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Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case | 
 enlarge | Authors: Stuart Taylor, Kc Johnson
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  74 reviews
Sales Rank: 110456
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.5
ISBN: 0312369123
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.15320922756563
EAN: 9780312369125
ASIN: 0312369123
Publication Date: September 4, 2007
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Product Description
What began that night shocked Duke University and Durham, North Carolina.
And it continues to captivate the nation: the Duke lacrosse team members‘ alleged rape of an African-American stripper and the unraveling of the case against them.
In this ever-deepening American tragedy, Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson argue, law enforcement, a campaigning prosecutor, biased journalists, and left-leaning academics repeatedly refused to pursue the truth while scapegoats were made of these young men, recklessly tarnishing their lives.
The story harbors multiple dramas, including the actions of a DA running for office; the inappropriate charges that should have been apparent to academics at Duke many months ago; the local and national media, who were so slow to take account of the publicly available evidence; and the appalling reactions of law enforcement, academia, and many black leaders.
Until Proven Innocent is the only book that covers all five aspects of the case (personal, legal, academic, political, and media) in a comprehensive fashion. Based on interviews with key members of the defense team, many of the unindicted lacrosse players, and Duke officials, it is also the only book to include interviews with all three of the defendants, their families, and their legal teams.
Taylor and Johnson‘s coverage of the Duke case was the earliest, most honest, and most comprehensive in the country, and here they take the idiocies and dishonesty of right- and left-wingers alike head on, shedding new light on the dangers of rogue prosecutors and police and a cultural tendency toward media-fueled travesties of justice. The context of the Duke case has vast import and contains likable heroes, unfortunate victims, and memorable villains—and in its full telling, it is captivating nonfiction with broad political, racial, and cultural relevance to our times.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 69 more reviews...
 This is a MUST read book ! August 7, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
In the early twentieth century, we had "To kill a Mockingbird". Now in the twentieth century we have "until Proven Innocent". I highly recommend that you read this book.
 Civil liberties, and the larger context of violence against women. July 13, 2008
1 out of 13 found this review helpful
As Nadine Strossen of the ACLU said in her blurb of "Until Proven Innocent," this book illustrates the importance of rights for the accused. Let's keep that in mind when we rush to judgement against the many, many people with far fewer resources who are accused of various crimes. Investigations utilizing DNA research have acquitted many people (mostly poor minorities) who not only had their reputations destroyed, but who spent years in a cage, sometimes on death row. It's curious how this case has gotten such sustained national attention, while far more egregious cases of false charges go barely mentioned, if at all. How many people are familiar with the case of the dozens of people of Tulia, Texas who were imprisoned by the acts of a single rogue DEA agent Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town? Matters are even worse when it comes to people of color who face charges of "terrorism." Actually, some of the Arab people we are "renditioning" in gulags around the world haven't even been formally charged. They've just been caught in the U.S. empire's unjust war of terror The Road to Guantanamo.
It is unacceptable that men are sometimes falsely accused. It is also unacceptable that each year in this country, around 30,000 women are impregnated through a sexual assault. It's also unacceptable that each night several hundred women will be punched, have their teeth knocked out, or be threatened by a man who reminds the woman that he has a gun.
It's this larger context of violence against women and the unjust imprisonment of minorities that the discussion of this case has ignored. Media figures who have given this case so much attention, like Sean Hannity, haven't said much of anything about the people on death row who Jesse Jackson helped to release. Many people who are concerned about the injustice of this case couldn't care less about the injustices activists like Jesse Jackson have been working on for years Legal Lynching: Racism, Injustice and the Death Penalty. In fact, cases involving poor minorities being railroaded have become more likely since right-wing politicians have cut the funding for services like legal aid.
Two of the books that cover this case use the term "political correctness" in their title. Right-wing ideologues have massively publicized and seized upon this case to advance their perception management agenda PR! - A Social History of Spin. Meanwhile, they will systematically ignore even worse cases of being "found guilty until proven innocent," to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of people in prison for violations of unjust laws, such as the laws of the anti-Constitutional "War on some Drugs" Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America Profits From Crime.
We need to look at cases like this in their larger context. We need to ask why there was such a coordinated and sustained effort to entrench this particular case in the public mind, while other cases are marginalized. And we need to avoid the efforts by some to use this case to diminish the very real and very common instances of violence against women.
