The grand jury found that there was enough evidence to warrant an investigation and trial. These grand jury members have no bias, nor knowledge of any of the Lacrosse players...what would their motive be? JUSTICE, maybe??? Nifong is the Defense lawyers last resort and scapegoat. Nifong is doing his job...to prosecute those who are believed to be guilty.
DURHAM -- Duke committees assessing the lacrosse team and Duke's student judicial process found a common culprit at the bottom of student misbehavior: the university's own ambivalent posture toward drinking.
Policies are on the books against underage drinking, for example, yet Duke officials long have looked the other way when it happens at campus events, the panels said. But what remained unclear was how Duke might extricate itself from what a committee report said was its own implication in the alcohol excesses of lacrosse players and other students.
Although one of the committees recommended several steps toward improving oversight of students living off campus, it stopped short of the strict policy advocated by City Manager Patrick Baker modeled after one used by his alma mater, Wake Forest University.
One person following the study's progress has been Catherine Bath, the mother of Raheem Bath, a Duke undergraduate who died as the result of a drinking binge in 1999. On April 19, she wrote Duke President Richard Brodhead in a letter posted on the Web site of a Pennsylvania nonprofit organization of which she is executive director, Security on Campus. Partly in response to the death, Duke overhauled its policies on student drinking in 2001 and has revised them as recently as last fall.
A "contingent of Duke parents" had been urging her to write Brodhead, Bath said, on the heels of the allegations that three Duke lacrosse players raped an exotic dancer hired for a team party at an off-campus house.
Bath took issue with drinking games, which also figured in the report on the lacrosse team as a disciplinary incident involving 10 players in 2001. Such games are prohibited by Duke's alcohol policy.
And she questioned why Duke's own noted researchers on teen drinking, Aaron White and Scott Schwartzwelder, weren't on the committees. "This says to me that you are not yet truly serious about changing the drinking culture among Duke students," she wrote.
Daniel Carter, vice president of Security on Campus, said Monday's reports at least acknowledge Bath's concerns. "I think they finally recognize, or say they have, what Catherine has been trying to say for seven years now," Carter said. "I would hope they would take this as a wakeup call. They've got a problem, as evidenced by what has happened in this situation with the lacrosse team, that they better take steps to correct."
Wanda Boone, co-founder of an anti-teen drinking organization called Durham Together for Resilient Youth, said she's cautiously optimistic for change at Duke. But she believes the university hasn't done enough to welcome viewpoints from outside the campus on drinking.
Duke's alcohol policy refers to community standards and expectations, she noted. "So my question is, how can you embrace a community standard or community expectation without inviting or participating in a dialogue with the community?" Boone asked.
She offered to meet with members of yet another of the five committees created by Brodhead last month, a "campus culture initiative," that is expected to review drinking in more depth.
That committee is just getting started and isn't due to issue its first reports until December. Boone said one of its two chairmen, Larry Moneta, Duke executive vice president for student affairs, wrote her to say that "if and when we decide to engage others in the process," the committee will get in touch with her. Moneta couldn't be reached for comment Tuesday.
But a community appeal by Boone didn't get much more traction. A town meeting by DurhamTRY on April 20 drew just 10 people. "We're saying that adults must change the national norm," Boone said. "What happens on the campus spills out onto the community. The clear message must be sent that underage drinking is not a rite of passage or an entitlement."
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