The View From Here . . .
By Bob Morgan, Jr.

It is perhaps not the ideal topic for the holiday season, but I've just finished a book that I think everyone should read. It's Until Proved Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case by Stuart Taylor, Jr. and KC Johnson (St. Martin's Press 2007). The book, unfortunately, is of local interest since one of the falsely accused players is from our readership area.

Mr. Taylor, a columnist for the National Journal and a contrib-uting editor for Newsweek and Mr. Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College, recount the sometimes tawdry, sometimes inspiring, story. In highly readable prose, they take the reader through the case and its many crosscurrents, from the boneheaded decision of the lacrosse team to hire a stripper, to the bizarrely false accusations of sexual assault, to excellent detective work by the defense team, to the eventual unraveling of the prosecution's case, to the defendants' final vindication.

There is no shortage of villains in the case. Obviously, chief among them (outside of the accuser herself, who at least had the excuse of having mental health issues) was Mike Nifong, the politically ambitious district attorney for the county in which Duke is located.

Mr. Nifong, now disbarred, attempted to use the Duke case to win a tough race for election. He used such tactics as making inflammatory statements about the accused, utilizing a ridiculously flawed photo identification process (only Duke players were included in the array) and then withholding for months exculpatory DNA evidence. He adamantly refused to consider proof of innocence, including one defendant's virtually airtight proof that he was not at the scene of the alleged crime at relevant times.

But there were many other villains as well. Members of the Duke faculty, which the authors convincingly describe as radicalized in many departments, almost immediately rushed to judgment, organizing rallies and placing an inflammatory advertisement in the campus newspaper discussing "what happened to that young woman".

But probably more appalling was the attitude of the Duke administration and its president, Richard Brodhead. Even after it was apparent that there were serious problems with the prosecution's case, the administration adopted an almost completely above the battle posture, with virtually no support for the accused students. Finally, much of the media either got the facts wrong or could not get past the story line that the case was about race, sex and class rather than actual guilt or innocence.

Of course, there were heroes as well. An African American law professor at Duke, James Coleman, remained a voice of reason throughout the case and issued a balanced report about the lacrosse team. Defense lawyers labored vigorously, with one, Brad Bannon, managing to ferret out hidden DNA evidence from a mass of papers produced by the testing lab. And the three defendants and their families remained steadfast throughout the ordeal.

In the end, the authors draw a number of lessons about the case - the importance of safeguards in criminal cases to avoid wrongful convictions (especially where the accused are not as well off as the Duke defendants), the problems of what the authors call "feminist overkill" in sexual assault cases and, perhaps most important, the problems with political correctness on campus, which has led to an almost complete lack of diversity of thought.

I trust that the families of the Duke accused are having a much better holiday season than they did last year. For the rest of us, the book by Mr. Taylor and Mr. Johnson provides both an inspiring and a cautionary tale.