigation that broadly condemned a culture of racism and sexism on campus. Some signatories to the ad continued to publicly condemn the players even after it was clear that they were innocent.

Of course, the initial reaction from civil rights groups should be considered in the context of the way blacks have been traditionally been treated (and are still treated) in the criminal justice system, as well as the history of racial violence and discrimination in the south. In particular, there’s a long and sordid history around interracial sex, interracial rape, and the legal system’s insufficient protection of the rights of black people in such matters, from masters taking liberties with their slaves, to miscegenation laws, to shameful cases like the lynching of Emmett Till.

But it’s the reaction from these groups after it became clear that Nifong had abused his authority, and that the lacrosse players were innocent, that’s harder to justify. Instead of recognizing that Durham County may have a problem in the DA’s office, some advocacy groups continued to support Nifong. Some shifted their attention from the now-proven-false charges to the alleged boorish but legal behavior of lacrosse players. Some just moved on to other things. But few, on the left or the right, considered the possibility that there may be other victims.

“I think the left was indifferent,” Coleman says. “And that’s too bad. Because based on the work we do in wrongful conviction cases, it was a chance to make people aware of the fact that what happened in that cases wasn’t unusual, but fairly common. It was a chance to look at the conduct of public officials, and to learn form it.”

K.C. Johnson adds, “I think the NAACP would have been in a unique position to have demanded the kind of review that could have exposed other injustices. I was disappointed, but not surprised that there was little support for that. There was this feeling of we must move on. It was really a missed opportunity. The whole country was watching, and you had this opportunity to shine on a light on prosecutor and police misconduct, problems that disproportionately affect minority communities. But the civil rights groups that were opposed to any of that happening.”

New York Times columnist Peter Applebome made a similar point in 2007, as the case died down. “{T}he news media, and civil rights and women’s rights organizations who were so intoxicated by the story of bad white boys that they missed the real outrage: how prosecutors can railroad innocent people, nearly all of them without the {lacrosse} students’ resources or abilities to fight back.”

To their credit, two of the accused lacrosse players seemed to understand what was at stake better than anyone. At the press conference shortly after the players were declared innocent, Reade Seligmann reflected on what he had just gone through:

“This entire experience has opened my eyes up to a tragic world of injustice I never knew existed. If police officers and a district attorney can systematically railroad us with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, I can’t imagine what they’d do to people who do not have the resources to defend themselves. So rather than relying on disparaging stereotypes and creating political and racial conflicts, all of us need to take a step back from this case and learn from it. The Duke lacrosse case has shown that our society has lost sight of the most fundamental principle of our legal system: the presumption of innocence.”

Colin Finnerty made a similar observation, ”There seem to be some flaws in the legal system that should be addressed, the fact that in North Carolina there are no recordings of the grand jury, and to establish checks and balances on district attorneys.”



A Break for Darryl Howard

The Innocence Project took on Darryl Howard’s case in 2006, along with local defense attorney James Cooney. Locally renowned for representing the Duke lacrosse players, Cooney also represented Alan Gell, a death row inmate who was retried, acquitted, and released in 2004 after Cooney discovered that prosecutors had withheld critical exculpatory evidence in his original trial.

In 2010, Howard’s new legal team then sent the rape kit taken from Doris Washington to a lab for more advanced DNA testing. That lab found sperm on a vaginal swab that the North Carolina crime lab failed to find 15 years earlier. The lab was then able to create a DNA profile of the sperm that excluded Daryl Washington as the source.

The following year Howard’s attorneys obtained a court order to run the DNA profile through CODIS, the FBI’s digital index of DNA profiles. CODIS returned a hit on Jermeck Jones, a man with more than 30 prior convictions. Pertinent to Howard’s case, Jones’ record includes convictions for drug distribution and for assaulting women. He was 15 years old at the time of the Washington murders, putting him within the age range of the members of the New York Boys. Howard’s new attorneys also asked the same lab to retest the DNA found in Nishonda Washington. The lab was able to exclude both Darryl Howard and Jermeck Jones as the source of the sperm, but unable to create a full profile to run through CODIS.

The new testing conclusively showed that two separate men had sex, or possibly raped, Doris Washington and her daughter shortly before the two were murdered. One of them was Jermeck Jones. Neither of them as Darryl Howard.

