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A Rush to Injustice: How Power, Prejudice, Racism, and Political Correctness Overshadowed Truth and Justice in the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case

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This is a powerful book that is co-written by a gradate of Duke University who came to realize just how despicable the actions of both Duke administrators and faculty have been in the Duke Rape Hoax.

This book provides an especially powerful indictment of the maladministration of University President Richard Brodhead and quotes the following passage from a letter sent to Brodhead by a Duke alumnus:

"You are quoted as saying, `I embrace athletics at Duke.' My God, President Brodhead, if the way you treated those three players, the team, and the coach is your idea of an embrace, what do you do when you dislike someone or something?"

The above quote is well worth rereading and pondering.

Other insights from this book include:

*If all 46 members of the lacrosse team deny both doing anything wrong themselves and having any knowledge of any other player doing anything wrong, then the administration should have taken this as proof that nothing wrong happened. This reveals a shocking lack of common sense by the Duke adminstrators.

*The Group of 88 faculty members who ran a number of ads urging students to form opinions about the case based solely on race and class and forget about emerging facts about the case, are people who are committed to politics and not to justice.

*Prior to his indictment, Colin Finnerty was widely regarded by his friends and teammates as being the guy who was least likely to be prosecuted due to his being the nicest guy on the team.

*Wes Covington was interviewed for this book and told of Nifong's arrogant behavior. One day, an intern approached Nifong and want to shake hands with him. Nifong's response? To refuse the handshake on the grounds that, "I don't shake hands with interns."

*Durham Police Department Sergeant Mark Gottlieb complained to Covington that Nifong was pressuring him to arrest players sooner rather than later.

*Bob Ekstrand was also interviewed for this book and he related a chilling story of how Nifong wanted to have two of the players arrested in class, purely for reasons of publicity, but was blocked by a judge.

All in all, a great book about shocking injustice in the Land of the Free.

Definitive and excellent review of what went on at Duke during the Lacrosse Rape Case. Confirmed my beliefs that actions of President Broadhead, Trustee Chairman Steele, and the Group of 88 professors behaved disgustingly and failed to support their students. Following the notice of innocence, none had the decentcy to offer any apology to the students and their families. What was once a proud part of my life in attending Duke is now full of shame for the school. The only way for Duke to start working back to being the school it once was is for all of the above named administration and the 88 faculty to resign.

I have followed the Duke Lacrosse Case closely and thought I was completely filled in until I read this thoroughly researched and very detailed account. The authors obviously went to great lengths to get the inside story and they wrote it with a strong sense of compassion while at the same time not holding back their disgust and disappointment for the Duke administrators, the Group of 88, the police, Nifong, the New Black Panthers, etc. One of the authors is a NY Times best seller while the other is a Duke alumnus who is very passionate about his love for Duke, but maintained that his mission was to report the truth no matter what he found out while visiting Duke during his research. And that's just what the authors did. They uncovered unknown details from insiders closely involved with the story. Some of the revelations truly shocked me.

I commend the authors for their obvious concern for the players and their families and for their detailed descriptions of the three falsely accused players. The picture is not at all the one the media led us to believe early on. In fact, if half of the facts in the book about the three young men are true, it is beyond me that Nifong was able to get as far as he did with his prosecution. But he's getting what he deserves now, as the authors predicted. They also suggest that criminal charges are on the horizon and it looks as though they might be right.

There is a legal side to the book which lays out how the case progressed. Thankfully, the authors, both attorneys, had the sense to put it into simple terms so readers could understand every step of the process.

All in all, it is an excellent book, one that fills in all of the missing facts and doesn't add the fluff that some books do. I highly recommend it!

The raw facts of the Duke rape case are disgusting enough. As the authors, Nader Baydoun an R. Stephanie Good, point out, there were numerous holes in the case right from the get-go wide enough to drive a semi through and it is nothing short of obscene that the case proceeded as long and as far as it did. But it did proceed so far and three young men will carry the scars with them for life. One can only hope they have the mettle to not let it eat them up and instead use it to grow stronger.

As the authors point out, though, it was not merely the raw facts that were at issue in this twilight zone of a case. Many, many others simply had no concern for the guilt or innocence of the three young men and were more than happy to hang them out to dry in order to advance their own agendas. District Attorney Nifong simply wanted to be reelected and needed the black vote to do it. The Group of 88 had their own agenda driven by politically correct views of race, gender and athletics. The New Black Panthers are nothing more than a hate group which would not have cared less if blacks had raped a white woman instead (as indeed later events actually proved). The authors do a good job of painting these people for what they are.

