MIKE NIFONG'S ANTI-RACISM WORKSHOPS

Now Held Monthly in All Major Cities

Especially Valuable for Southerners Eager to Repudiate Their Racist Heritage

With Valuable Lessons From Mike's Own Screw-Up in the Duke Case

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Preview of First Workshop Agenda:

--Why Whites Need to Prove We are Not Racist (Even Though This Is Impossible to Prove)

--How Anti-Racism Can Benefit Your Career (Especially If You're a White Southerner)

--How You Can Make Your Anti-Racist Reputation By Nailing Other Southern White Guys (Since They're the Bad Guys, That Automatically Makes You a Good Guy)

--How to Find a Case That Can Make Your Career (It's Gotta Be Selma All Over Again)

--"Inconvenient Facts" and How to Deal With Them (Is It Really a "Fact" If No One Knows About It?)

--How to Make Suckers of the National Media (Hint: This Is An Easy One, Since No One Wants to Be Against a Guy Who's Fighting Racism)

--What If the Truth Comes Out, Damn It! (What Works for Sharpton Won't Necessarily Work for You)

--How Oprah Can Help Out In a Tight Spot (And When To Tear Up At the Right Moments)

--How to Make a Successful Exit (Like I Did, By Starting These Seminars)

Why would a seasoned prosecutor like Mike Nifong flout the rules in so many ways in the Duke case? Why would he publicly describe the four lacrosse players as "rapists" before that had been established in a court of law? Why would he suppress DNA evidence that the defense was entitled to see? Why, in short, did he go so far before the facts were in?

One of Nifong's public comments provides a clue. He says he wanted to protect the town of Durham from the reputation of being a place featuring "a bunch of lacrosse players from Duke raping a black girl." From this we see that Nifong suffers from delusions of grandeur. He sees himself as the Custodian of Durham's Reputation. He views his job as the White Protector of the Black Race. If he simply saw himself as a prosecutor doing his job in a difficult situation--with competing claims and counterclaims--he wouldn't have made such an ass of himself.

Nifong seems to be suffering from Recovering Southerner Syndrome. This is the ailment, first named on this blog, in which Southerners feel so guilty about slavery and segregation that they perform undignified backward somersaults to prove that they are "not really Southern." When they encounter something Southern--like white Southern frat boys at a party--their mind immediately conjures up images of segregated water fountains and they draw their swords and go into Crusader Against Racism mode. Viewed in this way, Nifong saw himself as a kind of white knight slaying the dragons of Southern bigotry. Nifong was not alone in this: dozens of Duke professors reacted to the incident in exactly the same way.

The only problem was that the facts didn't bear them out. The Duke players apparently weren't planning a rape or a lynching; they were merely misbehaving in the manner of "boys gone wild." So the world is different now and the old models don't necessarily apply. I suspect that MIke Nifong is not the only fellow who is going to learn this lesson the hard way.

Plato said the highest form of justice is discretion, and what he meant is that penalties should be proportined to the particular offense. In this sense, "rule of law" is imperfect justice, because it applies a general standard to everyone. In some cases that can lead to injustice.

We see the problems with general rules "blindly" applied in the case of Genarlow Wilson, a 17 year old who had consensual sex with a 15 year old girl. Since the girl was under-age, Wilson was charged with rape and given a 10 year sentence. He has already served two.

Wow, that was one costly sexual encounter. Fortunately a judge has decided that Wilson has served enough time and ordered his release. But no, Wilson can't get out yet because the district attorney wants to appeal. What? Will someone please talk sense into this man?

I'd like to see the wrath of the law focus instead of Mike Nifong, the opportunistic prosecutor who tried to build a career by convicting the Duke lacrosse players of rape. Nifong's ethics hearing starts today, and now it's his turn to be the object of scrutiny. In the Duke rape case, the facts didn't seem to matter one bit to Nifong. Rather, he played fast and loose with the law, using and abusing his power, in order to advance himself. This is a true case of prosecutorial misconduct.

I don't know what the appropriate penalty is for Nifong. Maybe what he did isn't an indictable offense. But they should at least take away his law license. I'd like to see him selling real estate or waiting tables in one of Raleigh Durham's upscale restaurants. If that happens, I wonder if those Duke boys would leave a tip.