By this time, Mike Nifong had resigned from office after the Duke lacrosse scandal. One of his former assistants, Tracey Cline, had won the election to replace him. According to Scheck, Howard’s attorneys had an oral agreement with Cline that neither party would approach Jermeck Jones about the DNA tests without prior notice to the other side. Yet when Howard’s attorneys sent an investigator to question Jones, he had already been made aware of the test results. ”We were surprised that someone had already told him,” Scheck says.

Jones told the private investigator he had never had sex with Doris Washington. But bizarrely, he said he did have sex with Nishonda Washington, and on the night before she was killed. When asked how his story could be reconciled with the results of the DNA tests, Jones said that Nishonda must have somehow transferred his sperm from her rectum into her mother’s vagina.

Howard’s attorneys brought all of this to Tracey Cline. But the new DA and former Nifong “top deputy” refused to reopen the case or conduct any further investigation.



The Nifong legacy

Several months after Nifong was disbarred in 2007, Tracey Cline announced in February 2008 that she’d be seeking her former boss’s position. Cline was not only Nifong’s top assistant, she was also his second chair in the Duke case. She denied playing a large role in the case, although advocates for the players point to bar disciplinary transcripts that suggest otherwise. Nevertheless, her connection with Nifong wasn’t enough to sully her reputation with the voters of Durham. In 2008 Cline was elected to take over for her mentor. She invited him to her swearing-in as an honored guest.

But shortly before Cline took office, a panel of judges from the North Carolina Court of Appeals threw out burglary, robbery, kidnapping and attempted sexual assault charges against Frankie Washington, a case tried by Cline. Washington had been held in jail for four years a before his trial, and there’s strong evidence that Cline may also have convicted the wrong man. In overturning Washington’s conviction, Judge Douglas McCullough wrote that the mess could have been avoided “if the state had exercised even the slightest care during the course of this prosecution.” When he later freed Black, Durham Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson added, “People are starting to question, in Durham, the degree to which the prosecutor’s office and the police department are tracking down cases when there are leads that other people have committed the crimes.”

It was the first of many rebukes to come. Just a month after Cline was sworn in, Hudson threw out the charges against another man, Derrick Allen, finding again that Cline had withheld potentially exculpatory evidence at his trial.

Then in 2010, Attorney General Roy Cooper ordered an investigation of the North Carolina state crime lab. The resulting report was damning, finding that crime lab analysts had altered or withheld exculpatory information in at least 230 cases over a 16-year period. Three of those were death penalty cases in which the accused had already been executed.

A follow-up investigation by the Raleigh News & Observer uncovered more. The paper found that prosecutors and police pressured crime lab analysts to produce results that helped them win convictions. The pressure wasn’t subtle. A training manual for crime lab analysts gave tips on how to boost their “conviction rate,” while referring to experts who testify for criminal defendants as “defense whores.” In some cases, when analysts got test results that were unfavorable to prosecutors, they would repeat the tests until they got the results prosecutors wanted. Many times, defense attorneys were never notified of how many tries it took to get the test results “right.” To illustrate the point, the paper found a video of two blood spatter analysts altering and redoing an experiment over and over until they could produce the result that prosecutors were looking for. To celebrate their success, the two analysts gave one another a high-five.

The crime lab scandal would soon become a factor in the fall of Durham’s second consecutive elected district attorney. In December 2010 and August 2011, Judge Hudson threw out two more cases that Cline had tried. In both cases, Hudson cited yet more misconduct on the part of Cline, including more instances in which she failed to disclose exculpatory evidence. In one of the cases, Cline blamed the now-beleaguered crime lab.

The following September, the News & Observer published an extensive investigation of Cline herself, going back to her days as an assistant district attorney under Nifong. The paper found that Cline’s behavior had been questioned by judges in at last six cases, and that she had “misstated facts to judges” and “not provided evidence favorable to defendants.” Two months later, Hudson rebuked Cline in yet another case, finding that she had intentionally delayed presenting a murder case to a grand jury long enough for the victim’s remains to be cremated, then misled defense attorneys about the matter for months.

