Duke Rape? They are Devils.

I don't know if the Duke Lacrosse players accused of rape did it, but I certainly find reasons to question the allegation. And I admit, though normally my radar is up on false allegations, when I first heard about this on the news, I didn't think skeptically about it. Now, I suspect that a conviction is all but impossible, and perhaps because the charges are false. But I don't know. I'm not saying they are.

VC examines the issue of race and crime in depth today. It is a very good read deserving of a feature article in a national publication.

To make the subject more interesting, when I was in my last year of law school, I read a report about false rape accusations at a city in the midwest which housed a large university. With a sample size of 109 rape allegations over a 9 year perior, 41% of them were "false." By false, this meant that the accuser admitted to making up the charges, and the recant was deemed credible. No disputed cases, however unlikely, were included in the 'false' category, so the actual number of false charges obviously could be larger. Links to the abstract of the study I found in a few seconds this morning are here and here and here.

This isn't on point to Cassandra's post, but it is related. The motives of admitted fake accusers were usually (1) alibi (2) revenge or (3) sypathy/attention.

I also found Ann Coulter unusually subdued but very insightful on this subject. Her column focused on what each side has to learn.

However the Duke lacrosse rape case turns out, one lesson that absolutely will not be learned is this: You can severely reduce your chances of having a false accusation of rape leveled against you if you don't hire strange women to come to your house and take their clothes off for money. Also, you can severely reduce your chances of being raped if you do not go to strange men's houses and take your clothes off for money. (Does anyone else detect a common thread here?)
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Whenever a gun is used in a crime, there are never-ending news stories about how dangerous guns are. But these girls go out alone, late at night, drunk off their butts, and there's nary a peep about the dangers of drunk women on their own in public. It's their "right."
Yes, of course no one "deserves" to die for a mistake. Or to be raped or falsely accused of rape for a mistake. I have always been unabashedly anti-murder, anti-rape and anti-false accusation -- and I don't care who knows about it!

But these statements would roll off the tongue more easily in a world that so much as tacitly acknowledged that all these messy turns of fate followed behavior that your mother could have told you was tacky.

Frankly, I'm all in favor of trying this case in the media, but we can't because the accuser is protected by the media's voluntary compliance with "rape shield" laws about identifying rape victims/accusers. Thus, we get "indefinite" details about the accuser, but we don't get to probe the accuser like we do the accused.

The DA seems to want it tried in the media b/c I fear he doesn't think he has a chance at a conviction, but he does have a chance at re-election.

Since we know an awful lot about this case, unlike other cases (see, e.g., Kobe), we might as well try it now. The evidence is mixed. It should make for an intersting drama. Sadly, the people involved are all too real.