Product Description

A rowdy party, booze, boys, and a stripper-and after a wild night of living it up, charges of assault and rape were leveled at certain members of the Duke lacrosse team. When the district attorney brought charges, it seemed like an easy verdict. Few suspected then that this national blockbuster of a news story was all based on lies.
Seasoned trial attorney Nader Baydoun deconstructs the case and reveals the egregious misconduct that led to a rush to judgment and a gross injustice. By presenting the evidence with a trained eye for detail, Baydoun exposes the political pandering of the district attorney, his neglect of crucial evidence, the way in which he stacked the case against the innocent suspects, and how he tenaciously believed unreliable victim testimony-all to ensure his reelection. Baydoun also takes the university leadership to task for its failure to support the students in the case.
In this gripping tale of injustice, Baydoun sets the record straight and points the way to justice for the real victims.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #48379 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Customer Reviews

Doesn't hold a candle to "Until Proven Innocent"
"A Rush To Injustice" isn't a bad book or an awful book: it simply isn't anywhere as good or comprehensive or well-written as Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case.

Where Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson engaged in extensive first-hand research, interviewing many of the participants directly and drilling down to an almost microscopic level, the authors of "Rush" were content to rely primarily on newspaper and magazine articles. Ironically, "Until Proven Innocent" points out the bias and inaccuracy of many of these articles.

The primary author appears to be Nader Baydoun, a Nashville lawyer who graduated from Duke University. The viewpoint is very much first-person. Badoun took it upon himself to "investigate" the situation. He claims he heard "tales of crooked prosecutors, selfserving faculty members, turncoat administrators, irate revenge-seeking neighbors, and even, possibly dirty cops who were out to pursue their own personal agendas." Well, anyone who followed in KC Johnson's blog Durham-In-Wonderland or the Liestoppers blog knew about these things as soon as they came to light.

The book is not well-written. The word "I" appears far too frequently because Baydoun is telling the story of his reactions to the case with the case itself being secondary. Events that were of critical importance have to wait for Baydoun to wade his way through preliminaries with chapter titles like "The Plot Thickens" and "Duked". He doesn't reach one of the most truly outrageous episodes, the infamous and reprehensible Group of 88, until page 93.

Comments such as "Much to my chagrin, it has become all too apparent to me that hypocrisy has been allowed to reign in the halls of Duke, overshadowed and underscored by the arrogance of some seemingly highly educated faculty members and students." This and many other comments sound like apologia from rightfully concerned and embarassed Duke alumni, but do nothing to tell the story of the three falsely accused Duke lacrosse players.

Overall, as I said, this is not an awful book, but "Until Proven Innocent" is far superior for anyone who is interested in the actual story of the case and not Baydoun's subjective shame over the goings on at his alma mater.

Jerry

best account of the Duke Lacrosse case
This is best and most succinct of the three books currently available on the Duke Lacrosse case. As someone who knows some of the characters in this story, I think this book provides a very good account of the thought processes and actions of everyone involved.

Good Account of a Legal Lynching
This book was the first of three to bring us an account of the Duke LaCrosse Rape Scandal Hoax of 2006. The authors do a good job of describing how a terrible lie by a mentally disturbed black stripper nearly sent three innocent white Duke students into prison for life. Even more than the lie, we're shown how a gallery of villians conspired to railroad the three innocents because of their various agendas. As the authors point out, on nearly every university campus, students are forced to take diversity classes where they're taught that white males are the source of all problems. This is part of the fanatical politically correct obsessions of white male treachery, black victomhood and feminist radical theory. You're presented with an amazing gallery of lynch mob members, determined to over-ride the truth in their goal of incacerating for life the young trio. You've got a very disturbed female black stripper who had made the same charges three years before against a group of men but didn't pursue her complaint. There's the psychopathic district attorney, Mike Nifong who knew early on that the rape charges were a lie but nevertheless pursued the suspects because he wanted to be re-elected as DA. Duke University's gutless president, Richard Brodhead and his treacherous cronies never wavered in their support of the demented Nifong and consistently refused to look at the pile of documentation by the defense attorneys that proved the innocence of the accused. You had a group of 88 Duke professors (or a gallery of 88 bigots) who signed a newspaper ad that encouraged protestors to "turn up the volume" against the LaCrosse players, even though many of these professors had LaCrosse players in their classes. There were the violently anti-white New Panther Party who came to Duke to demonstrate and urged violence against the players. The North Carolina chapter of the NAACP comes across as a morally derelict group that demanded Nifong imprison the boys.

The Durham Police and judges were also derelict in trying to uncover the truth The authors show us how the media outrageously distorted the truth and crucified the accused, led by the New York Times and CNN's disgrace, Nancy Grace who constantly referred to the accused as "rapists". The Times articles were so pro-Mike Nifong you would think he was personally writing the articles. Even Duke Hospital helped ignite the inferno when one of its emegency nurses, Tara Livecy distorted her examination of the stripper to show that she had been raped. The nurse was proud of being a feminist and said she never ever doubted any woman who cried rape. Many student protestors were equally guilty, especially one student/faculty led group, The Potbangers, that held countless protests in front of the residences of the LaCrosse players and threatened them with bodily harm. Throughout this book, you may be reminded of an identical case in New York State in 1987 when black teenager Tawana Brawley accused a group of white men, including a young district attorney, of gang rape. For a year, her false charges were fanned by racial arsonists like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. In a horrifying example of deja vu, both Sharpton and Jackson flew into Durham to scream for justice while demanding imprisonment against the accused trio. Like Tawana Brawley, the stripper was never charged with anything. While Nifong was eventually disbarred, none of the lynch mob has ever apologized for its actions. In fact, President Brodhead was just recently praised by his board of trustees for his outstanding efforts in handling the false rape case--which would suggest the board supported the president's unwavering support of Mike Nifong.

My one complaint is that there are no photographs in this book. A true life drama this big demands pictorial enhancement to give us images of both the villians and the heroes. One of the heroes, in addition to the defense attorneys, was the feisty, heroic Duke campus newspaper, The Chronicle, which never wavered in urging for people to hold their judgements until all the facts were in The paper stood up to the administration and to the arrogant faculty members who demanded that they were the only ones who knew the truth. In the end, they were proven to be just as guilty as Mike Nifong in trying to perpetuate a horrendous miscarriage of judgement upon three of its own students.