Then it all got surreal. Three days after, in December 2011, Cline accused Judge Hudson of corruption, and requested he be removed from all criminal cases in Durham County. She specifically requested that he be removed from a coming hearing for Mike Peterson, the novelist, newspaper writer, and former Durham mayoral candidate convicted in 2003 of murdering his wife. The prosecutor in that case was former District Attorney James Hardin, who had supervised both Cline and Nifong, and had since become judge. (As an added twist, Peterson was a former newspaper columnist who had been critical of Hardin.)

On December 5, 2011, Cline made her case against Hudson in a special hearing before Superior Court Judge Carl Fox. Cline bizarrely accused Hudson of orchestrating a vast conspiracy to bring her down, one which included a number of defense attorneys, as well as reporters and editors at the Raleigh News & Observer. She subpoenaed more than 50 people, including court clerks, defense attorneys, other active and retired judges, staff from the News & Observer, and Hudson himself. As the newspaper put it, all told, Cline had subpoenaed “a considerable part of Durham’s legal community.”

Fox ruled against Cline, as did another judge the following month when she made the same accusations in another case. In a blistering opinion, Judge Hudson later ordered a new trial for Peterson, citing an investigation which found that forensic analyst Duane Deaver had lied on the stand about his qualifications and about the scientific reliability of his blood spatter analysis. Deaver’s testimony was critical in the state’s argument that Peterson’s wife died in a homicide, not an accident.

In January 2012, defense attorney Kerry Sutton filed a complaint against Cline, citing her odd behavior and the multiple findings of misconduct against her. Six weeks later, Superior Court Judge Robert Hobgood removed Cline from office, finding “clear, cogent and convincing evidence” that she “brought the office of the Durham County District Attorney and the entire Durham County justice system into disrepute.” Hobgood’s order was later upheld by the North Carolina Supreme Court.

In a system where prosecutors routinely get away with misconduct, even Mike Nifong’s removal from office was almost unheard of. Now it had happened again.



Looking for more Darryl Howards

Scheck, who filed Darryl Howard’s petition for a new trial on Wednesday, says the fate of other possibly innocent people shouldn’t rest on organizations like his finding and taking their cases. “We need an audit,” he says. “We need a thorough, comprehensive audit of cases in Durham County to find out how many other innocent people may have been affected by the culture in that office. It’s the only way to get to the bottom of this.”

Both James Coleman and K.C. Johnson agree. “It was disappointing that it never happened,” Johnson says. “But it wasn’t surprising. There was just no constituency for it.” Coleman says the audit needs to be broader. ”I think we absolutely need a review, not just in Durham, but across the entire state.”

As for Howard, Scheck says he’s hopeful that interim Durham County District Attorney Leon Stanback will take another look at the case. “We’d love to talk some more with him,” Scheck says. “We’d much rather work with prosecutors than against them.”

Meanwhile, Stanback, who was appointed to fill out Cline’s term, has said he has no intention of running for the position in the next election. So there will be a campaign to replace Tracey Cline. And Durham County voters will be presented with a stark set of choices in the Democratic primary.

On the one hand, there’s Roger Echols, currently Stanback’s top assistant, and formerly an assistant to Cline. Echols is running on a fairly traditional law-and-order platform that emphasizes crime reduction and victim’s rights. Echols’ main opponent is Mitchell Garrell, a former Durham assistant district attorney whom Cline fired in 2010. Garrell was dismissed shortly after he had released evidence to defense attorneys that reflected unfavorably on Cline in a child abuse case. The defendant had already been granted a new trial, and Garrell’s disclosures to the defense were consistent with state law. But the dismissal of a long-serving, well-respected prosecutor drew some attention. Garrell is now running on a reform platform, promising more accountability, including working with defense attorneys in cases where there are genuine questions about the integrity of a conviction.

While Echols would continue the Nifong-Cline line of succession, it’s worth noting that he hasn’t been implicated in any of the cases in which his former boss has been accused of misconduct. But it is hard not to notice that Durham voters will be choosing between a guy that Cline hired, and a guy that she fired — after he helped expose some of her mistakes. And given his platform, it’s certainly safe to say that Garrell would be a break from the past.

The outcome of the election could determine whether there’s a genuine effort to see if there are other Darryl Howards languishing in North Carolina prisons, or whether Durham will opt to simply move on from Tracey Cline, without any attempt to assess the damage she may have done.