What the authors miss, however, is the larger picture of campus life that makes an incident like this not only likely, but inevitable. How many times do you think students at Duke have heard feminists tell them that a woman needs to be believed when she says she was raped? Probably a lot. How many times do you think these same students have heard other feminists (who like to claim they are moderates and that not all feminists are male bashers) point out that such a statement is directly contrary to the presumption of innocence and that anyone espousing it should not hold a position of authority at the school? Probably never. How many times have the student heard statistics on rape that were inflated through the roof? Probably a lot. How many times have they heard "moderate" feminists challenge such misinformation? Probably never. How many times have they heard some feminist introduce the issue of rape into any conversation simply to gain the emotional high ground and patronize someone with whom they disagree? Probably a lot. How many times have they heard a "moderate" feminist or anyone else challenge such behavior and defend the object of such behavior from such patronization? Probably never. Such questions could go on and on and on.

The cold, hard fact is that college campuses have become festering grounds of misinformation about gender issues and that misinformation is consistently in the same direction, i.e. portraying men as more violent and privileged than they are while portraying women as more victimized than is the case. The Duke rape hoax came directly out of this.

The authors do a better job in discussing the racial hypocrisy that reared its ugly head. But even here, there are a few painful points that must be illuminated. The authors claim that most blacks really want justice to be served. But then we later learn that Nifong got 90-95% of the black vote. These do not strike me as numbers befitting a group determined to see justice done. Perhaps we can say that the black community was misled by Nifong, but really, where does this lead us? If I were to just say that blacks are easily misled and do not care enough about the facts to examine them for themselves, people would call me racist. But what other choices are there? This is a deeply troubling issue that deserves tighter analysis than we receive here.

Finally, the authors spend much time telling us what good people these players are. I do not doubt this, but again there is a troubling issue that needs to be stated. Until this case came about, Nifong himself had conducted himself honorably. It is an uncomfortable truism that a person's outward honorable behavior is not always a good indication of what a person will do when the crunch comes. The players thankfully seem to have an internal quality that matches their external personas. But many others in this sordid affair, including Nifong and probably many members of the despicable Group of 88, do not. We should be mindful of the lesson. No doubt the accused players are.

This book requires a strong stomach to digest the insane way the Duke Three were treated by the administration and the group of Professors who are still at Duke. Wonderfully written with insight and style.
Would have liked more information as to how Dr. Brodhead was convinced to reinstate the program.

I read this book in less than two days, it was so compelling - as, indeed, was It's Not about the Truth, a particularly accurate and damning title and book itself.

Mr. Baydour's account draws strength from his stance as a very loyal alumnus and a lawyer. He and Ms. Good have provided us many details in this well-written book that I had not digested heretofore. They have also zeroed in upon the overriding problems at Duke University and many other institutions as well: political correctness, the power of such groups, the silence of most others in the presence of political correctness (a national phenomenon), and the ideological and impenetrable fervor of its perpetrators, fundamentalist in style (The far right and the far left meet here in their intransigence).

To this picture I would add a long-time, widespread view that the University's hiring record for presidents has somehow not been as successful as one would want. For many of us there have been two really superb presidents: Dr. William Preston Few at the beginning and recently Governor Terry Sanford. The latter's operation in a tricky personnel/work situation I personally witnessed. He was a man of great breadth and savoir faire.

This view of the University's administration is not unique to this case. Again, it is widely bruited within and without that the managers, high and low, never make mistakes, never apologize, personnel need to be yes/persons or else no matter how expert they are, and, judging from the experience of the Lacrosse Team, expert groups are also expendable. Again, it is a national problem. Mr. Baydoun and Ms. Good have exposed some of these phenomena at Duke as have none other except the authors of It's Not about the Truth, and even more forcefully.

These problems have gradually worsened in the second half of my fifty years of observation from within and without. Mr. James B. Duke was quoted to a former boss by one of Mr. Duke's associates as saying that, "If I do not hire people who know more about it than I do, I have not done my job." Many institutions and businesses do not want to hear from such personnel and are likely to crush them. The Lacrosse Case contained some of that style.

Another excellent expose of the mess the Duke administration made in reaction to an absurd (and now proven criminal) district attorney and a group of radical racists.

