More from Radley Balko:
Rambling Duke Post
April 16, 2007
by Radley Balko
MichaelW at a Second Hand Conjecture gets awfully mad at me for suggesting that there's something wrong with the comparative lack of coverage of the James Giles versus the Duke lacrosse case.
Well first, I wasn't saying that everyone who has written or commented on the Duke case is a bigot. I'm saying the sudden rush of coverage and I-do-declare outrage from law-and-order conservatives strikes me as disingenuous, given that for many, this is the first time they've ever given a damn about prosecutoral misconduct and due process. Generally, they spend their time doing their damndest to underplay the former and undermine the latter. If MichaelW doesn't fit into this category (and he doesn't), then I wasn't talking about him, and he has nothing to take offense at.
Second, I wasn't saying the cases were exactly similar. Certainly, the media attention granted the Duke players when they were first accused merited continued coverage as the case fell apart (though, ironically enough, the initial media coverage triggered the continued scrutiny and public pressure that made it impossible to continue with the case. Were it not for the media coverage and exposure, Nifong may well have gotten at least to trial, where anything can happen). But the discrepancy in coverage between the two cases is pretty hard to ignore. Especially if you read a bit more about the circumstances behind Giles' conviction:
Dallas County has had more people exonerated by DNA than all but three entire states. Texas, which leads the nation in convictions overturned by genetic testing, has had 27, Illinois, 26, and New York, 23. California has had nine exonerations.
But a whole heck of a lot more are coming:
With countless current and former Texas prisoners clamoring for testing to clear their names — more than 430 in Dallas County — law enforcement officials predict that the number of overturned convictions will grow exponentially.
Texas prosecutors have typically fought activists' attempts to revisit cases. But Dallas County Dist. Atty. Craig Watkins, the first African American elected to the office, has forged an unusual alliance with the Innocence Project, a New York-based group that uses DNA testing to challenge convictions.
Watkins has proclaimed "a new day in Dallas" and is promising to right past wrongs of his office — particularly the many disputed convictions during the reign of Henry Wade, Dallas County's top prosecutor from 1951 to 1987.
"The mentality of the office at that time was, 'I don't care if there is some doubt, let's make sure we keep up our conviction rate,' " Watkins said.
Wade's a legend in law-and-order circles. There are buildings named after him in Texas.
"Back then, if you sent someone to jail who was possibly innocent, it was a badge of honor," Watkins said.
[...]
Nearly all the Dallas DNA exonerations have involved men who were convicted of sex crimes based on dubious witness accounts. Most are African Americans — Giles will be the 10th.
Here's the kicker:
Unlike many other jurisdictions, including Houston, Dallas County preserved blood samples and other evidence collected decades ago, a stroke of luck that is allowing felons to seek a review of their convictions.
Think these types of wrongful convictions only happened in Dallas County, coincidentally the only county with blood samples on hand for testing to prove their innocence? Of course not. The only difference is that the people in other prisons across the country won't get the chance to free themselves.In the Giles case, prosecutors also withheld evidence. There were also racial elements (Giles was "the only black man in the courtroom" at his trial).
I just find it odd that though he was exonerated the same week as the Duke players, Giles' case got .006 percent (I did the math) the coverage in the blogosphere that the Duke exonerations did. And this man lost 24 years of his life. Ten in prison, and 14 where he couldn't go ten miles from his home without first obtaining permission. He also lost a marriage, and contact with much of his family.
I'm not saying anyone who didn't write about Giles is wrong or racist or bigoted. Hell, I didn't write about it until this weekend. I brought it up to point out the contrast between the two cases, and the contrast in the coverage of them, in the hopes of nudging conservatives outraged by the Duke case to see it as more than vindicating their feelings about feminists, liberal academics, the media, and civil rights groups, and look at it for what it is: a glaring illustration of the inadequacies of the criminal justice system.
That is, get over the identity politics and cult of victimhood. Yeah, the Duke guys got screwed. But they were exonerated. There are lots more innocent people who need to be exonerated, people who have been in prison a long time, and who don't have the benefit of high-priced lawyers or media attention or the powerful pundit advocates the Duke players had.
Unfortunately, just as the left did with the Imus case, conservatives seemed to have drawn all the wrong lessons from Duke. See Jack Dunphy, Michelle Malkin, and Heather McDonald, all of whom have decided to use the Duke case to lament how the media doesn't do enough to tell us about how black people are inherently more criminal and dangerous than white people.
