Brendan Nyhan

A reader points me to another excellent Chris Lawrence post on the Duke lacrosse case — this time he’s flagging a News and Observer public editor column from April 2 noting that the newspaper didn’t publish statements made by the accuser:

[N&O deputy managing editor Linda] Williams said editors and the reporter discussed the fairness issue at length before interviewing the woman and publishing the story. The governing decision, she said, was to print only information from the interview that conformed with the police reports. “We limited for publication the statements from the woman that were in line with what she said in the police report,” Williams said. Other information from the interview has not been published.

So what was withheld? Statements that contradict established facts? Or claims that aren’t supported by available evidence?

Here’s the latest from Duke, where supporters of the players are wearing shirts that say “Innocent” around campus:

-WRAL says the players may have been identified using shirtless pictures that revealed scratches on their bodies:

An exotic dancer who says three Duke lacrosse players raped her may have identified two of them based on photographs that show scratches on their bodies, a defense attorney said Wednesday.

The attorney said that when 46 members of the lacrosse team submitted court-ordered DNA samples last month, they were also photographed without their shirts.

The attorney said that is possibly how Reade Seligmann, 20, and Collin Finnerty, 19, were identified by the alleged victim, who told police she was gang-raped, sodomized and beaten for 30 minutes at a lacrosse-team party on March 14.

-Also, the second round of DNA results are on the way:

The results of more DNA testing in the investigation of a reported rape at a Duke University lacrosse team party are due any day, the lawyer of one of the two indicted team members said.

Bill Cotter, who represents Collin Finnerty, said he is expecting as early as today to receive the results, which prosecutors are required to hand over by law. After a first round of tests, which compared DNA taken from the 46 white members of the team with evidence collected from an escort service dancer who was hired at the party. The woman, who is black, told police that she was raped by three white men.

-Via Chris Lawrence, the N&O has a very useful graphical summary of the timelines of the night in question.

-Finally, NBC 17 has posted some of the pictures that defense attorneys have been touting.

I leave tomorrow for the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago, IL. I’m presenting my first single-authored paper at a professional conference (PDF), and also presenting a co-authored paper and participating in a roundtable on academic blogs.

Here’s a summary of my paper:

THE HIGH PRICE OF CONSTRAINT?
Comparing the relative impact of verification threat and
counter-framing in partisan debate

Can institutions help citizens make good decisions? I present a national survey experiment
testing two possible answers to this question from the literature: verification threat, which
may promote counter-attitudinal persuasion, and counter-framing, which may promote
partisan or ideological constraint. Surprisingly, the results indicate that verification threat and
counter-framing tend to increase partisan constraint in a competitive political context.

Academics rarely solicit public feedback on their work, but I believe in the collective intelligence of my readers and would appreciate any feedback you have. I will be revising this paper soon for publication so constructive comments are especially helpful.

Today’s Herald Sun offers more details on the alleged alibi of Reade Seligmann:

Several attorneys moved quickly Tuesday to try to discredit the indictments.

While they acknowledged that Seligmann attended the March 13 party at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd., two attorneys said Seligmann wasn’t at the party for part of the time they say the alleged rape could have occurred — between 12:10 and 12:30 a.m. on March 14. They base this timeframe on time-stamped photographs purportedly made by an unidentified student at the party.

The attorneys, however, declined to be named and would not show The Herald-Sun the evidence to substantiate their claim.

The lawyers said Seligmann has records to prove he made cell phone calls at 12:07, 12:09 and 12:11 a.m.

Then he called a cab at 12:14 a.m. and was picked up and driven away from North Buchanan Boulevard at 12:19 a.m., the lawyers said Tuesday.

Finally, a security camera at a bank ATM machine showed Seligmann making a withdrawal at 12:24 a.m., the lawyers added. They declined to be specific about which cab company or which bank Seligmann purportedly used.

Charlotte attorney Pete Anderson told The Charlotte Observer that both players have alibis.

"In the upcoming weeks, the lawyers for these two students are going to be able to provide objective evidence that demonstrates they were not capable of committing any sexual offense," Anderson said. "This will include receipts and other records demonstrating that they weren’t present at the house at the time when the assault was allegedly taking place."

The Herald-Sun could not corroborate the claim that Seligmann summoned a cab on the night in question. All 12 of the taxicab companies serving Durham contacted by The Herald-Sun on Tuesday said they did not dispatch a driver to 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. on the night of the alleged incident.

Bell Belahouel is owner and operator of the Safe Ride company, which allows Duke students to pay using an account tied to their student IDs. Belahouel said his records show both the indicted students have used his service before, but not on March 13. Belahouel, who said Mondays are usually pretty quiet, said his phone records show no calls whatsoever were made to his business between 6:04 p.m. March 13 and 8:06 a.m. March 14.

