Current Events Watch

It was déjà vu for me when I first heard three Duke LaCrosse players were being charged with rape. A friend asked me why I thought they were innocent. I told her the accounts I’d heard on the news just didn’t add up. When the DNA evidence didn’t match the players who were charged, I felt vindicated. Former prosecutor Mike Nifong is, at the moment, giving testimony in a Raleigh courtroom as part of a hearing about possible violations of ethical conduct in his handling of the case.

In 1994, I angered a group of mothers at my daughter’s elementary school. We’d all heard morning news accounts—Susan Smith describing a black man carjacking her, taking off with her two young sons. They were amazed at my distrust of Smith’s story. I remember I told the group Smith’s story just didn’t work for me. Eventually, I was vindicated on that one too. Smith’s doing life in prison for murdering her children. The black man was a fiction.

Remember Tawana Brawley? Her alleged rape, exploited by Al Sharpton who spun media like a cotton candy machine, occurred in 1997. Brawley accused six white men of the crime. They were exonerated. Sharpton got himself a makeover and has established a lucrative career as a self-appointed spokesperson for African-Americans.

The race card is alive and well in the United States, played by various races, it seems at times, on a whim.

The latest case almost ruined the lives of three young men whose nightmare started with a lousy decision to attend a party featuring a couple of strippers.

The alleged victim reportedly insulted the physical aspects, namely the sizes, of the party-goers’ sexual organs. Some of the party-goers reportedly insulted the victim by shouting racial insults.

Now Mike Nifong is being grilled, for not sharing comprehensive DNA results, for never personally interviewing the alleged victim, for turning a regrettable incident into an explosive race-charged political uproar.

One of the accused players, Reade Seligmann, described his life falling apart after the day he had to call his mother and tell her the results of the alleged victim’s participation in a line-up. “She picked me.â€?

And Nifong, ever the tinsel-tongued lawyer, described his actions in the case as stemming from the fact he “did not want decisions in the case to be based on politics.� When he uttered those words, there was a moment of stunned silence in the courtroom.

Asked about his constant off-the-cuff comments to the press, Nifong responded he may have gotten “carried away a little bit.�

Déjà vu, American style.

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