As a follow-up to my Dec. 28th, 2006 post, all charges against the Duke players have been dropped, the prosecuting D.A. has been disbarred from practicing law, and everyone is wringing their hands at the injustice done to these fine upstanding students at this southern university.
Sure the D.A. cynically catered to the Black community's cries for justice, even though he knew early on that the case against the students were problematical. Of course he had an ulterior motive, he needed the Black vote in his bid to be re-elected, which he was.
Sure, the university, civic leaders and others, rushed to judgement in this case against the students, before all the facts were fully known and investigated. Sure, sometime-ambulance chasers like Jesse and Al, flew into town to weigh-in on the situation.
But what is seldom talked about, is the not-too-distant racist history of North Carolina and the south in general, that made this town and university leaders particularly sensitive to charges of rape against a Black woman. After all, not too long ago, rapes and lynchings of Blacks were commonplace, and would seldom even be investigated, much less the white perpetrators being tried and convicted.
So a plausible rape charge like this, set off serious overreactions, not so much because of this crime, but because of all the other crimes against Blacks in the south, which were never prosecuted. So these students were prematurely charged, due to the history of a lack of charges that should have been, but never brought against a long line of white criminals, some of whom are still walking around freely in the south, and others who were allowed to die uninvestigated, untried and unconvicted.
Lastly, the students were the victims of a confused and unstable alleged victim, and an overzealous, politically ambitious D.A. - so welcome to the real world of what Black defendants routinely go through in the criminal justice system of America. Also these students are now widely portrayed by the media as victims. They have done TV news shows with sympathetic interviewers asking how they survived such an ordeal. The students may have been victimized, but are they totally innocent victims? Rarely is it mentioned that they used an escort service to hire two women to strip and ???? The team house had a well-known reputation for rowdiness and unruly conduct. One of the emails recovered from one of their computers described a fantasy of dismembering one of the strippers. There were other run-ins with the law - 15 of the 47 Lacrosse team members, had been cited for public and underage drinking, and one of the defendants had been arrested in D.C. with other friends for beating a man in a bar while tauting him with gay slurs. According to the escort service, they were led to believe that the strippers would be entertaining for a bachelor party and there would only be five guys there. Also the second stripper said the accusing stripper was okay until she was given a drink by one of the students and became glassy-eyed and unstable.
These are not just innocent students caught up in a situation they had no responsibility for fostering. So a little bit of delayed, blow-back karma, drifted their way, and they did not care for, nor like, how it felt.
So I'm saying to the students, tough! - get over it! - like Blacks have had to do for hundreds of years!
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3 comments:
I wholehearteldy agree with your comments! And thank you for the back story on this about North Carolina.
Also, I am commenting as one who has personally experienced the back hand side of the criminal justice system. I worked for many years as an insurance claims adjuster (and was quite a diligent, excellent worker I might add too). I started young and worked for several companies (as the only way to climb the pay ladder and escape often racist departments is to move to another company...that is until their eventually horns come out too...Plus I never planned to retire in that field which was overly stressful).
As a claims adjuster you settle claims either by paying for damages to property, or negotiating and settling injury claims. You are also responsible for issuing checks. Each company gives you a certain amount of $ authority to settle claims, and you are left their trust in you to handle their money up to your authority. For the record, it was NEVER even an inkling of a tempation to pilfer their money. I always worked hard, and usually worked a second job, after starting as a claims adjuster while still putting myself through college.
At one of the last companies that I worked for I unfortunately fell victim to what turned out to be a thieving co-worker. I've always been one to think and look for the best in people and had no clue that this person had this whole other white-collar crime side to him. I had NO idea that he (a well-liked, employee-of-the-month-black male) had been stealing money from this company for what turned out to be a couple of years by then. And as it turned out, his partner in crime (literally) was another co-worker, an older white female who he was quite friendly with and interacted with socially after work (she was dating his black friend). I never understood what he had in common with her that made them hang out so much when he knew that she was (even on the surface) someone that you would not really trust even just as a co-worker, less known as a friend. But, after this whole ordeal, I obviously understood their connection: Come to find out, they had been stealing money together for about two years, starting a year before I even got to the company.
The way I got used was by the black male co-worker, Terry, catching me in a quick moment at work and having me to sign a check that he said that he needed to expedite quickly to settle a claim that an attorney was having picked up shortly. Now, this type of thing is done all day long in claims offices. Supervisors routinely sign checks over your authority, and most times don't even look hardly at the file itself. (If they have built trust you and know your work, it is impractical for them to check everything. I had to even stop a supv. once who signed a 20k+ check for one of my cases who didn't even look at anything. And I had to remind her that that she might want to look at the file further which brought to her attention that the check was even over her owh authority, and she needed to get it signed by uppper mgmt.) I was not a supv., but it was common at that particular company for adjusters to sign checks for each other because we were left for months at a time without even having a manager, as it was a very small dept. with high turnover.
So, to make a long story short, 9 months after signing that check for Terry (and after I had already left the company), I learned that a big investigation had been going on by the authorities and indicated that Terry and the while female co-worker had been robbing the company blind, to the tune of over 200k! And I also learned that one of their friends that they had been writing checks to had the same name as the payee on the check that Terry had me sign that day! (I always remembered that name on the check after I signed it, because it later started to ring a bell as a name that I had heard as a friend of his. It was a common name, so I dismissed it as a coincidence, and thought, "nah!..." And even if it was the same name, it was just a coincidene that one of his claimants had the same common name as one of his friends name who I thought I had heard before.)
