At Least No Harm Was Done (Updated)

Unless you count, oh, say, the fact that Duke lacrosse coach Mike Pressler lost his job, the entire spring lacrosse season was canceled, two of the students charged were suspended, untold time, energy and money was spent on what now seems to have been an entirely unjustified prosecution and even more spent on their legal defense, racial tensions were heightened throughout Durham and much of the rest of the country, I think we can say that, all in all, the finally dismissed charges against the accused students was much ado about nothing. Hey, no harm no foul, right?

Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong, already up on ethics charges before the North Carolina State Bar including withholding evidence from defense lawyers, lying to the court and to bar investigators, and making misleading and inflammatory comments about the defendants, should be disbarred and then have his head served up on a platter and then be sued by the students on civil rights grounds. Usually, I’m all about the “innocent until proven guilty” thing, but I’ll make an exception here, seeing as how he so obviously did. Prosecutors wield enormous power and must accordingly be held to an extremely high standard of ethical conduct. Nifong’s conduct doesn’t even pass what lawyers call the straight-face test here; namely, the ability to voice a legal argument in open court without the lawyer or judge breaking out in laughter.

Forget race and sex and class. Criminal prosecutions isn’t about affirmative action. Prosecutors, even or especially the sort who hope to milk some political mileage out of a case, have no business being overzealous in charging rich white boys these days just because it used to be the case not so long ago that rich white boys routinely got away with murder or at least rape if the victim was a black woman.

I know next to nothing about the defendants or the alleged victim in this case. If there was probable cause to arrest and indict the students, they certainly should have been arrested and indicted; and if the evidence continued to hold up, they should have been tried; and, if guilty, they should have been convicted. But once the case began to unravel as it did here, the state had every bit as much responsibility to pull the plug on this fiasco as it did to move aggressively against the accused students in the first place.

Make no mistake about it, affluent white preppy lacrosse students at a rich, white preppy school like Duke are unsympathetic defendants. Schools don’t get much preppier than Duke and school sports don’t get much preppier than lacrosse. (Okay, so the equally preppy University of Virginia has a polo team. But, hey, it’s a public university and players have to provide their own horses!) And, yes, frat boys and jocks are capable of the most outlandish sort of behavior, too often including criminal behavior. But an assumption of guilt based in large measure on prejudice against the privileged is no less onerous than such assumptions aimed at the poor or underprivileged and it is no less loathsome when being white (or male) makes one a more likely suspect in the eyes of a prosecutor than being black.

The words inscribed above the main entrance to the U.S. Supreme Court building, Equal Justice Under Law, are clear enough even for a prosecutor to understand.

[N.B. -- This post is substantially the same as my Inactivist post of March 22, 2007.]