December 28, 2006
The Duke Lacrosse Boys Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:55 AM EST I have heard that there was a famous experiment in animal cognition where a chimpanzee was put in a room alone. Hanging from the ceiling, just out of the chimp’s reach, was a bunch of bananas. There was also a footstool in the room, but it was only when the footstool and the bananas happened to line up in the frustrated chimp’s line of sight that the light bulb went off in his head and he dragged the footstool over, climbed up, and grabbed the bananas. Yesterday, reading Ellen Feldman’s most interesting post about the part played by a Lionel train set in the second trial of the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama in the early 1930s, I suddenly felt like the chimp. If Ms. Feldman’s article was the footstool, the bunch of bananas was an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about the Duke “rape” case that is now disgracing the state of North Carolina. Put the two cases—separated by 70 years and a profound social revolution—together and they make a historically fruitful combination. For the two cases are remarkably similar in both form and substance, indicating just how far the pendulum has swung. Both cases took place in states of the old Confederacy. In both cases, young men were charged with the terrible crime of rape on no evidence other than the testimony of the accusers. In both cases the accusers had little if any real credibility and the rapes almost certainly never in fact took place. In both cases there was an immediate public outcry demanding action against the accused. In both cases the prosecution acted purely for political reasons. In both cases exculpatory evidence was suppressed or ignored. The difference between the two cases, of course, is that they are racial mirror images of each other. In the Scottsboro case, nine young black men (and boys—one was only 12) were charged with raping two white girls on a freight train. In the Duke case three young white men on the Duke lacrosse team were charged with raping a black woman hired to be a stripper at a team party. Another difference between the cases, of course, is that the Scottsboro Boys were uneducated and destitute, quite unable to secure adequate counsel, although when they finally did secure it, it didn’t help. The result was a gross miscarriage of justice that resulted in convictions and long periods spent in jail (although, despite numerous death sentences, none were executed). The Duke lacrosse players, however, are upper-middle-class, and their families immediately hired first-rate legal talent who have blown the case apart. The rape charges have already been dropped, and the other charges—sexual assault and kidnapping—will almost surely be dropped or dismissed soon. While the three accused young men have been through hell over the last 10 months and their parents have had to spend large sums of money, none has spent even a night in jail for their nonexistent crimes. Once the case does totally collapse, one can only hope that the North Carolina legal establishment will do justice by throwing the book at the prosecutor who put his own reelection as district attorney—by flagrantly appealing for black votes in a case he knew to be without real evidence—above his sworn duty to do justice and to follow the law himself. And Duke University’s president and many of the faculty will owe the Duke students a profound apology. Like the white citizens of 1930s Alabama, they did no more than look at the race of the accuser and the accused and decide guilt on the basis of it.
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