An Institutional Perspective on the Duke Lacrosse Case
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Excerpt
We can organize the Duke lacrosse story around our three major sociopolitico-legal institutions. Like the mortal characters on Simon’s show, the team members—particularly, most obviously, Seligmann, Finnerty, and Evans—were acted upon and nearly crushed by those institutional forces. That the outcome of the case ultimately was successful seems beside the point. All still endured hardships largely perpetrated by the institutions themselves. Each institution failed to perform its role properly in the case, at least initially. A larger question is how to reconcile the ultimately successful outcome with the notion of institutional failure. Did the institutions right themselves and self-correct, producing the proper outcome? Or did the case resolve itself appropriately in spite of those institutions? To understand the Duke lacrosse controversy is to study these institutions and to answer questions about the performance of each: to learn what each did right and wrong, to learn why, and to consider how each can improve in the future.
ISBN
9780754678731
Publication Date
2011
Publisher
Ashgate Publishing
City
New York, NY
Keywords
Duke Blue Devils (Lacrosse team), Malicious accusation, Mass media, criminal justice, Prosecutorial misconduct, Rape, Investigation, North Carolina, Durham
Disciplines
Criminal Law | Law
Recommended Citation
An Institutional Perspective on the Duke Lacrosse Case, in INSTITUTIONAL FAILURES: DUKE LACROSSE, UNIVERSITIES, THE NEWS MEDIA, AND THE LEGAL SYSTEM (Howard M. Wasserman, ed.) (Ashgate Publishing) (2011).
