Thirty MIllion Dollars!
Normally I'm all for sticking it to the state when they screw up, but the Duke case is now officially out of control.
Nifong went to jail today. Fine. I can live with that, even though I believe he's a scapegoat and that his disbarment and jailing does more harm to the system by intimating that this sort of thing actually happens when prosecutors cheat when in fact most do it with impunity and never get caught or sanctioned. But now the times reports that "the three students he accused were in talks with the city for a settlement of $30 million "
Are you kidding me?
That's grotesque. The DA has now done more jail time than the kids. There are dozens of poor and yes, black exonerees who actually spent decades in prison or on death row for crimes they didn't commit and they get pittances. Why do these kids deserve 30 million dollars? (And this On top of the huge settlement Duke's almost certainly already paid?) What's happening here is just more big rich white daddy extortion. It's shameful.
my controversial book about a day in my life as Public Defender in the South Bronx is finally available for Kindle and Ipad.
5 comments:
I'm with you, David. If the Duke boys' (can you name even one of them without consulting Google? I can't) injury is worth $30 mil, we ought to be opening the public treasury to guys like Gilber Amezquita who lost years of their lives to the unfairness of the system.
I don't think they are looking for a settlement of 30 million.
I think they are looking for a settlement and are threatening to sue for 30 million if they don't settle.
I think this just goes to show why the cops, DA's etc. usually stick to screwing over poor people. First, because they usually get away with it, and, second, the lack of costs which generally attaches to getting caught. Even if we catch them shafting some poor schmuck like this, what are the damages? but these fast-track kids lives are going somewhere, and their families are somebodies, and they are entitled to their indiscretions... Scott Gesner, PD, KS.
When people say to me "how can you defend those people?" it's usually someone from the suburbs and I make the point that it's easy for them to take their Constitutional rights for granted because of their political power that usually means the police treat them better, they aren't profiled, the police respond quickly to their calls, etc.
But then I make the point that my clients (I've been an ex-PD for 2 months now), who lack this political power, see a different side of the police and tend to be the outer "sheep" the wolf feeds on before it gets to them. I tell them my clients, lacking political power, need representation to exercise their constitutional rights since that's their only protection against a system that will feed on them if it's not agitated.
They still usually look at me like I'm tainted but occasionally someone starts to understand that the rights of "those people" are the ones they often take for granted.
I can understand the sentiment, and feel some of it too, but I disagree with your feeling that this is a bad thing in totality. Your position is that by everyone involved here getting hammered, folks get to sit back and feel everything is right in the world and in the rare instances that law enforcement gets out of control, they are punished accordingly. Certainly there is some of that, but I also think, just like A-Rod getting an undeserved enormous contract manages to pull everyone else's salary up, this will have an overall effect of increasing the price for DAs who break the law or pursue prosecutions they should not (one and the same in my opinion). There's now a precedent for throwing a prosecutor in jail for lying. There's now a precedent for paying out signifcant sums of money for this sort of thing. In fact, this seems to me to be incentive to civil rights plaintiffs lawyers to take on more of these kinds of cases and get soem representation and, hopefully, some small recompense for those who thus far have not been made whole for the wrongs they've suffered. Maybe I'm too optimistic. Keep up the great work, Feige.
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