Hard lessons learned from the Duke rape case

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Now that the rape charges against Duke University lacrosse players Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty and David Evans have been dropped, Durham County, N.C., District Attorney Mike Nifong should do the right thing, cut his losses and drop the remaining charges of kidnapping and sexual assault against the three defendants. That would close what has to be one of the dreariest episodes in the history of rape and racial victimization cases.

But Nifong has given no hint that he has learned any lessons from the fiasco. Whether he’s driven by ego, the need to save face or just plain stubbornness, he’s determined to barge ahead and pile more embarrassment on himself with a prosecution. But there are compelling lessons that can be learned from the aborted rape case — even if Nifong hasn’t learned them.

One is the danger of shouting race in a rape case. Women’s groups have waged a relentless and often frustrating fight to get police, prosecutors, the courts and the media to treat rape as a serious crime, especially when the alleged victims are poor or minority women and the alleged attackers are white males. But a suspect cry of rape in a racially charged case does great harm to that fight.

It leaves rape victims of any color and income wide open to the charge that they will falsely shout rape to cover up their sexual misdeeds. That could make police more hesitant to make arrests and prosecutors even more gun shy about vigorously prosecuting rape cases. It also makes black leaders, most of whom are male, more reluctant to strongly denounce genuine sexual victimization crimes. That puts women, particularly black women, at greater risk of sexual attack. That’s a tragedy, because sexual victimization is a deadly fact of life for countless women.

The next lesson: in a racially charged and politically tainted rape case, the battle lines are quickly drawn. In the Duke case, they were scrawled almost the instant the charges were filed. Black and women’s groups squared off against a legion of coaches, jocks and a deeply skeptical public. One side screamed that it was a case of privileged white males victimizing a black woman, while the other side screamed that the players were the ones being victimized because they were white and athletes.

The screams that the case was a bogus racial hit by an overly ambitious prosecutor, or that the case proved how badly black women are victimized, grew louder and more fierce with each new revelation in the tortured case. The confusing and contradictory statements that the alleged victim gave about the attack, the failure of DNA tests to match the alleged assailants to the alleged victim, the infamous public recant on “60 Minutes” by Kim Roberts, the accuser’s dance partner and the event’s principal witness, and the disclosure that the alleged victim had sexual contact with others immediately prior to the alleged assault stoked public fury.

The three players indicted in the case and their attorney quickly pounced on each new revelation, loudly claimed that the players were innocent and demanding that the charges be dropped. They also protested that the case had irreparably damaged the good names and reputations of the athletes. They were right, and that engendered even more public sympathy for their clients.

There was a lesson, too, for black leaders. To their credit, the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson didn’t stampede to the barricades and demand conviction and severe punishment for the accused assailants, as they have in past hot ticket racially tinged cases. Who can forget Tawana Brawley and the black students that tore up a football stadium in Decatur, Ill., a few years back? Sharpton and Jackson instantly screamed racism. Every time they did, they hopelessly muddled the case and inflamed racial tensions.

In the Duke case, a reflexive shout of racism would have further discredited the legitimate fight against sexual victimization. Because of that, black leaders should have gone one step further and urged the Duke protestors to cool their rhetoric until all the facts were in. They didn’t. Black leaders’ great fear is that if they rebuke blacks that abuse race to grab headlines that would be tantamount to race treason.

Then there’s Nifong. He was roundly denounced for rushing to judgment on the case to curry favor with blacks and women’s groups, purportedly to boost his chances of winning re-election. There’s no evidence that Nifong purposely used the case to do that, but there’s no doubt that politics and race badly clouded the case from the start.

Whether it’s O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson or any other high profile racially charged case, prosecutors are always tempted to pander to public passions and engage in media posturing. That’s a fatal mistake. If the evidence is there, that should be the only thing that prosecutors pay attention to. When they start focusing elsewhere, they risk not only the humiliating loss experienced by Nifong, but also needlessly fueling public cynicism that justice is for sale and that the system is hopelessly flawed.

The Duke case bruised lives, gave the justice system a momentary black eye, stirred racial divisions on one of America’s elite campuses and riled the public. The final lesson is that when politics, race and passions collide in a questionable case, caution and good sense go out the window. The Duke case proved that.

BlackNews.com columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author, political analyst and social issues commentator.