DA vows Duke case 'not going away'


April 12, 2006

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DURHAM, N.C. -- The district attorney investigating the alleged rape and assault of a North Carolina Central University female student by members of the Duke men's lacrosse team vowed Tuesday the case will continue and said he is waiting for additional DNA evidence.

Attorneys for team members said this week that the absence of DNA evidence from test results returned Monday shows their clients were not involved in a rape of the 27-year-old woman. No charges have been filed.

At a forum Tuesday at NCCU, Durham County District Attorney Michael Nifong said, "A lot has been said in the press, particularly by some attorneys ... that this case should go away. I hope you will understand that my presence here means that this case is not going away."

Nifong added that in about 75% of sexual-assault cases, there is no DNA evidence. "DNA results can often be helpful, but I've been doing this a long time, and for most of the years I've been doing this, we had to deal with sexual-assault cases the good old-fashioned way. Witnesses got on the stand and told what happened to them," Nifong said. "In this situation, I would suspect that a jury will get to evaluate the evidence."

Nifong did not elaborate on the type of DNA tests still to be completed, saying, "There are many types of DNA tests that can be done."

Bill Thomas, an attorney for one of the team captains, urged the accuser to recant, saying he believes she made up the allegations to avoid a charge of public drunkenness. "It is my sincere hope that she comes forward and tells the truth in this matter and allows these young men to go on with their lives and for this community to heal," Thomas said.

Published: April 13, 2006

DURHAM, N.C., April 12 — Defense lawyers for several players on Duke University's lacrosse team said Wednesday that they expected at least one player to be indicted, perhaps as early as Monday, in the investigation of a woman's charges that she was raped by three players at a party last month.


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Rape Allegations at Duke
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Complete Coverage » Bill Thomas II, who represents one of the lacrosse team's captains.

"All 46 young men said a crime did not occur, so who she picks, and which men would be involved, is sort of like spinning a roulette wheel," he said, referring to the player or players the woman has identified. "You can imagine that this is a very stressful time for all of those men and their families."

John F. Burness, Duke's senior vice president for public affairs and government relations, said he did not want to comment on speculation that there might be an arrest in the case.

"We have to let the criminal justice system take its course," he said.

Mr. Nifong, who is running for re-election, said during a public forum on Tuesday that the 27-year-old black woman who accused three white men of raping her identified at least one as a suspect last week. After a candidates' debate Wednesday, Mr. Nifong refused to elaborate on that comment or on any other aspect of the case.

"Right now, I'm only going to talk about my campaign," he said as he weaved through a crowd to avoid a group of reporters.

The woman's identification of at least one man who she said was among her attackers came about three weeks after she was hired to dance at a March 13 off-campus party for which the lacrosse team's captains played host.

The lawyers for the players have said that this time gap should cast doubt on the reliability of the woman's account.

The lawyers also said that DNA tests had failed to link the players to the accuser. They said this proved that the rape did not occur. After the DNA results came back Monday, Mr. Nifong said he would pursue the case because he believed a sexual assault had occurred. Additional higher-level DNA tests, done at another lab, were expected back as early as this week, he said.

In another development, the families of some players, Duke athletic department boosters and former Duke lacrosse players have acted together to hire Robert S. Bennett, a prominent Washington lawyer, as their spokesman.

Mr. Bennett, who represented President Bill Clinton in the Paula Jones sexual-harassment case, was hired by the group calling itself the Committee for Fairness to Duke Families.

In a statement, Mr. Bennett, a former federal prosecutor, said he did not represent any single player but a group of people who wanted to protect the reputation of Duke University.

"It is unfortunate that members of the Duke community, players and families are being judged before all the facts are in," The Associated Press quoted him as saying in his statement. "A lot of innocent young people and the families are being hurt, and unfortunately this situation is being abused by people with separate agendas. It is grossly unfair, and cool heads must prevail."

Wade M. Smith, who represents one of the lacrosse players, said he did not know what Mr. Bennett's exact role is in the matter. He said he hoped that Mr. Nifong dropped the case entirely, and soon, so that the players and everyone in this community could begin the healing process. He said that he and other lawyers had met with Mr. Nifong to ask him to do just that.

