Do The Right Thing

Bear in mind, most of what I know about the law, I learned from watching Law and Order. 

Which I freely admit isn’t a whole lot.  But, in at least one key respect, there’s a lesson or two in there that some parts of the American legal and law-enforcement systems could stand to assimilate.  In L’nO, often as not, thinking you’ve solved the case too early – based on “norms”/cliches, usually – is a “gotcha” that leads to mild, amused chagrin around the bottom of the hour. 

In real life, of course, it destroys lives, literally and figuratively.  It’s been in the news twice this past weekend.

Duke University finally apologized to the three lacrosse players in whose railroading they participated last year.  (No matter – everyone knew they were guilty, until, oops, they weren’t:

Duke University President Richard Brodhead apologized Saturday for not better supporting the men’s lacrosse team and their families after three players were falsely accused in last year’s highly publicized rape scandal.

Brodhead, speaking at the university’s law school, said he regretted Duke’s “failure to reach out” in a “time of extraordinary peril” after a woman accused three players of raping her at a March 2006 party thrown by the team.

“Given the complexities of this case, getting the communication right would never have been easy,” Brodhead said. “But the fact is that we did not get it right, causing the families to feel abandoned when they were most in need of support. This was a mistake. I take responsibility for it and I apologize for it.”

Brodhead spoke at a school-sponsored forum on legal and ethical issues common to high-profile cases, and he received a standing ovation following his speech. He left afterward and school officials said he would not be available for further comment.

Well, after all, they were upper-middle-class white guys (mostly), and one had a record of being a jag.  That whole “innocent until proven guilty” thing doesn’t count for them, right?

And if that white guy looks like of like a redneck, well…:

A woman who spent more than a week trapped in the wreckage of her sport-utility vehicle has been upgraded to serious condition, a spokeswoman at Harborview Medical Center said Sunday…Her husband, Tom Rider, said Friday he was frustrated by the red tape he had to fight to get authorities to launch a search for his wife more than a week after she disappeared…When he couldn’t reach his wife, Rider said he called Bellevue police to report his wife missing.

Bellevue police took the report right away, but when they found video of Tanya Rider getting into her car after work, they told her husband the case was out of their jurisdiction and he should notify King County, he said.

Tom Rider said he tried that, but “the first operator I talked to on the first day I tried to report it flat denied to start a missing persons report because she didn’t meet the criteria,” he said…Thursday morning, detectives asked him to come in to sign for a search of phone records. They also asked him to take a polygraph test.

“By the time he was done explaining the polygraph test to me, the detective burst into the room with a cell phone map that had a circle on it,” Tom Rider said Friday. He said the detective started explaining the blip they had found and within minutes, news arrived that Tanya Rider had been found.

That’s right – shake down the husband before you look for the cell phone.  Because of course  the husband did it. 

The white guy always does it, doesn’t he?

4 thoughts on “Do The Right Thing

  1. I love Law and Order, especially early on, but candidly, it’s really really poor at teaching law. I’ve lawyer friends who say we should take NOTHING from it, it’s that far off-base, except for the most very general of concepts.

  2. Not only did Duke not support the players, they fired the coach, cancelled the season and assumed the players were guilty.

  3. I heard Brodhead’s so called apology. I thought it was lousy. So the University “failed to reach out”? They reached out all right. They reached out and ripped the still beating hearts right out of those lacrosse players. I also love where he said the families of those students were “made to feel abandoned”…way to take responsibility, President Jackass. Not “we abandoned them” but made “to feel abandoned”! I hope the families not only do not accept such a self serving non apology, but demand a few more million in their defamation case against the University for the insult it provides.

  4. I’ve heard it said — and I haven’t checked; maybe angryclown will snort in indignation and then go do some research and find out if it’s true — that there are more murders of and by white middle class New Yorkers on Law and Order every year than there are murders of and by white middle class New Yorkers in, well, New York every year.

    I think it’s rank racial discrimination, myself, and we need some affirmative action. It’s horribly unfair to the legions of good black actors and actresses to be denied these roles out of some perceived need to overstate the numbers (and percentages) of white-on-white murders.

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