Fight for the presumption of innocence.
In September 2009, Hofstra freshman Danmell Ndonye told Nassau County police she had been gangraped in a bathroom stall in Estabrook Hall after a campus party. She said one man had taken her phone, that she followed the group to get it back, and that she was then bound and assaulted by five men.
Police arrested and charged with first-degree rape: Hofstra student Rondell Bedward, 21, plus Jesus Ortiz, 19, Stalin Felipe, 19, and Kevin Taveras, 20. Bail was set at $500,000 each. A fifth man was sought but not arrested. Each of the four faced up to 25 years if convicted.
The account fell apart within days. A relative of one of the men told authorities that a cellphone video of the encounter existed. Prosecutors confronted Ndonye with that fact before they had even watched the recording. She then admitted the sex had been consensual.
District Attorney Kathleen Rice said a crime had not occurred. The four men were released the same night. The New York Post reported that her boyfriend at the time believed she invented the story because she did not want classmates, and especially him, to think she had been promiscuous. Rice described her as deeply troubled.
Ndonye faced no jail time. The men faced 25 years in prison, but she got counseling and 250 hours of community service.
In 1987, a young lady claimed she was gangraped. The media rallied behind her. People cried for justice for Brawley. There were protests—including one that shut down parts of the city of New York.
Tawana Brawley lied through her teeth.
People had found her on November 28, 1987, outside an apartment complex curled inside a trash bag. She had feces smeared on her, racial slurs written on her body, and cotton-like material in her nostrils and hair. Family members said she had been missing for four days. She claimed she was raped by several white men and that one attacker had what looked like a police badge.
Al Sharpton and his fellow race baiters protested. Sharpton went on WWOR-TV in March 1988 he said: “We stated openly that Steven Pagones, the assistant district attorney, did it. If we’re lying, sue us, so we can go into court with you and prove you did it.”
A special grand jury sat for seven months, heard dozens of witnesses, and issued its report in October 1988. It concluded that Brawley “was not the victim of a forcible sexual assault by multiple assailants over a four-day period,” that there was no evidence a sexual assault occurred, and that nothing about her condition was inconsistent with it having been self-inflicted.
Pagones sued Sharpton and won the case 10 years later. But the lies made Sharpton a TV star and he’s worked for MSNBC/MSNOW for 15 years. I am not calling him a big fat liar but only because he lost weight.
Tawana Brawley skated and escaped justice.
Nearly a century ago, two young white ladies said they were gangraped by 9 black men.
On March 25, 1931, a fight broke out between white and black youths riding a Southern Railroad freight train through northern Alabama. A posse stopped the train at Paint Rock. Deputies removed nine black teenagers and two white women, Victoria Price (about 21) and Ruby Bates (about 17), both mill workers from Huntsville who were traveling in men’s overalls and were themselves at risk of vagrancy charges.
The 9 teenagers were taken to Scottsboro and charged with rape. The governor called out the National Guard. A jury convicted 8 of them, letting go the one fellow who was 12 or 13 at the time.
That was not the end of the matter. The prosecution stretched out over the next decade. Twice the Supreme Court overturned guilty verdicts—the first time for not giving the teens good lawyers, the second time for excluding blacks from the jury—but judges kept holding trials and all-white juries kept convicting the men.
Bates recanted her testimony. Price never did. Death claimed the men one by one until only Clarence Norris remained. George Wallace granted him a pardon in 1976. The irony is Norris was the only one given a death sentence, later commuted to imprisonment for life.
In 2013—82 years after their arrest—Alabama issued posthumous pardons for the rest.
Big deal.
In the summer of 1906, members of the 25th Infantry—the famous Buffalo Soldiers—returned home from the Philippines and were assigned to Fort Brown in Brownsville, Texas, a town of 6,000 people who hated black soldiers.
After a report that a black soldier had attacked a white woman, Mayor Frederick Combe and the battalion commander, Major Charles W. Penrose, imposed an early curfew on the soldiers. That night around midnight gunfire in town killed bartender Frank Natus and wounded police lieutenant Joe Dominguez. White townspeople immediately blamed the soldiers and said they had seen black men firing in the streets. Spent cartridges from Army rifles were produced as evidence.
The soldiers had not left their barracks. A grand jury refused to indict them. Nevertheless, on November 5, President Teddy Roosevelt discharged all 167 enlisted men “without honor.” That status stripped them of pensions, barred reenlistment, and closed federal civil-service jobs. Roosevelt was adamant. Even Booker T. Washington could not get him to bend.
Then in 1970, John D. Weaver wrote, The Brownsville Raid, which argued that the soldiers had been framed. In 1972, the Army changed the records to honorable discharges. Congress voted and gave Dorsie Willis, the lone survivor, a special pension.
That’s nice.
And useless.
Do I have to mention the Duke lacrosse team?
It’s been 20 years, so maybe memories need to be refreshed.
On March 13, 2006, the team had an off-campus party and hired two black strippers. One of them, Crystal Mangum, reported to police she had been raped, beaten, and strangled by three white players in a bathroom. She identified Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans. Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong took the case, publicly described the players as having committed a racially motivated gang rape.
Nifong was an appointee as Durham County district attorney. He was running in a hotly contested Democrat primary to keep the job when the case broke. To get the black vote, he made the case the centerpiece of his campaign.
Cable news channels went bonkers, especially Nancy Grace on CNN Headline News. She called the players thugs and demanded that they be arrested and convicted.
88 Duke faculty and staff members published a full-page advertisement in the campus paper The Chronicle that treated the lacrosse accusation as the occasion for a broader indictment of campus culture.
The stripper lied. The prosecutor withheld evidence that could exonerate the men.
But the state’s Attorney General, Roy Cooper, stepped in and dropped the case. The state Bar stripped Nifong of his law license. CNN Headline News went out of business.
No one charged Mangum for perjury. If they had sent her to prison, Reginald Daye might still be alive. He was her boyfriend. She killed him on April 3, 2011. That drew prosecutorial attention. She served nearly 15 years in prison.
But there was some good. Stephen Miller, then a Duke undergraduate, publicly defended the lacrosse players and argued they were being presumed guilty. He went on Fox—a lot. He confronted Nancy Grace as well.
Miller is now Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy in the second Trump White House, and a senior adviser to the president. Doing the right thing has benefits with being free of guilt as the main one.
Now what’s this nonsense about the Cornell 7?
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This article first appeared on Don Surber’s Substack. Reprinted here with permission.
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