Del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
TwitThis
The Press Pounces
After telling doctors in vivid detail what three guys had allegedly done to her, Crystal Mangum was far from vivid when asked what they looked like. She was sure they were white, she told the police. But according to Officer Himan’s handwritten notes, she could recall little else.On two occasions, March 16 and 21, Sergeant Gottlieb asked Officer Clayton to show Mangum photos of most of the 46 white lacrosse players, hoping it might be easier for her than trying to describe them. They all looked alike, Mangum said. She added that she had drunk a 24-ounce beer before the party. It later came out that she had a history of bipolar disorder and that she had been taking Flexeril, a muscle relaxant, possibly heightening the alcohol’s effects. “This is harder than I thought,” Mangum told Clayton.
Still, she picked out five faces, identifying four of them with “100 percent certainty.” The fifth was Reade Seligmann, whom she identified with only a “70 percent” confidence level. She did not recognize Dave Evans at all when twice shown his picture.
But Mangum had said there were three rapists, not four or five. And the four faces she picked with “certainty” didn’t include the three young men—Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty and Dave Evans—whom she inconsistently picked in a third photo ID session and who became the focus of the case when they were charged with raping her. (Seligmann and Finnerty were then suspended by Duke; Evans graduated before his indictment came through.) Even if Mangum was raped, she had no idea who had done it.
One of the four she had picked with certainty, Brad Ross, was not even in Durham that night. Her identifications of the others were all flawed by various mistakes. Yet the Durham police and district attorney Mike Nifong ignored this powerful evidence of innocence. By March 23, Nifong’s office was ordering all 46 white lacrosse players to give DNA swabs.
After the Durham police tipped off the newspapers to the mass DNA sampling, articles tainting the players began appearing in local and national news organs, including The New York Times, implying that a sexual assault had occurred. “Dancer Gives Details of Ordeal,” read one headline in Raleigh-Durham’s News & Observer. The word alleged was conspicuously absent. The subhead cited the claim of “A Night of Racial Slurs, Growing Fear and, Finally, Sexual Violence.” No alleged there either.
As a result, people across the country began branding the Duke team with a “lacrosse thug” stereotype. Some said they had it coming. Lacrosse players were a bad bunch, they asserted, and probably racists to boot. They were privileged white kids. They were conceited. They were boorish.
Journalists never seemed to mention that the Duke lacrosse team had a good record of community service, especially with a reading program that assisted black and Hispanic children in the Durham public schools. Devon Sherwood, a freshman goalie and the only black member of the team, recalled how 46 white guys went out of their way to welcome him when he joined. Each one shook his hand. Each one offered him help. He said, “I felt more accepted than I’d ever felt in my lacrosse career.”
Many players hung together off the field, acquiring a reputation for loud, off-campus partying. But they studied hard. They got better grades than any other lacrosse team in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Pressler, the U.S. Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association coach of the year in 2005, held his talented team to high standards. Their graduation rate? It was 100 percent.
Advertisement 