Belahouel also said he called all of his drivers who worked that night and that none of them remembered going to Buchanan Boulevard.

Update 4/19 11:29 AM: ABC was provided with more details about the Seligmann alibi, including receipts and an interview with a cab driver:

By 12:24 a.m., a receipt reviewed by ABC indicates that Seligmann’s ATM card was used at a nearby Wachovia bank. In a written statement to the defense also reviewed by ABC, a cabdriver confirms picking up Seligmann and a friend a block and a half from the party, and driving them to the bank. By 12:25 a.m., he was making a phone call to a girlfriend out of state.

What did Seligmann do after leaving the bank? The taxi driver remembers taking him to a drive-thru fast-food restaurant and then dropping him off at his dorm. Duke University records show that Seligmann’s card was used to gain entry at 12:46 a.m.

In addition to bolstering Seligmann’s alibi, the taxi driver’s written testimony provided a rare glimpse of color in an otherwise darkened night.

“I remember those two guys starting enjoying their food inside my car, but I’m glad I end up with a nice tip and fare $25,” the taxi driver said in his testimony.

ABC News traced the steps of Seligmann’s story, timing how long it took to get from place to place. In repeated trials, the drive between the Wachovia branch and the corner where the cab picked him up took approximately five minutes. This suggests that Seligmann must have left the house by around 12:19 a.m.

So, Seligmann’s alibi suggests, he and the alleged victim were in the house together for less than 20 minutes. According to defense sources, based on the alleged victim’s affidavit, all of the following would have transpired within that time period: She and her dance partner performed for several minutes, left after feeling threatened by the boys’ growing “excited and aggressive,” returned after being persuaded by team members to dance some more, and then she was forced into a bathroom, beaten and raped.

Within those same minutes, phone bill records reviewed by ABC show that the defendant’s cell phone made at least two outgoing calls.

As many of you know, this blog was deleted from Google back in March. I’ve tried to get reindexed, but so far it hasn’t worked. It’s costing me hundreds of visitors per day, especially with all the blogging I’ve been doing on the Duke lacrosse case. So I’m asking for help from you, my readers. If you are indexed by Google, please link to me. With enough incoming links, maybe I’ll get back in. Thanks a lot.

A question for the lawyers out there: On pages 7 and 8 of the Duke lacrosse indictments, the District Attorney asks for them to be sealed, citing allegedly “substantial” flight risks. That seems preposterous; I assume the indictments were actually sealed for PR reasons. So why was the request granted? Are indictments usually sealed in high profile cases?

An article on FoxNews.com about the Duke lacrosse case includes some of the worst reporting I’ve read on the case:

Defense attorneys have said time-stamped photos taken the night of the party show that the alleged victim was injured and impaired before she arrived. Police recordings also indicate that the alleged victim was “just passed out drunk” in someone else’s car in the early hours of March 14, after the alleged assault took place.

Defense attorneys have refuted most points made by the accuser. She claims she lost some of her fingernails in the alleged attack, yet the team claims they must have fallen off. Although there were reports of nail polish on the banister of the house where the woman claims the incident took place — which the prosecution could point to as signs of a struggle — the counter argument is that the woman was painting her fingernails at the party and got nail polish on the banister herself.

There’s also word that one of the defense photos shows the accuser walking out of the house with the nail polish.

At every turn, the Fox News report is hostile to the accuser. First, the police recordings don’t “indicate” that the victim was “just passed out drunk”; they establish only that a police officer thought that she was. Other sources have claimed she might have been slipped a date rape drug. We simply don’t know.

Second, it is absurd to claim “[d]efense attorneys have refuted most points made by the accuser.” We don’t know what points the accuser has made; she only made a few comments to the press. And we certainly don’t know with any certainty that the claims she has made are false, though questions have been raised.

Finally, the only evidence that Fox News provides to support its claim that “[d]efense attorneys have refuted most points made by the accuser” pertain to her fingernails. Since when did fingernail evidence become dispositive in rape cases? Fox then implies that she is lying about her fingernails, writing, “She claims she lost some of her fingernails in the alleged attack, yet the team claims they must have fallen off.” In the context of the previous sentence, this statement suggests that we know the team is right, which has not been established. The rest of the discussion of nail polish is speculation and hearsay.

Was this written by an intern? Sean Hannity? Inquiring media critics want to know.

This is cheap talk, but defense attorneys are claiming the two players have an alibi:

Bill Thomas, a lawyer for a player who has not been charged, said that one of the two men under indictment did not even attend the party. He would [not] specify which one, saying only that “multiple witnesses and a commercial transaction” would provide an alibi.

