Help us find Annie
Apparently the Duke players deserved it, says Moran
ABC-TV commentator Terry Moran says that we should "not feel too sorry for the Dukies," referring to the three men whose lives were hijacked for a year because of the overweening ambitions of Mike Nifong.
But Moran's rationale is pretty weak:
- Hiring strippers for a party was morally reprehensible.
- They are "rich kids" who will get past it because of their family wealth and connections.
- Only the rich and privileged attend Duke.
- One of them was charged with assault in 2005 (emphasis added).
- They were able to afford competent legal representation.
- They managed to control some aspects of the way they were portrayed in the media.
- There are many, many cases of prosecutorial misconduct across our country every year.
- The media covers few, if any, of these cases.
- Most of the victims in these cases are poor or minority Americans--or both.
In a word, bullcrap. These three young men were able to survive a deliberate assault on their right to due process only because they were fortunate enough to have resources. The message ought to be, "If it can happen to them, it can happen to any of us." And it does. Take the neglected case of "Artie" Wheeler, thrown in jail without bail over a misdemeanor, because there was no law covering his "real" crime, which was holding a politically unpopular opinion about race relations. Not only did Wheeler get unsympathetic media coverage, some of the MSM outlets have actually deleted the shameful story of his arrest and coercion from their archives. Or, we could discuss the incident of malicious prosecution that I personally experienced eight years ago. (Some time later, when I am calm enough...)
Moran may have forgotten this, but being charged with a crime is different from being convicted of having committed it. Thus, the remark about Finnerty's 2005 problem borders on slander.
The scandal here is that there are so many cases of false arrest and malicious prosecution that go unreported. But that is not the fault of Evans, Finnerty and Seligman; it's the failing of the so-called news media to report these very real cases of governmental tyranny. Apparently the decision-makers believe that the bread-and-circuses approach (Anna Nicole Smith, Mel Gibson, Michael Richards) approach to selecting stories is better for the bottom line. And they are probably accurate. If people realized just how badly others like themselves are mistreated by government, the entire social contract might just come apart at the seams. In which case, Moran and numerous others would be out their well-paid jobs.