Michael Nifong, Durham County District Attorney is a liar, in the final analysis of evidence. Three varsity lacrosse players at Duke University, falsely accused of rape and wrongfully indicted by Nifong, have done no crime as submitted. Matters of race and privilege, which once concerned commentators as much as the charges did, may still be germane but from very different premises — and now probably not mediated with the same urgency, or zeal. The young men are free to try to salvage their reputations. Nifong, who himself won a full term to his office while doing unspeakable things to Lady Justice, is, too.
Assessing this in a strictly legal sense, it's appropriate for us to say "Poor, poor boys," and a plurality of thinkers and talkers, certainly most on the right, are in such a chorus. Michael Nifong and associates made the courtroom a theater, and told lies that will persist.
Not in dispute was what was supposed to happen, and what went as planned, on the night of March 13, 2006.
Did college lacrosse players ravish a woman at said place and time? No. Was the woman one of two strippers hired to commemorate the Duke team's prime sportsmanship? Yes. Did that turn out raucous fun as advertised? Not really, based on a timeline provided last year by the defense. One of the — gentlemen? — made a lewd request of one stripper. A relative standard of decency emerged and the player was slapped, then the mood was shattered, and the night-gone-wrong fell into the confusion of which spurious indictments are composed.
If the obscene remark never came, and the show ended at normal time, the lacrosse team and the strippers were still involved in an old transaction, an exchange of the basest tender and mutual scorn. By contract, there was not to be an abundance of charity or trust. A tease is itself deceit, and each party has as its cruel purpose to receive what it wanted, not to lose much for that, and especially not to get unlucky. Enter the staple entertainment at an athletic celebration.
When Hilaire Belloc spoke apropos, he knew of a place we all patronize, usually for, oh, very chic and humorous and incidental and venial services — a place thought to be not as dangerous as warned but is still, in all its carnal surfeit, the underworld. The question then becomes what the lacrosse players were guilty of. At which point it is difficult, and embarrassing, to answer.