According to a filing made by the district attorney’s office, the residents of the house where the party took place told police that Seligmann was one of six players who did not attend the party.

Another attorney, Robert Ekstrand, who represents dozens of players, said neither Seligmann nor Finnerty was at the party “at the relevant time.”

Here’s more on the alleged alibi via Chris Lawrence:

Sources close to the investigation said Tuesday that the defense will present evidence — including ATM receipts — that neither Seligmann, 20, nor Finnerty, 19, were at the team party at the time the alleged rape took place.

A cab driver allegedly carried one of the young men to an ATM, where a security camera captured his picture, the sources said, and the other man was reportedly at a restaurant.

Here’s yet another report:

A source close to the case told FOX News that there are credit card receipts, ATM receipts and/or taxi cab receipts that may establish that one or both of the accused players were not at the off-campus Durham house in which the alleged rape took place at the time of the alleged attack.

Power Line is notoriously soft on Republicans, but this is ridiculous:

The Washington Post takes an inside look at the sickness that features so prominently in the leftist blogosphere. The Post doesn’t pull its punches in examining the phenomenon (“I’m insane with rage and grief, but I feel more connected than I ever have,” admits the protagonist blogger, who gets 14,000 page views per day). Amazingly, though, the Post blames conservatives for it:

What’s notable about this isn’t only the level of anger but the direction from which it is coming. Not that long ago, it was the right that was angry and the left that was, at least comparatively, polite. But after years of being the targets of inflammatory rhetoric, not only from fringe groups but also from such mainstream conservative politicians as Newt Gingrich, the left has gone on the attack.

But the author, David Finkel, presents no evidence that the left was ever the “target of inflammatory rhetoric” (at least from anyone with an audience) that resembles the raving he depicts here. And the reference to Gingrich is laughable. Like him or not, the former Speaker was (and remains) a man of ideas, not invective.

The left was never a “target of inflammatory rhetoric” from anyone with an audience? Well, there’s only Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and about 500 other pundits.

And as for Gingrich, he was notorious for his use of invective. Does anyone at Power Line know anything about the history of American politics?

Here’s a sample of his MO from the Columbia Journalism Review, which documents him comparing former House Speaker Jim Wright to Mussolini:

Enter Newt Gingrich, the man who, as Suzanne Garment put it in her book Scandal, “brought scandal politics unmistakenly home to the Congress.” Even as a junior House member in the early ’80s, he saw visions of the Speakership and had a strategy for getting there. Among other things, it required infusing those staid congressional reporters with a blood lust. The frontal lobe of a pit bull had to be sutured, figuratively speaking, onto the brain of a gentleman, and this new creature aimed at the Dems. How was this accomplished? With the idea of “corruption.” Contrary to stereotype, the typical reporter is surprisingly passive. But, given a whiff of impropriety, a jolt of accusation, his eyes twitch, his limbs quiver (“It’s alive, Igor! IT’S ALIVE!”), and he lurches from the slab.

In his book The Ambition and the Power, John M. Barry describes how Gingrich performed his surgical feat. His aim was to create “resonance” — a pervasive perception among press and public that Democrats, particularly House Speaker Jim Wright, were crooked. Gingrich was short on evidence but long on persistence and rhetorical pyrotechnics. There was a circularity to his onslaught. Barry describes Gingrich walking into The Miami Herald in 1987 and persuading reporter Tom Fiedler to join the fray: “Fiedler’s story quoted Gingrich’s now-routine comment that Wright was the most corrupt Speaker in the twentieth century, and some variations: ‘Wright is so consumed by his own power that he is like Mussolini….We have overwhelming evidence that he is a genuinely bad man….’ The article added, ‘Gingrich said his charges are based on numerous news accounts.’ Many of those news accounts Gingrich had generated.”

And, of course, Gingrich’s GOPAC distributed an infamous memo called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” which provides a list of “contrast words” to apply to Republicans’ opponents that includes “traitor,” “sick,” “anti- (issue): flag, family, child, jobs,” “destructive” and “pathetic.”

Via Kevin Drum, Dick Morris is comparing George W. Bush to Jimmy Carter — a comparison I made back in June 2005:

George W. Bush is a one- term president now serving deep into his second term. Like his father, he shot his bolt during his first four years. Unlike his dad, he was able to persuade America to keep him around for another term. But he seems destined to spend the remainder of his tenure, a la Nixon, “twisting slowly in the wind.”

Bush has truly become the Republican equivalent of President Jimmy Carter, out of control, dropping in popularity, unable to resume command. He barely skated through 2004 using the issue of terrorism. But his very success in preventing further attacks has eroded the strength of the issue and has undermined its political importance. Tax cuts, the cause celebre of his 2000 campaign, have long since been passed and yielded their economic growth. But they’re long gone as a key issue.