Here are some resources for those who are interested in the related subjects of race, class, gender and justice:
Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex
Slam
The Warehouse Prison: Disposal Of The New Dangerous Class
Rich Get Richer and The Poor Get Prison, The (8th Edition)
Overcoming Violence against Women and Girls: The International Campaign to Eradicate a Worldwide Problem
The devastating results of totalitarian 'liberalism' April 29, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
Perhaps the clearest picture of the insidious forces of illiberalism that tried their best to deprive these young men of their freedom is obtained by drawing analogies with the McCarthyism of the 50s, as the authors do. It is frighteningly easy the way some people can change from persecutee to persecutor in such a short time. What is just as worrying is that this illiberal bloc that has developed in the States is mirrored all over the western world by similar forces in each country, which have spread like a particularly virulent fungus to wherever democracy has taken root, and which all guarantee the continuation of similar injustices, while the individuals involved continue their backpatting, under the illusion that they are fighting for freedom rather than against it. Well, this book is a wake-up call for you guys - the party's over, or at least winding down. For so long, critics of illiberalism have been branded right wing conservatives, fundamentalists, etc. if they so much as raised a voice in protest. It is important to all reading this review for you to know that by buying and reading this book, and throwing in your weight against these disturbing forces in our society, you are not throwing yourself in with conservative, reactionary, forces, but are in fact, taking a stand against them. This book is a Godsend to all who have suffered from today's McCarthyists, be they in America or around the world, because it gives an insight into the kind of minds that are ruining any hope of a decent society for our descendants to grow up in, and it is to these innocents that every thinking man and woman is morally obliged to ensure that those who have perverted the names of equality and correctness fail to reach the misty, utopian goals they have set for all of us.
Pulitzer Prize; National Book Award March 25, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
So many of the other reviewers have so forcefully and eloquently expressed my feeling about the book, I need hardly add to them. But my "heading" is quite serious: This book is worthy of a Pulitzer and a National Book Award -- non-fiction, investigative reporting, whatever the categories. (I believe the Pulitzers are to be announced in early April.)
Bob
 A Parable for Our Times March 8, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
It is quite likely that the infamous Duke rape case chronicled in Taylor and Johnson's book will one day be regarded as the emblematic parable of our time - in much the same way that the McCarthy hearings have become the emblematic episode of the early 1950s Cold War. It is difficult to conceive of an event that could more starkly highlight the societal dysfunctions of our era.
Taylor and Johnson's book amply demonstrates the incompleteness of viewing the Duke rape case simply as a rogue prosecutor running amok, unfairly targeting three boys despite profuse evidence of their innocence, and getting his comeuppance in the end. However unethical his conduct, DA Nifong could not by himself have catapulted these young men to national infamy. That sorry result required the active collaboration of countless accomplices: in the media, on the Duke faculty and administration, and within associations dedicated to the propagation of identity-politics grievance-mongering.
Indeed, the distinguishing aspect of this case is not that a prosecutor attempted to wrongfully charge three boys with rape -- for it seems sadly inevitable that somewhere, sometime across this nation, some such prosecutorial misconduct will recur. What distinguishes the Duke case is the ease with which so many attempted to shoehorn the events into a preconceived narrative of race- and sex-based exploitation (a narrative further spiced with an element of "revenge of the nerds" (faculty and press) against the "jocks" they resented.)
It is daunting enough that so many would jump to completely unsubstantiated conclusions before all the facts were out. The even greater tragedy is that once the facts were known, many people in positions of power and influence simply chose to disregard them insofar as they were inconvenient to the fantasy narrative in which they had invested so much of their professional identity. Perhaps the most egregious example of this is the disgraced "Group of 88" Duke faculty, who published an ad that presumed the fact of a sexual assault, contained a series of anonymous, unsubstantiated race-baiting quotes, and which encouraged the noise of the mob over the dispassionate evaluation of the evidence. Sadly, most of the Group of 88 has failed to apologize for their contribution to the hysterical atmosphere that gave momentum to the wrongful prosecution, but has since portrayed themselves as victims rather than transgressors, and misrepresented the plain language and intent of their own published statements. The juvenility of the Group of 88's methods of processing information has been on public display, and it has been an ugly sight to behold.
The stubborn refusal of so many in academia and the press to recognize factual reality even in the face of overwhelming evidence rightly calls into question the states of both competence and ethics in America's universities and in press rooms. As one example, noted sports journalist John Feinstein, we now know, was exactly wrong in his initial written interpretations of events, yet still had the audacity to write an article well after the resolution of the case, decrying the continuing lack of accountability in the Duke athletic department, while himself once again getting the facts wrong, and oblivious to the irony of his own calls for accountability in others. That so many in academia and journalism could sail blithely through this episode without looking themselves in the mirror and acknowledging their own pivotal roles in a gross injustice, sadly, speaks volumes about the state of both professions, and greatly explains growing public cynicism about each. Nifong was prosecuted for his misconduct, but Feinstein, Nancy Grace, and the Group of 88, among others, are still paid handsomely to prattle on as though their credibility is intact.
Taylor and Johnson relate the facts of the case in vivid, gripping detail. I give the book four stars rather than five because at places the text veers unattractively into an overheated blog style. The story is damning enough without this occasionally hamhanded commentary by the authors. But this is a minor sour note in the book; the reader is likely to be so incensed by the facts of the case, of which this is the best available history, that they will be unperturbed by stylistic imperfections.
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