What sort of person must a man be who knowingly destroys the reputations of three young men, wrecks the lives of all their families, ruins an athletic season for dozens more, all on the testimony of a notoriously unreliable witness who the man, a district attorney, had every reason to know was lying? It seems hard to believe that anyone could be that contemptible but that's precisely what Michael Nifong did in the Duke "rape" case.
What his motives were is unclear. Some speculated that he saw a political opportunity to ingratiate himself with the African-American community and the ideological left by pressing charges against privileged white males accused of raping a black woman. It turns out that the woman was a liar, both emotionally and mentally unstable, and whatever Nifong's intentions were in prosecuting this case he clearly was guilty, at best, of total incompetence and at worst of prosecutorial abuse in being willing to destroy the lives of people he knew were innocent.
Now he faces eviction from the North Carolina Bar as well as civil suits which will almost certainly be brought against him by the families of the students. His career as a lawyer and a politician is evidently over. He'll doubtless be paying damages to the families for the rest of his life. If so, he'll be getting what he deserves.
We might hope that next somebody gets after the 88 Duke faculty who signed a letter condemning the accused boys before the whole world, and the craven president of the university who acted as if the students were guilty before any evidence had been produced against them.
We might also hope that somebody calls to account the various race hustlers, like Jesse Jackson, who were so blinded by their own racism that they assumed that a black girl known to be of dubious virtue was more credible than the protestations of innocence of privileged white boys.
The whole episode highlights the moral poverty and intellectual bankruptcy of common liberal assumptions about race, class and gender and the utter fatuousness of political correctness. Many liberals are so invested in the dogma that a woman who claims rape is not lying, they're so committed to the mythology of the exploitation of black women at the hands of white men, that the young Duke students were, in their minds, guilty as a matter of course.
What is on trial in the Duke imbroglio is more than the abuses of one arrogant, cruel, and stupid prosecutor. What is on trial in Durham is the mindset of many in the secular far left which demands that justice be subordinated to ideology. A lot of people have, in this sordid episode, vividly demonstrated that they are willing to believe anything, no matter how vile, about wealthy white men if the allegation against them is made by a black woman. That tells us a great deal about where the locus of racism and sexism is to be found in this country.
RLC