"I still have great hope that we would persuade the prosecutor not to go forward with the case," he said, adding that if the case did go to the grand jury, the prospect of an indictment and a subsequent arrest was high.

"Grand juries pretty much do what the prosecutor tells them to do," he said.

Viv Bernstein contributed reporting for this article.

DThotheJ,

Did you hear the crap those lawyers want to being up about that woman www.aol.com? Now they are trying to bring up that she came in drunk. They still haven't answered the magic question(s) about the strangulation and their reasons for not calling the cops. If they are going to cover their tracks ,at least I'm going to do my my best not to have any possible evidence left over from it.

Here's a deep perspective:

http://blogher.org/node/3916

[font="Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif"]someone else has this up and worth posting here for discussion[/font]

[font="Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif"]Duke case reopens wounds for black women [/font]
Many are fed up with stereotype of hyper-sexual African American female

The Associated Press
Updated: 5:35 p.m. ET April 13, 2006


The young black women can almost finish each other’s stories.

They go to a party, a concert, a nightclub. Twenty-somethings of all colors are flirting and dancing. And then it happens.

Inevitably, a woman says, a white man asks her to dance erotically while he watches. Or he grabs her rear end. Or asks for sex, in graphic detail, without bothering to ask her name.

“We can sort of count on it happening. My friends from California and New York and Boston all tell the same stories,� said 22-year-old Danielle Terrazas Williams, a graduate student at Duke University. “They’re watching you as if you’re performing for them, and it’s disgusting. You just sort of feel like, ‘Is this all we’re good for?�’

Black women have been talking about this for a long time now, but the conversation has heated up since accusations surfaced that white Duke lacrosse players raped a black student they had hired as a stripper and shouted racial slurs at her.

Loose talk about the case has fed the stereotype that black women are hyper-sexual and readily available. Rush Limbaugh, for example, called the black student a “ho� on the radio. He later apologized.

The stereotype is everywhere, said Rebecca Hall, a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley who studies images of black women.

“Turn on a music video. A black woman is somebody who has excess sexuality spilling out all over the place. It’s excess sexuality that white men are entitled to,� she said.

Black women stew about the narrow, negative ways they are nearly always portrayed. They are either quick-tempered and full of attitude like Tyler Perry’s Madea character or the comedian Mo’Nique, or they are barely dressed and brazenly sexual like the women mimicking strippers in so many music videos.



Black women cheered when Halle Berry won an Academy Award in 2002 for “Monster’s Ball.� But why, some grumbled, did a black woman have to take off her clothes and perform sex scenes with a white man to win acting’s highest honor? Why are black women so rarely portrayed as flirty or romantic without being slutty?

So when the Duke case erupted, it hit a nerve. Krista Summit of Durham, N.C., started a blog on the case, “Justice 4 Two Sisters,� referring to the two exotic dancer sent to the lacrosse team’s off-campus house, and it got 18,000 hits in the first two weeks. Formal discussions of the case have been held at Duke, North Carolina Central University, the alleged victim’s school, and at such institutions as Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and Spelman College in Atlanta.

The discussions started with the Duke incident but quickly turned toward larger concerns of black women, and in some cases widened into a discussion of sexual assaults in general, with white women joining in to express their concerns.

The facts about the Duke case remain in doubt, but the image of a black woman stripping for a room full of white athletes shouting racial epithets is painful to many black women.

This woman may be a stripper, but that is not all she is, black woman say. She is also a student and a working mother.

“If she’s a stripper, she becomes part of a seedy underworld,� Williams said. “What would the story look like if the headline had said, ‘Lacrosse team allegedly gang-raped and strangled a mother of two?�’

“There’s a certain level of disrespect on campus toward African-American females,� said Erica Howard, a junior at Vanderbilt. She cringes at the memories of a string of incidents on her campus with “girls who were walking in front of dorms and white guys would come up and grab them.�

It happens so often that campus police even have a name for it. They call it “forcible fondling.�

Santina White, a black senior at the University of Texas at San Antonio, was enjoying a Dave Matthews Band concert when a white male student struck up a conversation. “The first thing he wanted to talk about is how sizable his manhood is compared to black men,� she said. “We are always being looked upon as if that (sex) is all I like to do — that’s all I want.�

Again and again, women say pop culture reinforces the stereotypes.