Just as the county did with Mike Nifong
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Thursday, March 20, 2014

Kitchens responds to Jezebel’s twisted attack
Caroline Kitchens | October 29, 2013, 2:30 pm

Last week, I published an op-ed in US News & World Report that touched on rape culture activism and sexual assault policies on campuses. My argument was simple: 1) the statistics used to bolster the claim that campus rape is an “epidemic” are untrustworthy; and 2) allowing these activists to have unchecked influence will further compromise the rights of the accused. As a graduate of Duke University, where several lacrosse players were falsely accused, I am keenly aware of what can go wrong when zealotry prevails.

The response from readers, including several scholars and researchers, was overwhelmingly positive. The notable exception was Erin Gloria Ryan at Jezebel. In an article entitled “‘Rape Culture’ is just Drunk College Sluts Lying, says Major Magazine,” she accused me of attacking rape victims. Never mind that I never implied that any victims of rape lied (with the exception of a case in North Dakota, in which I reported that the police determined an accuser had filed a false report) and said not a word about alcohol. As I read Ryan’s screed, it occurred to me that she might be talking about some other article. The fact that she referred to me by the wrong last name added to the confusion—an error they later fixed without any indication of a correction. Fervent Jezebel readers, many relying on Ryan’s caricature, proceeded to bombard me with insults, calling me a “rape-denying harpy,” “disgustingly anti-woman,” and a “small-town bigot”—among many other choice epithets.

There’s so much wrong with Ryan’s rant, it’s hard to know where to begin. I’ll start with the research.

The “1 in 5 college women will be raped” claim has been repeated so many times, it has become a dogma to sexual assault activists. Activists cling to this statistic and build movements around it despite the fact that it has been discredited many times. As far back as the early 1990s, scholars and journalists showed that the advocacy research surrounding campus sexual assault was methodologically flawed. It is beyond the scope of my op-ed to delve into all of the flawed research, but for more in-depth explanation, see here, here, and here. (And if you are going to contest my analysis, please read these links.)

Because of the serious flaws in the advocacy research, Department of Justice estimates are the best and perhaps only reliable source for assessing the prevalence of sexual assault. Ryan criticizes my use of the “Violent Victimization of College Students” report because she says that most victims she knows don’t describe their attacks as “violent.” Apparently, she got confused by the report’s title and failed to actually look at it. The report in fact specifies that sexual assaults “may or may not involve force” (emphasis added). The BJS’s definition includes “attacks or attempted attacks generally involving unwanted sexual contact between victim and offender,” including “verbal threats.” As I explain, this comprehensive survey of sexual assault occurrences on college campuses (mandated by the Violence Against Women Act, no less) puts the rate at one victimization per forty women. That is still a tragedy to be sure, but it’s a far cry from the “1 in 5” mantra.

Ohio University, mentioned in my piece for its anti-rape culture movement, has 11,052 female students. If one in five of those students was a victim of rape at some point over the course of four years, that would mean that approximately 553 females are being raped each year on that campus alone. Yet the Ohio University Police Department reports that in 2012, there were only 7 reports of rape or other sex crimes. Of course, sexual assault is among the most underreported of crimes. It’s also possible, as activists allege, that universities underreport crime data. But these facts are unlikely to fully account for this massive discrepancy. As Canadian columnist Margaret Wente recently wrote in The Globe and Mail, “(s)uch an astronomical number of serious unreported sex crimes would require a near-universal conspiracy of silence.” AEI’s Christina Hoff Sommers has noted that if sexual assault advocacy statistics were true, the prevalence of sex crimes in the US would be comparable to that of the war-stricken Congo.

Of course, we must protect victims of sexual assault and confront cultural forces that contribute to its incidence. I never implied—nor do I believe—that sexual assault on college campuses is not a very serious problem. But victims of violence will be best served by good research and accurate statistics. It does no service to victims to promote inflated statistics and impulsively attack any person who presents contrary information as a “rape denier.” We owe it to victims to have sound and informed procedures for investigating cases of sexual misconduct on campuses. For that, sound research is essential.

Next, a word about the falsely accused. A common response from Ryan and Jezebel’s disciples has been that the number of men falsely accused of sexual assault is minuscule in comparison to the number of assaults that go unpunished. They interpret any defense of the rights of the accused as victim-blaming.