Extraordinary and extremely well-written book which reveals insights not available to the public from news print or broadcasts. These fine young men have endured the very worst our society could conjure. Despite their hardships and, perhaps because of them,they have become the chosen ones, fully advised of the deficiencies and evils within our world; better than anyone else they are now extremely well prepared to tackle injustice whenever truth is compromised. I expect each to succeed in any endeavor they may choose in the future. Their good characters stand as witnesses for them (and should have from the beginning). The perpetration of the atrocities practiced by persons of power upon these young and innocent men is unforgivable. Many thanks to author Nader Baydoun for applying plain old common sense--sadly lacking elsewhere in our world-- to debunk the charges, the people, and the systems which made these incredulous allegations possible.

"A Rush To Injustice" isn't a bad book or an awful book: it simply isn't anywhere as good or comprehensive or well-written as Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case.

Where Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson engaged in extensive first-hand research, interviewing many of the participants directly and drilling down to an almost microscopic level, the authors of "Rush" were content to rely primarily on newspaper and magazine articles. Ironically, "Until Proven Innocent" points out the bias and inaccuracy of many of these articles.

The primary author appears to be Nader Baydoun, a Nashville lawyer who graduated from Duke University. The viewpoint is very much first-person. Badoun took it upon himself to "investigate" the situation. He claims he heard "tales of crooked prosecutors, selfserving faculty members, turncoat administrators, irate revenge-seeking neighbors, and even, possibly dirty cops who were out to pursue their own personal agendas." Well, anyone who followed in KC Johnson's blog Durham-In-Wonderland or the Liestoppers blog knew about these things as soon as they came to light.

The book is not well-written. The word "I" appears far too frequently because Baydoun is telling the story of his reactions to the case with the case itself being secondary. Events that were of critical importance have to wait for Baydoun to wade his way through preliminaries with chapter titles like "The Plot Thickens" and "Duked". He doesn't reach one of the most truly outrageous episodes, the infamous and reprehensible Group of 88, until page 93.

Comments such as "Much to my chagrin, it has become all too apparent to me that hypocrisy has been allowed to reign in the halls of Duke, overshadowed and underscored by the arrogance of some seemingly highly educated faculty members and students." This and many other comments sound like apologia from rightfully concerned and embarassed Duke alumni, but do nothing to tell the story of the three falsely accused Duke lacrosse players.

Overall, as I said, this is not an awful book, but "Until Proven Innocent" is far superior for anyone who is interested in the actual story of the case and not Baydoun's subjective shame over the goings on at his alma mater.

Jerry

This book lacks the immediacy of parts of Don Yaeger and Mike Pressler's IT'S NOT ABOUT THE TRUTH and lacks the comprehensiveness of Stuart Taylor's and KC Johnson's UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT, which stands as the definitive book on the Duke case, supported as it is by Johnson's absolutely heroic record of events in his Durham-in-Wonderland blog and by Taylor's early advocacy. You need Yaeger-Pressler for what it contains about the Pressler family which is not in UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT. Do you need the Baydoun-Good A RUSH TO INJUSTICE? The word opportunistic is probably unduly harsh for A RUSH TO INJUSTICE, but the book is too anecdotal, too personal, and the Index is unreliable. As much as the magnificent Robert Ekstrand is quoted here, he does not come to life as he does in Taylor and Johnson's book. Ekstrand should probably write his own book, for the record, as Mike Pressler should have done (rather than turning his diary over to Yeager). Yet you will find some information in A RUSH TO INJUSTICE not in Taylor and Johnson, who left out some of what they knew (imagine the magnitude of evidence in their hands) when they felt it would be distracting. Baydoun and Good have the time to point the reader to Brodhead's rush to judgment (surely the wrong judgment) in the James Van de Velde case at Yale, which resulted in a lawsuit naming Brodhead and others. One wonders if the higher administration at Yale held its breath during the wooing of Brodhead by Duke, afraid he might refuse. Would Yale hire him back, now? This is not a case in which one book says it all, even the splendid UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT. But the Baydoun and Good book is not absolutely essential, unless you are trying to amass a small library of early books on the case. Still, the case is so horrific that there is satisfaction at watching it dissolve, once again--after experiencing the terror, once again, on reviewing the way the ravening rogue prosecutor Nifong seized on the lacrosse players as they were thrown to him by the faculty Gang of 88 and the President of Duke University, Richard Brodhead.