“The way the media portrays black women, there are very few roles for black women that aren’t hyper-sexual,� Williams said. “Music videos are an obvious source. As benign as we think they may be, for some people music videos and movies are the only glimpse into black life that they will ever have.�

Hip-hop music videos routinely show black women nearly nude simulating sex acts and dancing erotically.

Rapper Remy Ma wears a sheer lace bustier, thigh-high boots and little else in the video for her latest single, “Conceited.� She says it is unfair to point the finger at hip-hop.

“Is that a rapper’s fault that that’s the way society is portrayed?� she asks. “Sex sells everywhere. Every commercial you look at, it’s all based around sex.�

Of course, it’s complicated. No one forces black women to disrobe on screen. And many of these images of black women accompany music produced and performed by black men. The raciest hip-hop videos play on “Uncut,� a Black Entertainment Television program starting at 3 a.m.

“The message that men get about black women is these are women that are available to them, that they have easy access and their sole purpose is to serve their pleasure,� said Mark Anthony Neal, a professor at Duke.

“The history of white men and black women, and the special fantasies and exploitation, is old and ancient,� the Rev. Jesse Jackson said when asked about the case. “The historical pattern of this behavior arouses so many fears and conjures up so many bad memories.�

Joan Morgan, author of “When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down,� said hyper-sexualized images of black women have “been here since slavery,� when white men owned black women and used them sexually. “But when you can look at a music video and see the same images acted out by white folks in the early 19th century, you’ve got to connect the dots there.�

Another great article:

http://dukeaaas.blogspot.com/2006/04...durham_13.html



"A Social Diasater"
: Voices from Durham--Mark Anthony Neal

(White) Male Privilege, Black Respectability, and Black Women’s Bodies
by Mark Anthony Neal

“As a black female, you go to a party, you're expected to dance, you're expected to be sexually provocative. You [are expected to] want to be touched, to be grabbed, to be fondled…As if they're re-enacting a rap video or something. As if we're there to be their video ho, basically. We can't just be regular students here. We can't just go to a party and enjoy ourselves.�—Audrey Christopher and Danielle Terrazas Williams (The Independent Weekly, 3.29.06)

“Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.�
—Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex�


When a young black women was allegedly raped, sodomized, robbed and beaten by members of the Duke University Lacrosse team of March 13th of this year, it was initially treated as little more than another case of “(privileged) boys gone wild�. As word began to spread about the specifics of the case, various communities mobilized to lay claim to its significance. These groups include Durham residents with long-standing grievances against the University, activists rightfully protesting yet another incident of alleged sexual violence related to a college campus, members of various black communities who wanted to highlight the racist implications of the alleged assault and of course those who felt that too many people were rushing to judgment about the alleged rapists, well before the true facts of the case were established. At the center of all of these claims and allegiances is the body of a young black woman, who in many ways has been continually assaulted, by the inability of the various narratives surrounding the case to take serious the realities of racialized sexual violence against women of color.

To date no charges have been filed in the so called “Duke lacrosse rape case�. The results of a DNA analysis taken after the alleged attack suggest that the members of the Duke lacrosse team were not involved in the attack, though the local district attorney will continue to pursue the case. As such I am less interested in trafficking through declarations of guilt and innocence in the case, but rather interested in illuminating the various perceptions that have been and will continue to be projected onto the body of the black woman who is the focal point of this case. As has been reported so far, the accuser is a full-time student at North Carolina Central University (NCCU) and a single mother of two. The young woman and a friend were purportedly hired to dance at a bachelor party at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. in Durham—a residence shared by several of the lacrosse team players.

Though some have downplayed the significance of race in this case—violence against women is violence against women—the intersections and race and gender are palpable. As Greg Garber notes in his fine coverage of the case for ESPN.com, the default request for exotic dancers at mainstream escort agencies is often white women (preferably blonde and big-breasted). Thus in all likelihood, regardless of what happened inside of 610 N. Buchanan Blvd, the young men were hoping to consume something that they felt that a black woman uniquely possessed. If these young men did in fact rape, sodomize, rob, and beat this young women, it wasn’t simply because she was a women, but because she was a black woman.

