Bryan Burwell, writing about the sudden, terse disenrollment of two basketball players after allegations of some sort of sexual misconduct, penneth:
Or is it closer to resembling the botched investigation and rush-to-judgment mess in the Duke lacrosse scandal, where no one involved was exactly a pure innocent, but assigning absolute guilt was a convoluted riddle?
Ah, yes, the lacrosse players who hired strippers for a party, and one of the strippers accused the players of raping her, but those charges were proven to be untrue (see Duke University’s own statement exonerating the three charged).
Indeed, assigning complex guilt was tough in the Duke case because everyone in the media was trying to convict and punish the innocent.
I’d applaud Burwell’s call to avoid a rush for judgment if his own judgment were not questionable in his characterization of the Duke case.
Also, I’d be remiss if I did not mention that the SLU students, who are part of “another unclear and uncomfortable, but extremely complicated, sexually charged, he-said, she-said mess in the world of sports”, are black as is Burwell. The Duke lacrosse players, those not innocent guys who were, in fact, innocent of the charges against them, are not. I hate to bring it up, since I might be called a racist for noticing.
