Duke Lacrosse Case Should Be Used To Kill Death Penalty

You get the impression that some folks regard what happened to the three Duke lacrosse players as the worst injustice ever.

I agree that it was an injustice.


David Evans, Collin Finnerty, and Reade Seligmann experienced what no one should ever have to suffer through: finding themselves accused of something they had not done.

For a year, their lives were rudely interrupted.


For the rest of their lives, a cloudy asterick will remain beside their names.

"It’s changed my life forever, no matter what happens from here on out. It’s probably gonna be something that defines me my whole life," Finnerty told Ed Bradley in a "60 Minutes" interview.

I am glad that it only took a year to clear the Duke students' names.

They now have the opportunity to move forward with their lives.

As upset as some people are about what happened to these three young men, I haven't sensed the response that should follow.

While their case was never a death penalty case, what happened to them serves only as the most recent evidence that the death penalty needs to be abolished in our state and in our nation. (A moratorium is not enough.)

I assume that false accusations, such as the ones made by Crystal Gail Mangum, are rare.

I assume that prosecutors like Mike Nifong are even less common.

I like to believe the best about people.

I like to believe the best about our judicial system.

I like to believe the best about America.

But no human being and no institution is immune to imperfections, whether those imperfections result from accidents or intentionally carried out acts.

We can look back now and say that the system worked.

The three Duke students were exonerated.

They were never found guilty in a court of law.

But that ignores how far the case did go and how quickly things spiraled out of control.

If the case went as far as it did, isn't it possible that it could have gone further?

What if the accused had not come from families who could afford the best lawyers money can buy?

What if Nifong had taken a more subtle inital approach, drawing less attention to the case than it so quickly received and maintained? (To an extent, the Duke students are actually lucky that Nifong handled the case as he did. Otherwise, their situation might have slipped under the radar.)

What if the accuser had been a better liar than she ultimately proved to be?

What if there had not been racial and socioeconomic differences between the accused and the accuser?

What if a jury had convicted the three Duke students?

What if there hadn't been evidence to support the students' claims of innocence?

What if their reputations had been worse than merely sometimes out of control partying-players, making it even easier for people to assume their guilt?

What if they had been accused of a death-penalty-eligible crime?

It shouldn't take great imaginations to see the all-too-real possibility of others being wrongfully accused of crimes and actually finding themselves convicted, thrown in jail, and even awaiting their undeserved executions.

The Duke players are alive, free, and without fatal wounds.

The same goes for Ronald Cotton and Darryl Hunt, two wrongfully accused men who suffered much more and much longer than the Duke students even came close to suffering.

But if we execute a person and later discover that that person is innocent, we cannot undo that crime.

Such a risk is unacceptable.

It's not worth risking the execution of one innocent individual for the sake of being able to execute a million guilty individuals.

If you can argue that such a sacrifice of the innocent is aceptable, then you can argue that it's no big deal what the Duke players or Ronald Cotton or Darryl Hunt went through.

In each of these cases, it is of course a very big deal what these fellow human beings suffered.

But none of their cases would begin to compare to the actual execution of an innocent human being.

If we actually believe that what happened to the Duke players is inexcusable, we should demand that our North Carolina legislators and governor abolish the death penalty.

And that effort should be carried out on a national level as well.