UCLA and Columbia University Law professor and critical race theorist Kimberle Crenshaw explains the uniqueness of discrimination against black women in her seminal essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex�. According to Crenshaw: “Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction , and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling in any number of directions, and sometimes, from all of them.� Using the traffic intersection as a metaphor, Crenshaw argues that black women often “experience double discrimination—the combined efforts of practices which discriminate on the basis of race and on the basis of sex. And sometimes, they experience discrimination as black women—not the sum of race and sex discrimination, but as black women.�

Of course there are historic discourses that have constructed black women as hypersexual insatiable, and exotic—such discourses have often been employed as the rationale for racialized sexual and rhetorical violence against black women. Contemporary examples of such discourses can be found in the flippant and hateful on-air comments by national radio personalities Rush Limbaugh and Neil Boortz, who described the alleged victim in the Duke lacrosse case and U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney, respectively, as a “ho� and a “ghetto slut�. Though it is often the music videos of hip-hop artists that are targeted for the degradation of black women’s bodies, these videos—like the syndicated shows of Boortz and Limbaugh, television networks like BET and MTV, and recording labels—are simply the vehicles for the corporately controlled circulation of black women’s bodies as such . The message is clear: black women and their bodies have little value, little protection and are accessible to anyone who feels entitled to them. Thus it should not be surprising that a generation of young white men, for whom the consumption of hip-hop has been second nature, would find a black exotic dancer desirable or in the worse case scenario, sexually available to them, even if she resist their advances. But the Duke lacrosse rape case is not simply about centuries old dramas across the color line—It also about the tensions within black communities about which black bodies deserve protection and defense

As the “identity� of the young black woman in the case began to be constructed in the media, it was revealed that she was an “exotic dancer� and un-wed mother of two. These facts should be irrelevant in a sexual assault case, but as is well known, defense attorneys often seek to demonize rape victims—in the courts and in the media—so that the integrity of the victim is called into question. The goal is to have the public and juries to believe that rape victims bear the burden of responsibility in their assaults. As scholar Wahneema Lubiano recently opined, this is part of the tenuous status of being a women in American society; If you are not “at home� under the “supervision� of a father or a husband, it is open season on your body. Already there have been attempts to portray the young woman who was raped, sodomized, robbed and beaten as immoral on the basis that she was a “stripper� and an unfit mother, who left her two children home while she performed.

But such demonization takes on another dynamic within the world of “black respectability.� It was clear from the outset, that for some black communities in Durham, NC, the young women was not a “respectable� victim. The concept of “black respectability� can be traced back to the struggles of African-Americans in the early days following “emancipation�, where so many of the former enslaved sought to find common ground—a shared humanity—with the white citizenry. The strategy behind “black respectability�—exemplified in the late 19th and early 20th century by the Black Women’s Club Movement and the New Negro Movement and much later by the NAACP Image Awards—was to put the “best face� of the race forward. Accordingly, it also meant that less savory black bodies and antics had to be reduced to so-called “dirty laundry�—never to see the light of day. It was a logical strategy, given the pervasiveness of white supremacy in the century after emancipation and the desire of many black leaders to fight racism, disenfranchisement and racist violence on moral grounds. But it also created the context where those black bodies and practices that were not thought to be respectable enough were jettisoned to the margins of black life and culture.

Ultimately the desire was to find the most “respectable� victims to help animate black communities to struggle against racism, segregationist practices and disenfranchisement. The late Rosa Parks embodied such a “victim�. As noted scholar Aldon Morris notes in his book The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, Parks galvanized blacks in Montgomery, AL and nationally, in part, because she was a “quiet, dignified woman of high morals�. (52) The same could not be said for fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin, who more than 8 months _before_ Rosa Parks’s historic act, refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. Unlike Ms. Parks, Ms. Colvin loudly protested the request that she move from her seat and was eventually charged with assault and battery on the bus driver who made the request and the police officers who were called in to intervene. When it was eventually revealed that Ms. Colvin was an un-wed, pregnant teen, black activists in Montgomery backed off of her case, waiting for a more respectable candidate—Ms. Parks—to emerge. Though the Duke Lacrosse case occurs in a different historical context than the Montgomery bus boycott, the silence and ambiguity emitting from some in black communities in Durham and elsewhere resembles the efforts of Montgomery’s black leaders to distance themselves from Colvin.

