Ghosts of the Scottsboro Boys hover over Durham

It might do Durham good to step back from the trees, and see how the forest looks through the out-of-state eyes of a born and breed Southerner.

I’ve never seen anything in my 34-year journalism career that compares to the apparent racism, motivated by the desire for political gain, that fuels the Duke lacrosse team’s rape accusations. The only high-profile analogy I know is Alabama’s attempt to lynch, legally of course, the Scottsboro Boys in 1931.

Douglas O. Linder, the Elmer Powell Peer Professor of Law at the University of Missouri – Kansas City School of Law, wrote about that trial (http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scottsboro/scottsb.htm):

“No crime in American history-- let alone a crime that never occurred-- produced as many trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials as did an alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers on a Southern Railroad freight run on March 25, 1931.

“Over the course of the two decades that followed, the struggle for justice of the ‘Scottsboro Boys,’ as the black teens were called, made celebrities out of anonymities, launched and ended careers, wasted lives, produced heroes . . . and divided America's political left.”

The parallels already scream at us. First, now, as then, did a crime occur?

There is already more than enough reasonable doubt from evidence made public. Thank the unrelenting efforts of your local journalists digging out the truth, despite the best efforts of District Attorney Mike Nifong, and your police chief, Steven Chalmers, to hide it from you.

This is the First Amendment and Government in the Sunshine protecting you from the state’s police power. Keep that in mind when you complain about the Founding Fathers, and subsequent state legislators, putting them in place.

The latest public revelation proves defendant Reade Seligmann was nowhere near the accuser’s claimed rape location.

The only time for the DA’s crime theory of the rape is 12:10 a.m. to 12:30 a.m. Time-stamped digital photos of the accuser eliminate all other times.

The Grand Jury’s indictment claims Mr. Seligmann, “willfully and feloniously, did ravish and carnally know” the accuser “by force and against her will.” Further, he kidnapped her, “for the purposes of terrorizing her and facilitating the commission of the felonies . . .”

To be true, the defendant had to pull off those crimes in less than four minutes. That’s all the time there is once you know Mr. Seligmann’s cell phone proves he called a taxi at 12:14 a.m., left the scene at 12:19 a.m., hit his ATM at 12:24 a.m., and digitally checked into his dorm room at 12:49 a.m.

Going back to those digital photos, the other defendant, Collin Finnerty, doesn’t show up in any of them. It’s reasonable to ask why he doesn’t.

Something else doesn’t show up either: neither his DNA, nor the DNA of anybody else who is white and on the Duke lacrosse team shows up on the accuser - the accuser who was supposedly brutally beaten, raped, and sodomized.

Mr. Nifong’s sleight-of-hand explanation was the rapists wore long sleeves and jackets. Mr. Nifong is no magician; his trick doesn’t work once you know the digital photos prove they wore short sleeves.

I don’t know anyone who believes him any longer. Regardless, Mr. Nifong said he is going for a third defendant.

File as he wills, without a miraculous recovery, he, the police chief, the judge who presides, and every other person whose fingerprints end up on this case, will become infamous. Their legacy will be on par with those involved with the Scottsboro Boys.

Just as Jim Crow didn’t leave town until whites stopped lying about their racist apartheid policies against blacks, this DA’s travesty won’t end until those blacks and their white allies organizing the daily protests stop lying about appearing to be the “new whites” persecuting the “new blacks.” Just as in the Scottsboro Boys case, it’s all about the color of a person’s skin.

Anyone will understand why Mr. Nifong isn’t taking interview appointments. If the truth, mined by journalists, continues to show his actions are as ill bent as they all appear to be so far, he’ll likely face charges of malicious prosecution. If that happens, the chief may well join him in the dock.

It’s time for the governor or attorney general to pull the plug on Mr. Nifong and Chief Chalmers. North Carolina’s commitment to eliminating racism in the criminal justice system is on trial across America and around the world.

So far, Durham looks to join 1931 Alabama as guilty of racist motivations.

Mr. Nifong’s political ambitions are destroying lives, careers, the university, and the community itself. The police chief appears as his accomplice. But justice will come.

Just as it did for those who persecuted the Scottsboro Boys.

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