Courtesy of family

I've been following this (ridiculous) story since last December. Not sure how the exoneration of the Duke lacrosse players will help Genarlow Wilson, but I certainly hope it does. (Be sure to check out Dinesh's posts on the Duke case, too.)

From the Turks: Let Him Go!

Here's the story from the NYTimes:

The former football player, Genarlow Wilson, is serving 10 years without parole for having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl at a New Year's Eve party, an offense that constituted aggravated child molesting even though he was 17 at the time.

The mandatory sentence shocked even the jury that convicted him. State law has since been changed to make most consensual sex between teenagers a misdemeanor.

But the courts have ruled that the new law does not apply to Mr. Wilson, and the district attorney in his case, David McDade of Douglas County, has opposed efforts this session to pass a law that would allow judges to review earlier cases and to revise sentences.

"Six young men basically gang-raped a 17-year-old and had repeated sex acts with a 15-year-old," Mr. McDade, told Channel 11, the local NBC affiliate, in March. "There's no member of the legislature that I think would condone that behavior."

But the jury in Mr. Wilson's case disagreed with Mr. McDade's depiction. After being repeatedly shown a home videotape of sex, drugs and alcohol at the New Year's Eve party in a hotel room in Douglas County, they acquitted Mr. Wilson of rape. The five other young men at the party have pleaded guilty to lesser charges. None have been convicted of rape.

Read the rest of the story

We know about Mike Nifong, and it looks like he's going to get his comeuppance. But what about the intellectual mau-mau artists at Duke, influential figures on the faculty, who whipped the campus up into a racial hysteria? What hapens to the people who helped to create a mob mentality against three students, rendering their lives miserable for more than a year, when their guilt was never established, never even probable, and now they have been shown to be innocent?

From the time the first reports of sexual assault at Duke University surfaced, these intellectual vigilantes went to work. Houston Baker, a professor of English and Afro-American Studies, issued a public letter condemning the "abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence and drunken white male privilege loosed among us." He seems to have simply presumed the students guilty.

Shortly after that, 88 members of the Duke arts and science faculty--the so-called Gang of 88--signed a public statement praising campus demonstrators who had distributed a "WANTED" poster that branded the lacrosse players as "rapists." The Gang of 88 didn't use that term, but its statement referred to "what happened to this young woman." Ignoring calls to wait for the evidence, the gang instead went into full social-justice gear.

"What is apparent every day now is the anger and fear of many students who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism, who see illuminated in this moment's extraordinary spotlight what they live with every day...We're turning up the volume in a moment when some of the most vulnerable among us are being asked to quiet down while we wait. To the students speaking individually and to the protesters making collective noise, thank you for not waiting and for making yourselves heard." In other words, Go vigilantes go!

So the offense given to the female Rutgers basketball players was so grievous that it demanded Imus be fired. Fine, but what about the harm caused to the lives of those Duke lacrosse players?

The wrongly-accused Duke students did not merely endure a two-word insult. They have had to suffer through the most horrific allegations, launched in a witch-hunt atmosphere that lasted for more than a year. They got little support from the university, and virtually no cooperation from the state.

What's the appropriate punishment for Mike Nifong, the opportunistic prosecutor, who seems to have "played" the evidence to promote his career? And what about the long list of Duke professors--some African American, some white--who circulated petitions using the incident to demonstrate racism at Duke, helping in the process to create the atmosphere of racial hysteria in which the whole incident was examined?

I hold no brief for Imus and given his scumbag behavior over years, an argument can be made that he deserved what he got. But on balance I consider the Duke show-trial, thankfully now ended, to have been a much greater miscarriage of justice. The Duke professors, even more than Imus, should have known better and not abused their power. Instead they played the race card and ruined these students' lives in their own university setting. Who will hold them accountable for the pain they have caused?

So Barack Obama inserts himself into the brouhaha surrounding Durham, NC district attorney Mike Nifong's handling of the Duke Lacrosse team rape case. It doesn't matter that it's a state far from Illinois and involves a case that's been unaddressed by all the other candidates.

By calling for an independent inquiry into madman Nifong's behavior, Obama's ostensibly (and in my opinion, rightly) siding with the lacrosse players.

And nervous white Democrats everywhere sigh relief.

Obama's one smart cookie.