Saturday, December 08, 2007 10:51 AM
Blawg Book Highlighter #13: Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case
On April 17, 2006, a grand jury in Durham, North Carolina, issued sealed indictments against two members of the Duke University lacrosse team in connection with allegations that a stripper was raped at a team party a month earlier.
"Today, two young men have been charged with crimes they did not commit," attorney Robert Ekstrand said in a statement issued that day. "This is a tragedy. For the two young men, an ordeal lies ahead. …They are both innocent."
A month later, a third member of that lacrosse team would be charged in connection with the same alleged crime.
As I skimmed through old news stories about the case, I kept coming back to Ekstrand's April 17, 2006 statement. His words that day couldn't have been more prescient, for everything he said would ultimately prove to be true. All three men were completely innocent. All the charges against them would be dropped six months later, but not before they'd been vilified in the press, on campus and by a rogue prosecuting attorney who pushed aside all the evidence of their innocence. Ultimately, the case proved to be a tragedy of justice.
Not even two years later, at least three books analyzing the Duke lacrosse rape case have already been published. "It's Not About the Truth: The Untold Story of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case and the Lives It Shattered" by Don Yaeger and Mike Pressler, and "A Rush to Injustice: How Power, Prejudice, Racism, and Political Correctness Overshadowed Truth and Justice in the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case" by Nader Baydoun and R. Stephanie Good, both were released in June 2007. "Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case," by Stuart Tayler Junior and KC Johnson, came out three months later.
The three all suffer from over-stretched title syndrome, at an average of a whopping18 words per title. But it's the latest one, and the one with the shortest of the three titles (15 words), "Until Proven Innocent," that has garnered the widest acclaim.
Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, writes for the New York Times that although the authors "are at times carried away by righteous indignation, they can surely be forgiven in light of the consequences of the abuses they describe." Rosen concludes, "Taylor and Johnson have made a gripping contribution to the literature of the wrongfully accused."
Abigail Thernstrom of the Wall Street Journal calls "Until Proven Innocent" "a stunning book" that "recounts the Duke lacrosse case in fascinating detail and offers, along the way, a damning portrait of the institutions – legal, educational and journalistic – that do so much to shape contemporary American culture."
And Amanda Barrett, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, says "Until Proven Innocent is the most compelling true crime book of the year." Barrett concludes that after reading the book, "you will feel disgusted, if not outraged."
The authors wrote extensively about the Duke case before joining forces on the book. Taylor, a columnist for National Journal and contributing editor for Newsweek, was nominated for a National Magazine Award for his columns on the case. Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York, has written over 800 posts of news-breaking analysis about the Duke case on his blog, Durham-in-Wonderland, and was a consultant for ABC's Law and Justice Unit for the case.
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Randy Richardson is an author, humorist, former journalist, and a lawyer. His fiction debut, Lost in the Ivy, a murder mystery set against the backdrop of Chicago's storied Wrigley Field, won the Writers Marketing Association's “Fresh Voices” Book Award and the Illinois Woman's Press Association's Mate E. Palmer Communications Contest. He writes the Dad Libs column for SanityCentral.com and is a frequent contributor to Chicago Parent magazine. In his day job, he is an attorney for the Social Security Administration’s disability appeals branch. At night and during lunch breaks, he serves as president of the Chicago Writers Association (chicagowrites.org) and works on his second novel while a 4-year-old tugs on his legs. Visit his website at www.lostintheivy.com.
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