http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=392
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=173
by Carey Roberts
How did a drug-addled stripper succeed in smearing the reputations of three Duke lacrosse players, dividing a community along racial lines, and making a mockery of the American legal system? That’s the question that Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson pose in their recent bell-ringer book, Until Proven Innocent.
Unless your news source is the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1260, you know by now that Crystal Mangum accused three young lacrosse players of brutally raping and sodomizing her in the early morning of March 14, 2006.
Now fast forward to April 11, 2007 – that’s the day North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper stood before a hushed crowd and declared, “We believe that these case were the result of a tragic rush to accuse and a failure to verify serious allegations. We believe these three individuals are innocent of these charges.”Call it the perfect scandal. The Duke lacrosse case emerged from the rarified nexus of a mentally-imbalanced lady of the night, a racially-divided community, a cabal of Duke University professors, a politically-ambitious prosecutor, and a media enterprise that cared more about hyping a morality tale than getting the facts right.
For the first time, Until Proven Innocent weaves the delicate strands of the story, rendering the outrageous at least comprehensible.
From the very beginning, the Durham police knew Crystal Mangum was a crock. At 1:22am they were summoned to pick up a semi-conscious female at a local grocery store. Not a word was mentioned about rape.
Fearing she might harm herself, the officers decided to have her committed to a local detox facility. But Mangum knew she could side-step the detention center if she played the rape card. Problem was, she couldn’t make up her mind whether there had been three assailants, five, or twenty.
But there was one person stood by her to the bitter end – Tara Levicy, the hospital nurse who later said she never doubted a woman who screams “rape.” Over the ensuring months, Levicy would repeatedly amend, back-fill, and embellish upon the details of her hospital encounter.
http://www.postchronicle.com/commentary/article_212114817.shtml