Saturday, August 25, 2007

Is the Day of Reckoning approaching for Durham?

The Snooze Room has apparently awaken from it’s deep slumber and is reporting the City of Durham faces the possibility of litigation over the Police handling of the Duke Lacrosse Hoax.

In today’s Herald-Sun reporter Ray Gronberg writes;

Two of the country's best-known lawyers are representing three former Duke University lacrosse players falsely accused of rape and may file a federal civil-rights lawsuit against the city next month, multiple sources say.

The players have hired Washington, D.C., lawyer Brendan Sullivan and New York City litigator Barry Scheck to represent them in the pending civil case.

Confirmation of that came Friday from Chris Manning, a law partner of Sullivan's in the Washington firm Williams & Connolly.

Manning said that Scheck -- a member of O.J. Simpson's legal "dream team" in the 1990s -- is representing the third falsely accused player, Reade Seligmann.

Sources say Sullivan and Scheck contacted the city's lawyers recently and told them Durham faces litigation over how police handled the Duke lacrosse case.

Their move prompted City Council members, senior administrators, City Attorney Henry Blinder and a private-practice attorney retained by the city, Joel Craig, to huddle behind closed doors twice this week for consultations.

Blinder and Craig are supposed to attend a face-to-face meeting with the players' attorneys sometime in the next few days to hear them describe the basis for a lawsuit and perhaps terms for an out-of-court settlement.

The council has scheduled a closed-door meeting on Sept. 6 to hear a report from Blinder and Craig on the results of that meeting....

News of this development should be the final five-alarm fire bell warning to Durham’s City Leaders. Despite the many warnings that disgraced, disbarred, and former DA Nifong along with the Durham PD were attempting to imprison three innocent players for a crime which never happened, the Durham Leaders did little to stop the impending train wreck. Those heady days of indignation, protests, and false statements of March-April 2006 are coming home to roust.

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or to be acted out under the guise of virtue. Erich Fromm

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

More like the day pf wrecking for Durham. If I was involved, the 300 million powerball lottery drawing today would be peanuts compared to what I would want from durham and its criminals running that city.

Anonymous said...

I don't know if Durham's citizens really understands the trouble their PD & the leadership has created for them.

Mayor Bell, City Manger Baker, Chief Chalmers, Deputy Chief Hodge, and Major Russ went missing while Cpl Addison slandered these players and Capt Lamb & Lt Ripberger approved a line-up which violated their own guidelines.

Gottlieb, Himan, Clayton, and the rest of the PD tried to put three inncoent men in prison for a crime which never happened!

The details of this attempted frame job are yet to be revealed.

Only Officer Shelton stood out and said it was nonsense!

Anonymous said...

I hope there is a day of wrecking for Duke too and that all the rest of the lacrosse families sue the hell out of Duke. They cannot get away with their "let's move on" mentality.

Anonymous said...

The day of financial reckoning has already happened for Duke University. They settled the case and we found out in the article that Attorney Sullivan was their counsel.

Now we need the Duke Board of Directors to clean House and rid Duke of those who incited students and betrayed the Lacrosse Team.

Here's to the Big Blue Boot!

Anonymous said...

Thank you for printing the contents of the Herald Sun article here. Would you please continue to post relevant HS articles for us? That way fewer of us will face the sickening task of signing into the Herald Sun online. I don't think the HS will find any readership at Duke University anytime soon. I simply can't bring myself to register after opening the HS when I was in town became terrifying. Willful ignorance and combined with thinly veiled malice in a newspaper is terrifying. HS Editorials made me physically ill with worry that my son lived in a city where even the fourth estate chose to gleefully cheer on the "something must have happened" crazy lynch mob and pretend to be deaf dumb and blind in order to punish randomly picked innocent effigies of white male privilege from our student body. Did they never consider that Mike Nifong was a hack who routinely got off on bullying people in traffic court..this not exactly a state secret.
No member of the Herald Sun staff showed an iota of integrity or a shred of actual journalistic pursuit of stories of the corruption in the DA's office and the police force carried out with impunity right under their noses. Crystal's psychiatric history and criminal record were known to all of them, as were the records of thief Kim Pittman and Crystal's lying cousin Jakki/Clyde and other members of her family ready to market her unborn infant to the highest bidder on night TV as the product of a fantastical lie. The Herald Sun needs new management now.

Anonymous said...

Is Blinder a Communist?

Anonymous said...

Praise the Lord for wonderful Christian researchers like KC Johnson!

Mandelbrot's Chaos said...

10:11, even the best lawyer in the world cannot prevent their client from acting like a complete and utter idiot if his or her client is determined to do so. Perhaps Blinder should be commended for (perhaps once again) stating the obvious to the city leadership.

Anonymous said...

OK , if Durham only has 5 million $ insurance cover, where is the the other 10 million coming from?

5 million for each of the false accused is still not enough for a life time of "Some thing happened" crap!

Anonymous said...

Lets remmber that Duke has still not settled with the other 43 families and that the 43 will also go after the Durham PD and town 'leaders'....

Anonymous said...

Durham ought to be worried. I think 20 million per player sounds about right.

Anonymous said...

Thanks liestoppers -- we can only hope the cases go to trial or at least through discovery -- the time for covering up is over and the truth needs to be told.

Anonymous said...

To answer the question: Yes, the day of reckoning has definitely arrived. There is no way Durham can allow this case to go to Trial. The City would get destroyed.

-Esquire-
-Maryland-

Anonymous said...

Reckon Day just proved to be another of the long line of hoaxes perpetuated during Nifong's nefarious "career."
The only reckoning I heard was
"Reckon we better git more inshurrance!"