Contrary to Ryan’s characterization, I did not say or imply that “across the country, poor men are being kicked out of college in droves.” What I actually said is that campus tribunals fail to provide the procedural safeguards necessary to protect students from false accusations. Though Ryan seems not to care, research shows that false accusations may be more common than gender activists realize. In an excellent review of the literature, Rachael Larimore and Yale Law School’s Emily Bazelon explain that the research surrounding false accusations varies widely in its estimates, but most credible studies converge around a rate of 8% to 10% for false reports of rape. False accusations may or may not be rampant, but they are certainly not trivial. And if we continue to promote policies aimed solely at protecting the rights of the accuser without protections for the accused, wrongful convictions will become much more likely.

The activists’ lack of concern for those falsely accused is troubling. Discussions surrounding sexual assault policies should not be based on a numbers game of false accusations vs. unreported victimizations. We should be focused on ensuring justice and basic fairness for all students. Sexual assault activists may not like it, but our country upholds the presumption of innocence as one of the central tenets of the justice system. To say that young men accused of sexual assault should be guaranteed due process by no means implicates victims.

It’s not easy for campus judiciaries to find the correct balance between protecting the rights of the accused and cultivating a safe environment for victims of sexual assault. There needs to be more civil discussion on how to fix the way universities respond to cases of sexual misconduct, and it needs to be informed by a commitment to protecting the rights of both parties.

Unfortunately, hardline gender activists have created a hostile environment for reasoned discussion. They prefer to shout “victim blamer!” and “rape apologist!” whenever they encounter a perspective that does not further their victim agenda. Many social scientists hesitate to broach the topic at all because of the moral fervor and stridency of the activists. But the fervor and stridency are getting in the way of reason and compassion—for both victims and the accused. That has to change.

I urge everyone to read my analysis with an open mind and explore some of the hyperlinks backing up my claims. If you can find any part where I say or even imply that sexual assault is ever in a girl’s “jungle-juice addled slutty imagination,” then Jezebel: you win.[/s]
Edited by Quasimodo, Mar 20 2014, 04:44 PM.
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http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2014/02/19/brian-banks-shares-his-story-with-students-following-wrongful-rape-conviction-being-cut-from-nfl/

Brian Banks Shares His Story With Students Following Wrongful Rape Conviction, Being Cut From NFL
February 19, 2014 8:42 PM

HAWTHORNE (CBSLA.com) — Brian Banks has quite a story to tell.

Students at Hawthorne High School Wednesday listened intently as the former high school football star told them that, at 16 years old, a classmate wrongly accused him of rape and kidnapping.

Banks lost his full ride to USC and spent five years in state prison, and another four years as a registered sex offender.

That’s when his alleged victim, Wanetta Gibson, admitted on video that she made it all up.

A few months later, with the help of the California Innocence Project, Banks was exonerated and making headlines.

Within days of being set free, former USC football coach Pete Carroll offered banks a second chance, this time for a tryout with the Seattle Seahawks. Offers starting coming in from other NFL teams and Banks was signed by the Atlanta Falcons. He played in the pre-season before he was cut from the team.

Banks is now turning to public speaking to share his story, with the hope of helping other teens realize their dreams.

“When you look into the eyes of these kids what do you see?” CBS2/KCAL9 reporter Randy Paige said.

“I see me when I was 16 years old,” Banks said with a laugh.

Banks told the students they should use his experiences as a lesson that misfortune doesn’t have to tie them down.

“You can sit here and let those bad situations affect the rest of your life, or you can learn from your bad situations and realize it’s not the end of the world – it’s just the beginning,” Banks said.

Students say the message got through.

“Don’t quit, I mean, ‘cause he didn’t quit. He had a childhood dream and he just kept continuing to pursue it after all he went through,” one student said.

Banks is now heading for speaking engagements in Baltimore and Washington DC, where he plans to represent Innocence Projects and to speak to legislators about new laws to protect the innocent.

His life story has even inspired a feature film, which is currently in production.

