{"id":1370,"date":"2007-10-01T04:04:05","date_gmt":"2007-10-01T09:04:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1370"},"modified":"2007-10-01T14:02:10","modified_gmt":"2007-10-01T19:02:10","slug":"do-the-right-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1370","title":{"rendered":"Do The Right Thing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bear in mind, most of what I know about the law, I learned from watching Law and Order.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

Which I freely admit isn’t a whole lot.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In L’nO<\/em>, 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In real life, of course, it destroys lives, literally and figuratively.\u00a0 It’s been in the news twice this past weekend.<\/p>\n

Duke University finally <\/em>apologized<\/a>\u00a0to the three lacrosse players in whose railroading they participated last year.\u00a0 (No matter – everyone knew they were guilty<\/a>, until, oops<\/a>,\u00a0they weren’t:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, after all, they were <\/em>upper-middle-class white guys (mostly), and one had a record of being a jag.\u00a0 That whole “innocent until proven guilty” thing doesn’t count for them, right?<\/p>\n

And if that white guy looks like of like a redneck, well…:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s right – shake down the husband before you look for the cell phone.\u00a0 Because of course<\/em>\u00a0 the husband did it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The white guy always <\/em>does it, doesn’t he?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bear in mind, most of what I know about the law, I learned from watching Law and Order.\u00a0 Which I freely admit isn’t a whole lot.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,24,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-and-punishment","category-culture-war","category-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1370\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}