Sunday, May 06, 2007
Durham Bull
It turns out that Mike Nifong was not the only public official shoveling the stinky stuff on the Duke lacrosse team defendants. He had a lot of help from the Durham cops.
Cases like this make us nervous, because we have the sneaking suspicion that sloppy practices and outright railroading occur all the time beyond the notice or concern of the public. Is the Nifong case an outlier in its substance, or only because it came to light? I fear the latter.
4 Comments:
By 
Diane Wilson, at
Mon May 07, 07:19:00 AM:
It's not just the Durham cops. There's Duke Hospital, too; the SANE exam was incredibly botched, then covered up and lied about. See here, here, and here.
By 
, at
Mon May 07, 02:15:00 PM:
And again I ask, who watches the watchers? More "sheepdogs" among the "sheep" with fewer restrictions on their behavior will worsen many problems already endemic to law enforcement. The "sheepdogs" have plenty of issues that need sorting out before I'd be at all willing to give them anything like the total carte blanche that they request for the purposes of antiterrorism operations.
By Diane Wilson, at
Mon May 07, 07:57:00 PM:
In this case, the watchers were not doing their jobs. Duke Medical Center failed miserably in managing their SANE program and personnel. The Durham police department broke their own rules about running lineups. The results will be massive civil suits; watchers are supposed to have some level of integrity.
Nifong is a different kind of problem. He was (and remains) virtually immune from prosecution or civil damages for actions taken as part of his job as district attorney. The NC bar's involvement is extraordinary, and even then, they are almost entirely limited to saying, "you won't be able to do this again."
It's not so much a case of who watches the watchers, but who keeps the watchers awake?
By , at
Tue May 08, 03:10:00 AM:
"The results will be massive civil suits; watchers are supposed to have some level of integrity."
That's exactly my point, though. At least in normal, public, criminal proceedings, remedy is available at the least via civil suits against institutions that are the host of systemic or individual misconduct. Abuses by agencies which are engaged in counterterrorism operations will be secret by nature of the work they do. It's hard to sue someone without the process of discovery! Any subpoenas you try to serve will be ignored in the name of national security. That remedy really isn't available.
