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By Richard Levick, Levick Strategic Communications
To state the obvious, the Duke Lacrosse scandal has opened a can of socio-cultural worms, the implications of which reach way beyond the typical messaging of communications consultants or the predictable talking points of elected officials.
We've gone through the looking glass on this one in the sense that much of the common wisdom - or common cynicism - does not stand up to close scrutiny. The New York Daily News, for one, did a remarkably insightful job pointing out how a number of glib assumptions just might not hold water ("Pressing questions in the Duke Lacrosse case" by Tamer El-Ghobashy, Christian Red, and Michael O'Keefe, April 23, 2006).
There are no positive answers to the following short quiz, which is indebted to those Daily News insights. Our three questions attempt to capture instead some of the all-pervasive ambiguity that defines this terrible event.
Q: How has this case reversed the usual media roles of lawyers in a high-profile case?
A: Defense lawyers tend to be instinctually averse to sharing direct evidence with the media or discussing their cases in public before a trial. Here, the defense lawyers have mounted a campaign to publicly discredit the accuser by releasing supposedly exculpatory taxi cab and ATM receipts along with time-stamped photos in which the accuser is looking disoriented.
To be sure, there is often an early whispering campaign against accusers in sex cases involving celebrities, as we saw with both William Kennedy Smith and Kobe Bryant. However, what makes this case unusual is how totally open the defense attorneys are in their strategy to publicly compromise the accuser and irretrievably seed the jury pool. They are flourishing their weapons rather than attacking covertly.
On the other hand, the DA opened the door for this assault by the defense - a counter-assault, really - when he first characterized the accused as "hooligans" and called particular attention to the racial slurs allegedly made during the incident. Considering the virulence of public sentiment, the defense lawyers may have concluded that there was no choice but to attack, and that the best way to do so was out in the open.
Q: It's widely suggested that Durham prosecutor Mike Nifong is doing everything he can to keep the case alive as he faces a strong challenge in a May 2 Democratic district attorney primary. Why might such an imputation be an over-simplification?
A: A smart politician would prefer a much less aggressive posture than what Nifong has assumed. Jackson Katz, an anti-sexism activist and the founder of the Mentors in Violence Program, says that Nifong knows "it will be easy for the defense to discredit a stripper, and he knows the lacrosse players are well-connected and will be lawyered up. It's self-destructive to take on white students in Durham just to pander to black voters."
On the other hand, it could be argued that the election is being held before the trial. If Nifong is as calculating as some people assume, he may have already conceded the trial, but without relinquishing the benefits of pre-trial posturing.
Q: Nifong is getting mileage now by reminding us that most rape cases have not hinged on DNA evidence. In what sense did Nifong back himself into this corner?
A: It was Nifong who elevated the importance of DNA in the first place. Every player except one (an African American player who was never accused) was tested and, at that point, the unmistakable message dominating the prosecutor's media strategy was that the test results would be dispositive. |