Even more profound are those who would distance themselves from the alleged victim in the Duke lacrosse case, because she was involved in “immoral� behavior. Such a point was made by Herald-Sun columnist John McCann—in many ways the “voice� of Black Durham—who suggested that the case was about the “consequences of violating moral laws.� (3.29.06) He later added in a subsequent column that the young woman was at 512 Buchanan Blvd. to “arouse and titillate young men who allegedly stumbled the same way she did—inappropriately using the body and mind.� (4.04.06) In McCann’s world a “thin line separates the criminal�—rape—and the “immoral�—exotic dancing. McCann’s comments are reflective of a deep social conservatism that offers little protection those who are thought to be immoral. Thus had the alleged victim in this case had been a gay black man or a black lesbian—such as the late Sakia Gunn (and far too many like her)—who was randomly assaulted, their assaults would likely be met with the same level of silence and moral scrutiny (as compared to your run-of-the-mill gang-banger, who gets shot by a law enforcement officer).

The real immorality here is the way that “silence� makes so many black folk complicit in sexual attacks against black women and girls. For every media spectacle, which highlights sexual violence across the color line, there are numerous black women who are assaulted in their own communities and even homes by black men. This is the point that Aishah Shahidah Simmons’s poignant documentary NO! makes throughout. Black male sexual violence against black women and girls is more often than not, met with blatant silence and denial or in the case of black celebrities, what University of Florida law professor Katheryn Russell-Brown calls “black protectionism�. In her book Protecting Our Own: Race, Crime, and African-Americans (Rowman & Littlefield) defines black protectionism as “what happens when the African-American community rallies around its fallen heroes—those prominent blacks who have been accused of wrongdoing.� Black protectionism figures prominently in issues of rape and sexual abuse in the black community given the number of highly visible black men, to name a few, who have been accused (Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas), convicted (heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson and former congressman Mel Reynolds) and recorded (R. Kelly) of/in acts of sexual abuse and harassment against black women and girls. In each case, to varying degrees, these men benefited from black protectionism. As Russell-Brown notes, “black protectionism splits the Black community by gender. It treats prominent black men as a unique class.�

The Duke lacrosse rape case has generated so much attention and media coverage because it traffics in the time tested spectacles of race relations and white privilege gone awry. Regardless of whether or not anyone is indicted and convicted in the case, the reality is that women will continue to be raped and those sexual assaults will continue to be met with silence and a degree of dismissiveness that holds the victims accountable for attacks on their bodies. If anything should come of the human tragedy that is unfolding in Durham, NC, it should be to challenge us as a nation to take very seriously the incidences of sexual assault—in all of its forms—and to construct responses to those crimes that are reflective of a society concerned with all assaults on our humanity.

***

Mark Anthony Neal is Associate Professor of African-American Studies at Duke University and the author of four books, including the recent New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity.

Here is my theory about her being (according to the police officer who first made contact with her) "passed out drunk". Now it makes more sense why there was a problem with the dna. I think they drugged her and used condoms in the assault. There are also reports that she told the nurse at the hospital that foreign objects were also used in the assault, so there wouldn't be any human dna from that either. They knew no one would believe a drunk, passed out Black stripper.

The DA has ordered a second round of more high-tech dna tests. Wonder why.

I beleive also that the female was drugged. This was a well planned and thoughtout attack. White men beleive it is a right of passage for them to have sex with black women, either willingly or by force. First they(white boys) tried to hide their ID by claiming they were members of the basketball and baseball teams. All changed their names in order to confuse her. It is also interesting that they Just Happened to have cameras and took photos trying to support their claim. Even though indictments were handed down for two of the white boys, I am not impressed. The D.A. is playing games and hedgeing his bets too. Since he is up for re-election and will need the white vote, he has done nothing of his own accord to bring these white boys to justice. He took a cop-out by sending the case to the Grand Jury thereby letting them decide to bring charges or not. If not, it was the juries decision, and if so, it was their decision.

In this case, the media set out to Prove a rape did'nt occur or at least not at the hands of the white Duke boys. But since this kind of behavior is considered a Right of Passage for them(white men) most have participated in this behavior themselves and since black women(men too) are still considered propert