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Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Useful commentary…

…from CBS about Duke lacrosse. Some excerpts:

“Clearly, there is more to this story than what has been made public; than what defense attorneys or the prosecutor have disclosed," CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen says. "There has to be because what has been talked about publicly is a terribly weak case; one that even an eager grand jury would not have embraced the way this one did."


…"The damning evidence is her saying these young men raped me. Conventionally, that's the way the rape cases are proved," Mickey Sherman, a defense attorney, said on CBS News' The Early Show Tuesday.

CBS News legal analyst Wendy Murphy agrees.

"It was reported yesterday that she identified two of the three men she said raped her with 100 percent certainty from photographic identification procedures. That's pretty good evidence when you consider there were 46 guys there," Murphy said on The Early Show.


…[A CBS correspondent] met with defense attorneys, who showed her the time-stamped photographs taken at the lacrosse party where the alleged rape occurred. In all, she saw 23 photos, which attorneys say prove their clients' innocence — in part because they show that the woman was already bruised and cut when she arrived at the house. Because of the cuts, they say if a rape took place, her DNA should have been discovered.

However, "if you really look at the photographs, they provide a 27-minute gap, which is exactly the amount of time the victim says she was in the bathroom being raped by three of these guys," Murphy told The Early Show co-anchor Rene Syler Monday.


…Murphy tells CBS News: "It could be a year now before we see any actual trial. There could be a deal going on behind the scenes that's going to make this case go away very quickly because it's incredibly embarrassing and harmful both to Duke as an institution and to that region, where they've had terrible, terrible race sensitive problems for a long time."