Until Proven Innocent

Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case by Stuart Taylor Jr and KC Johnson, 405 pages

On Monday, March 13, 2006, some members of the Duke Men's Lacrosse team held a party at an off-campus house rented by several of their teammates.  The highlight of the evening was to be a performance by a pair of strippers, but one of the dancers arrived inebriated and unable to perform.  An angry scene ensued, ending with the sober entertainer, Kim Roberts, hauling her drunken colleague, Crystal Mangum, whom she had not met prior to that evening, to her car.  Shortly thereafter, Roberts approached police at a local supermarket, complaining that Mangum refused to leave her car.  Finding Mangum incoherent, the policemen called for an ambulance to transport her to a hospital.  Once there, Mangum told concerned health care workers several wildly different accounts of the night's events, converging on the claim that she had been raped by multiple men at the party.  Although Mangum was inconsistent on a wide range of important elements - the number of attackers, their descriptions, Roberts' role - and although her story was contradicted by testimony from Roberts and the team members, as well as physical, DNA, photographic, and electronic evidence, three members of the team would eventually be charged with rape.  The others would see their season cancelled, their coach fired, and themselves threatened by protesters, denounced by professors, and labelled as racist rape-enablers by The New York Times and CNN.

Yet the main villain of the story, as told by Taylor and Johnson, is not Mangum, but District Attorney Mike Nifong.  For Nifong, a white man in the midst of a desperate three-way election battle in which his opponents were a woman and an African-American, Mangum's story represented an ideal opportunity to appeal to women and minorities.  Once set on this course, the prosecutor was determined to continue to pursue the case even if it required the concealment of exculpatory evidence.  The secondary villains are those activists and media figures who, driven by an ideology of racial and sexual resentment, aided and abetted the injustices committed against these young men.  Finally, the authors are deeply critical of the Duke administration's inability to offer even a qualified defense of their students in the face of the angry mob, allowing outrage to trump evidence.

Taylor and Johnson, both of whom reported on the case as it unfolded, carefully detail the story at every stage of its development.  Their intimate understanding of the personalities involved is clear, and it allows them to prioritize the personal over the political, but unfortunately this also leads to some apparent personal animus against certain figures.  There is also a certain amount of necessary repetition - as lies are repeated over and over with slight variations, so too the truth must prove as tireless as the lies.