Duke Rape Case--The Aftermath Cometh

I don't think I have ever posted about the Duke rape case, leaving the topic to much better bloggers. But I have read today three excellent posts on the subject today.

First comes Thomas Sowell over at Real Clear Politics. For Sowell, the greater tragedy, even more than the fate suffered by the accused, is the further damage to institutions whose quick rush to judgment has damaged their personal and collective reputations even more than they had previously thought.

The January 29th issue of The Weekly Standard has a devastating article about the lynch mob atmosphere created, not only by the Duke University faculty and administration, but also by writers for such "respectable" publications as the New York Times and the Washington Post, not to mention a professor of law at the University of Southern California and a former president of Princeton.

We have become a society easily stampeded, even by the unsubstantiated, inconsistent and mutually contradictory statements of a woman with a criminal record.

All it takes is something that invokes the new holy trinity of the intelligentsia -- "race, class and gender." The story of a black woman gang-raped by white men fit the theme so compellingly that much of the media had no time to waste trying to find out if it was true before going ballistic.

So quick were the media and liberal academia on the guilty until proven innocent meme, that I am suprised the Duke Medical Center didn't report a massive rash of whiplash. The so-called professional skeptics of the press and the rational thinkers of academia rushed headlong into a brutal slaying of these young men's character that cannot be repaired with an apology. Not that one is likely to come.

Jim Lindgren, at the Volokh Conspiracy, has two worthy posts on the subject as well. The first is about the media coverage and a hearty commendation to KC Johnson, a blogger who has followed the case with the tenaciousness of a hungry wolf. Lindgren believes Johnson's coverage of the case is worthy of a Pulitzer prize, but alas, bloggers are not eligible, because new media reporters can't be rewarded by old media--it just doesn't work that way.

However, Johnson and Lindgren both praise the work of the Duke Chronicle, the student newspaper at Duke. From Johnson:

In fact, compare the Chronicle’s coverage to that of the New York Times on this case, but remove the mastheads from the two papers. I suspect that most people would guess that the Times, with its (until recently) simplistic, one-sided articles and commentary was the college newspaper, and the Chronicle’s work was that of the country's paper of record.

Indeed.

A little later, Lindgren looks at the support for the Duke Men's Lacrosse team from teh school's women's lacrosse team and the abuse the latter received for supporting their fellow classmates. After quoting some of the slimy attacks on their character for supporting their friends, Lindren offers this:

The women of the Duke lacrosse team knew that their friends on the men’s team were innocent because they had talked with them, they knew that the rape story was implausible, one of the men had an airtight alibi, and, of course, the Duke suspects had already been exonerated by the DNA evidence.

Meadow writes about all the people who need to apologize, but I was thinking that some of the courageous people who spoke up for the truth relatively early on should be recognized and honored for their efforts. Every year Duke gives many graduating students prizes for contributions to the community. Every graduating member of the Duke women's lacrosse team (as well as perhaps the chief reporters and editors of the Chronicle) should be given the William J. Griffith University Service Award.(Link in original)

Loyalty is such a precious trait and apparently one in short supply at Duke, that the women's team is unlikely to receive any award for their behavior. However, their admirable stance in the face of ridicule and disparagment of an entire community should not go unnoticed.

The whole episode has so many losers that it is difficult to find anything positive to come out of the affair. But the women's lacrosse team may very well be the only bright spot.