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Civil Suit Settlement

By K.C. Johnson

Anne Blythe at the N&O brings word of the final resolution of the civil suit filed by the three falsely accused players. The suit was effectively neutered by the 4th Circuit, and the settlement reflects that reality: the city has agreed to make a $50,000 donation to the state Innocence Inquiry Commission, but otherwise make no payments or admit to any wrongdoing.Updated, 1.07pm: The city of Durham released a statement, indicating the following: ?As the City has maintained throughout, it believes that its police officers had an obligation to investigate the allegations made by Crystal Mangum in 2006 and that no police officer nor any other City employee engaged in improper conduct.?And so Durham has now reaffirmed that it was not improper conduct:--for a member of its Police Department to give misleading testimony to the grand jury;--for its Police Department to run a rigged photo array confined only to photos of the suspects;--for one of two investigators on the case to not keep contemporaneous notes on his exchanges with witnesses, and then months later to produce a straight-from-memory report that seemed designed to fill in holes in the case;--for its senior police leadership to transfer supervisory control of a major police investigation to a county prosecutor;--for members of the police department to (at the bare minimum) not speak up when the prosecutor and lab director discussed, in the officers' presence, producing a report that did not include all DNA test results;--for members of the Police Department to enter Duke dorms and seek to interview suspects that the department knew were represented by counsel;--for a police department employee to give wildly misleading, and in some cases simply inaccurate, public statements about the case...continue to full post

Full post as published by Durham-in-Wonderland on May 16, 2014 (boomark / email).