Duke Lacrosse, Class Warfare, and Good Brownies

It's the same old story: Boys meet Girl. Boys invite Girl to do the dance of the seven veils. Girl falsely accuses Boys of felonious sexual misconduct. District Attorney hopeful lagging in polls sees opportunity to gather votes by appealing to underlying class conflict in district by aggressively prosecuting case and withholding excupatory evidence until specifically ordered to release it. CNN Banshee stokes fire by aggressively reporting case. Initially withheld DNA evidence exonerates boys and case is dismissed. You know. That story.

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I got to hear one of the participants in the Duke lacrosse saga speak on Friday. Joseph Cheshire

(the fifth, no less), one of the attorneys representing a defendant in that case, spoke at a South

Carolina Bar criminal law seminar yesterday in Charleston. It was a rare treat. The guy is a sound-bite generating machine (sadly, I only got a few of them). Some examples:

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On the pressure for prosecutors to "win":

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Mr. Cheshire pointed out that prosecutors must take special care to look closely at their cases because the "innate, inherent believability of prosecutors" can make people rush to convict, even unjustly. "This culture of winning has to stop. Do the best you can, but don't cheat."

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On CNN legal commentator Nancy Grace:

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She is "one of the five worst people on the Earth" (Cheshire's co-counsel in the case, Wade Smith, added, "and the other four are (former prosecutor Michael) Nifong".

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On the criminal justice system in America:

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"America has about 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's prison population". He pointed out that, if only one percent of America's convictions were erroneous, that means that thousands of innocent people are in prison. He also said that a huge percentage of the people in prison are poor and don't look like "us", and that the reversal of the traditional roles in the Duke lacrosse case forced middle and upper-class white folks "to see people who looked like their sons and sons-in-law unjustly accused" of a crime and presumed guilty. He also acknowledged that if the defendants in that case had been poor, and unable to afford the high-priced attorneys they got, that their attorneys probably would not and could not have gotten the huge stacks of DNA testing reports that ultimately resulted in his client's acquittal, and would have taken a deal to get their clients a year or so in prison (not my clients, of course).

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On the power of the press:

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He said the press has a powerful impact on how people perceive facts. He indicated that one poll showed that "85% of people in the minority community would have voted to convict (the Duke lacrosse defendants) even if the evidence tended to show innocence."

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On the blogosphere:

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"Blogs are a fascinating thing. Pay attention to them." He said he learned a lot about his case from blogs posted about it. He learned people's perceptions of the case, and even about theories involving some of the evidence in it. He said some of them were crazy, but some were genuinely helpful.