April 11, 2007

In April 2006, threee members of Duke University's men's lacrosse team were accused of raping a black stripper, Crystal Gail Mangum, during a March 13 party at an off-campus residence. Three players, David Evans, Reade Seligmann, and Collin Finnerty, were charged with forcible rape, first degree sexual assault, and kidnapping. 

 

What the three young men did not know was that they were about to get a lesson in Democrat Party politics that no political science course at Duke could ever teach.  2006 was an election year in North Carolina and Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong, a Democrat, was in the midst of a tough reelection battle.  He needed the support of Durham County’s large African American community, and what better way to lock up the black vote than to prosecute a high profile rape case against three rich white college kids, when the victim was a single black mother, struggling to make ends meet. 

 

The Duke Rape Case was a political prosecution by a Democrat, pursued for his own political ends.  Now, after 395 days of injustice, the three defendants have been found innocent of all charges and the Attorney General of North Carolina has implied that the only true criminals in the case are the Democrat District Attorney, Mike Nifong, and the accuser, Ms. Mangum.

 

The April 11, 2007 edition of Salon.com, a leading liberal website, contains an article by Earl Ofari Hutchinson, titled, The Politics of Lynching.  What is most peculiar about the article is that not once does Hutchinson mention that lynching was essentially a political crime, perpetrated by Democrats and their terrorist auxiliary, the KKK, against Republicans, both black and white.

 

Tuskegee Institute records tell us that, between the years 1882 and 1951, some 3,437 blacks and 1,293 whites, nearly all Republicans, were lynched.   And although the identity of the guilty parties was almost always known to local law enforcement officials, arrests and prosecutions were rare.  Tuskegee Institute records covering the 1900-1930 period, for example, reveal just twelve trials in which a total of sixty-seven individuals were convicted… representing less than one percent of those guilty of lynching during the first thirty years of the twentieth century.

 

The non-prosecution of lynching and other terrorist acts, from the Emancipation Proclamation until the 1960s, was the direct result of political nonfeasance by Democrat elected officials.

 

During the Clinton scandals of the 1990s, some forty-five individuals were found guilty of felony crimes, including bribery, conspiracy, contempt, extortion, fraud, larceny, lying to federal investigators, money laundering, obstruction of justice, perjury, subornation of perjury, theft of public documents, witness tampering, and more.  Thirteen indicted individuals went free because the Justice Department failed to bring them to trial, while at least fifty-six others escaped justice completely… apparently because prosecution would have been far too politically damaging for Democrats.

 

On Wednesday, September 28, 2005, a Texas grand jury indicted House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) on charges of conspiring to inject illegal corporate contributions into 2002 state elections, helping Texas Republicans redraw congressional districts statewide and cementing GOP control of the U.S. House of Representatives.  Inasmuch as the law under which DeLay was indicted was enacted subsequent to the alleged offense, it is clear that the indictment by Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, a Democrat, was politically inspired.

 

The indictment, yet another example of political prosecution by Democrats, was handed down by the third grand jury impaneled by Earle… the first two having refused to indict on the same evidence.
On March 6, 2007, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was convicted of lying and obstructing an investigation.  The verdict culminated a nearly four-year investigation into how CIA employee Valerie Plame's name was leaked to reporters in 2003.  Since the grand jury had found no underlying crime, and since the Special Prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, knew from the outset that no one at the White House had leaked Ms. Plame’s name,  it appears that Libby’s prosecution was politically motivated. 
Clearly, Democrats have become quite adept at: a) using the courts as instruments of social and political subversion, b) using undue political influence in the courts to protect Democrats from prosecution, and c) using the courts as a means of defeating and destroying their political enemies.

 

In an emotional press conference in Durham, North Carolina on April 11, 2007, one of the Duke athletes, Reade Seligmann, said, “This entire experience has opened my eyes to a tragic world of injustice I never knew existed.  If police officers and a district attorney can systematically railroad us with absolutely no evidence… I can’t imagine what they’d do to people who do not have the resources to defend themselves.”

 

Amen!  Mr. Seligmann has learned, the hard way, that one of our two major political parties has been “gaming” the criminal justice system.  We can only hope that he has also discovered which party that might be.