Well, you can see where this naive line of thinking led me...straight to my getting majorly burned! Not only by the black male co-worker who used me to sign a fraudulent check...but by the criminal justice system who blew this case up in an obviously racist way. I heard about this investigation one year, and was in shock and rightfully paranoid that I would be implicated. I talked to a reputable attorney then who told me not that if I were interviewed (with an attorney), and the facts were seen, it should be clear in the end that I knew nothing about it. But, yet, I find out 2 years! after I found out that Pat and Terry were arrested, that I too am indicted! And I find out by my friends and family seeing my name on the evening news as them two AND ME had been stealing money from this company! The district attorney had just haphazardly thrown my name into the indictment without any regard for the facts. And I learned through this the saying that goes, a d.a. can practically get a grand jury to indict (rubber stamp) a ham sandwich. They had 500 pages of evidence in this case, and about 2 sentences with my name in it about the check that I had signed. And I later read in the evidence that even this Bonnie and Clyde duo had had a supv. to sign one of these checks. But, of course, this white male supv. was not indicted. And I ALSO remember Terry having a white female co-worker of ours sign a check for him too. And OF COURSE, she wasn't indicted. But, of course, me, I'm indicted (without warning) and on the evening news, like we're a 3-(crime)ring circus. Needless to say, none of the payees that they were writing checks to had any connection to me. They were all their friends and family.
But yet, with all the indications that I most likely didn't know anything about their stealing money scheme that had been going on well before I even got to the company, I'm indicated with them. They had my name on one check out of over 40, but yet I'm haphazardlhy indicted.
Then, when I have to go through the criminal justice process, I experience the district attorney who obviousl could have cared less about the true facts of the case, or me, a no name colored girl. I was just another number, and hopefully, easy conviction for me. After 10 months my charges were totally dismissed. No trial, no discussion, no plea, and of course NO facts to support why I was even negligently indicted in the first place. And most of all, of course, NO APOLOGY.
So, saying this whole long story (still shortening it for blogging purposes) to say, NO I have no sympathy for the Duke boys. Welcome to our world. And if they don't like it on this side for a change, deal with it and be an agent for change...for all people.
p.s. I actually consider this whole experience, though extremely difficult and painful, to have been a blessing. I strengthened by faith and resolve, and it changed my sympathy for our people to true empathy to what injustice feels like. Plus, I became even more of an agent for change by changing my profession to social service and advocacy.
(excuse the previous typos)
But the other obviously racist aspects of the case I was involved in was this one very blatant fact:
When Terry and the white female were arrested (a year after they left the company and the investigation yielded charges, and 2 years before I found out that I was to be indicted also), the insurance commissioner (for state of Georgia) stages this whole media event when he had Terry arrested. Now, of course, Terry was totally wrong and stupid for committing these crimes in the first place. But the way that he and the white lady were handled in terms of their arrests was blatantly racist. The insurance commissioner (a Republican with skeletons and scandals later falling out of his own closet, but is STILL in office) had his own political agenda and staged a press conference timed for when the police would pull Terry out of his corporate job in hand cuffs with his pockets pulled out. Meanwhile (back at the ranch), the white female (who based on the evidence got Terry STARTED in this insurance fraud scheme when he stared working there after her) was at home watching his arrest on the news. I heard from an associate that she had told someone that she wasn't worried about this (being arrested like Terry was, etc.) because she had already worked something out. And had made arrangments to turn herself in. Her face and picture were not on the news ever, nothing but her name. (And fortunately my picture was never on the news, as thank God that I'd never had a mug shot to plaster when they threw my name in the dragnet indictment 2 years later.) But Terry, a black man, was the face of this case.
In the end, I believe that both Terry and the white lady got the first time offenders program. Now that's one time that a black man did well to be hooked up with a white woman. The only reason he wasn't thrown under the jail is because they would have had to throw the white lady under it with him. So, they both got off fairly light, in my opinion.
p.s. Another note: I knew a friend who had worked in the insurance commissioner's office years before this case, under the previous Democrat commissioner. She would tell us then that the then-commissioner was adamant about not pursuing these types of cases in the media. He didn't want anything to do with anything that looked racist. Though they had a lot of Nigerian insur. fraud cases, and others who had stolen money, he was strongly against putting it in the media...not wanting to appear racist. Not the case with the next Bush-like commissioner. He went after the racist angle with both dripping fangs.
Wow Kim, thanks for sharing your horrific experiences, but it further proves that we are routinely targeted, whereas whites usually get the benefit of the doubt and a presumption of innocence until proven otherwise. The way the students were charged and convicted in the public areana, is rare for those of their race and class. Maybe their ordeal is karma for hiring black strippers for their sick 'entertainment' rather than paying for more expensive white strippers, which they could well afford. Also one of the students had a previous conviction for sexual assault - that fact was rarely reported by the media, but could have been used by the prosecution against the students had the case gone to trial and had not been dropped.
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