When people write this kind of tripe, I always wonder, so what's your point?. That is, what do they want to happen?
Should every crime story come with a disclaimer that says, "NOTE: The Daily Herald wants its readers to know that black people commit disproportionately more crimes than white people"? Should Time magazine do a cover story on "The Dangerously Criminal Black Man?" What's the point in letting everybody know what races commit the most crimes?
Are they giving us these statistics for the purposes of making public policy? What would a public policy look like that takes these statistics into consideration? Would it mean that black people should get fewer constitutional protections than white people because of their propensity to commit more crime? Would it be a justification for racial profiling--for police to randomly pull over black men in nice cars because there's a higher chance that they're dealing drugs? Does it excuse some of the horrible police attitudes toward black people? Does it excuse the use of racist informants like Tom Coleman and Randy Gentry?
(Side note: Racial profiling is perfectly fine when police get a report that "a black man of X height was just seen robbing a bank," then go looking for black men of X height. I'm talking about the "X percentage of drug dealers in this area are black, therefore, we should pull over black men driving nice cars in this area at random, because there's a good chance one of them is dealing drugs" kind of profiling.)
What is the point?
Conservatives are always quick to rail against group rights. But it seems to me they can sometimes get downright giddy when it comes to pointing out "group wrongs."
Now, there are also problems with the statistics themselves. The stats I've seen come out nearly flat when adjusted for class and income. The drug war also disproportionately affects blacks, both in subtle ways (the lucrative drug trade is going to be more enticing to a black kid with few prospects than it is to a white kid with lots of options) and overt ways (the crack-cocaine disparity, and the increased likelihood of black offenders getting jail time over white offenders for the same crimes--meaning nonviolent offenders get imprisoned alongsided violent ones. Guess what happens next?) And there are chicken-egg problems (for example, maybe blacks are disproportionately convicted because they're disproportionately targeted and prosecuted, a theory that's bolstered (but certainly not completely validated) by the fact that they're disproportionately represented among those exonerated by the Innocence Project).
Dunphy's article about media taboos and black crime is particularly galling. He misleadingly hooks the reader with the story about a gruesome murder of a white couple in Tennessee by a bunch of barbarians who happen to be black. It's a horrible story. But it's an anomaly. It's also completely hideous and ridiculous to try to score racial points with the tragedy. As if white people have never committed horrible crimes. Or that the fact that the men who commited this one are black reveals something deep and disturbing about black mens' souls. Dunphy's own statistics later in the article show that black-on-white crime is extremely rare, which makes his leading with the Tennessee story more than a little disingenuous.
I'm sure latent prejudice did play into the media's willingness to bite early on the Duke story. The college journalists I worked with at my college newspaper salivated over stories that made the rich, white-kid Greek system look bad (unfortunately, the Greek system gave them way too much material, and I say that as someone who was in a fraternity at the time). I've no doubt that those biases are common, and probably carry over when college journalists become professional journalists. But the idea that the Duke story is part of some larger criminal justice/media bias against rich white men is so absurd it's laughable.
Though I've gotten lots of emails of support for the issues I've covered lately, I've also received a few chastising me for becoming a "bleeding heart," or drifting to the left. Frankly, I don't care. My positions and principles haven't changed at all. I'm just spending more time on issues with which I happen to share common cause with the left. And on which I find the right's indifference particularly appalling.
In most of society (see the Imus case) I think race is blown wholly out of proportion, and that we spend way too much time fixating on it.
But the criminal justice system is different. Here, racism is more prominent, less noticeable, less catchable, and what's at stake if it isn't corrected is of much graver concern: someone's freedom, or in some cases, his life. I didn't always think this. I've generally been skeptical of claims of racial bias. But the more time I've spent the last few years looking into these cases, the more evidence I see that it's not only present in the criminal justice system, it's pervasive. Don't get me wrong. Lots of white people get caught up in the spokes, too. And I think I've advocated pretty strongly for them when those cases have caught my eye.
All of this is why I find the right's outrage over the Duke case to be so grating. And the fact that so many conservatives seem to have walked away from the case thinking the lesson is not that the criminal justice system on the whole needs more accountability, transparency, and balance, but rather that we aren't doing enough to vilify black people, and that rich white people are the real victims here, well, that's just plain stupid. And wrong. And infuriating.
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