“These are the rewards and the fruits of hard work, of staying true to you and never giving up in those dreams,” Banks said. “And it’s also a part of a calling; I’m here doing what I’m doing because I’m supposed to. I went through what I went through for a reason. What that reason is I’m not sure yet, but it’s taken me in a direction that has given me more clarity as the days go by.”
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Wake County DA Colon Willoughby to leave office before end of his term
By Anne Blythe
ablythe@newsobserver.comMarch 20, 2014 Updated 1 hour ago

RALEIGH — Wake County District Attorney Colon Willoughby is leaving office at the end of this month to work in private practice, raising questions about who the governor will appoint to fill the remainder of his elected term.

Willoughby, 63, surprised his staff earlier this year when he announced he would not be seeking another term as district attorney after nearly three decades in the office.

Until recently, Willoughby had said he planned to stay through his term and let the voters decide who becomes the next district attorney.

On Thursday, the longtime prosecutor said he had been given an opportunity he could not turn down by McGuire Woods, a firm with more than 900 lawyers in 19 offices around the globe.

Willoughby, who has a business degree and worked in the field briefly before going into law, will be working in the firm's government regulatory and criminal investigations division.

"Government regulations can present challenges to businesses, and I think my experience can help them navigate some of those," Willoughby said Thursday afternoon.

Willoughby delivered a letter of resignation to Gov. Pat McCrory on Thursday.

March 31 is his last day as Wake's top prosecutor, a job that has changed a lot in the 28 years that Willoughby has held it.

McCrory praised Willoughby in a statement for having a career marked by "integrity, high ethical standards and an unbroken trust giving to him by the people of Wake County."

"He was an important voice against white-collar crime and government corruption and the people of North Carolina are indebted to him for his exemplary public service," McCrory said in the statement.

The North Carolina Constitution gives the governor the authority to make the appointment. Willoughby stated in his retirement letter that he would be happy to give McCrory advice on who should fill the post until a new district attorney is elected and fills the post on Jan. 1.

"Your selection of a district attorney to manage this office during the election cycle could demonstrate your sensitivity for keeping partisan politics out of the Wake County criminal justice system," Willoughby said in his three-paragraph retirement letter. "Our office and the citizens of Wake County are proud of our history of accomplishing that goal."

Willoughby, who will join McGuire Woods on May 1 as a partner, said Thursday that he hoped the governor would appoint an acting district attorney who is not one of the six candidates seeking the post.

Blythe: 919-836-4948; Twitter: @AnneBlythe1


Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/03/20/3717785/wake-county-da-colon-willoughby.html#storylink=cpy
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http://www.stripes.com/midshipman-in-naval-academy-sex-case-not-guilty-1.273749

Midshipman in Naval Academy sex case not guilty
By Pamela Wood
The Baltimore Sun

Published: March 20, 2014

A former Navy football player was found not guilty of sexually assaulting a fellow midshipman at an off-campus party nearly two years ago.

A military judge, Marine Corps Col. Daniel Daugherty, found Midshipman Joshua Tate not guilty on Thursday morning at the conclusion of a court-martial at the Washington Navy Yard.

Tate was facing up to 30 years in prison if he had been found guilty.

Tate also was charged with making false statements to investigators three times. Daugherty sent those charges back to Naval Academy Superintendent Vice Adm. Michael Miller for reconsideration. As commanding officer, Miller has the final say on whether to prosecute under military law.

Daugherty said Wednesday that two other midshipmen accused of lying in connection with the case ultimately were not prosecuted in court and were punished administratively at the academy instead.

Tate, a former football player, had been accused of having sex at the party with a female classmate who was so drunk she couldn't have consented.

The alleged victim testified that she drank heavily before and during the party and did not remember having sex with Tate in a car outside the party. She said when she confronted Tate the next day after hearing rumors, he said they had sex.

She initially did not cooperate with the investigation and acknowledged urging Tate to lie, but said she later had a change of heart and wanted to pursue the case.

Tate did not testify during the court martial.

With the decision in Tate's case, the Navy failed to secure a verdict against any if the three former football players initially investigated in the case, which drew national attention amid rising concerns about sexual assault in the military.

Ensign Tra'ves Bush, who was a midshipman at the time, was not formally charged following a preliminary hearing last year.

Midshipman Eric Graham was charged with abusive sexual contact and making false statements. His case was dropped following pre-trial rulings that were not favorable to the prosecution. He is in the process of withdrawing from the academy.

The alleged victim is now a senior at the academy.

pwood@baltsun.com
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