Jeffrey Rosen reviews Until Proven Innocent for the New York Times

Jeffrey Rosen,"Wrongly Accused," NYTBR, 16 September, reviews Stuart Taylor, Jr., and KC Johnson's Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case. Rosen is a professor of law at George Washington University and the author, most recently, of The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America. Here are the review's opening paragraphs:

From the Scottsboro Boys to Clarence Gideon, some of the most memorable legal narratives have been tales of the wrongly accused. Now"Until Proven Innocent," a new book about the false allegations of rape against three Duke lacrosse players, can join these galvanizing cautionary tales. We know how the story ended: the attorney general of North Carolina dismissed all charges against the lacrosse players, declaring them completely innocent, and he denounced Michael Nifong, the district attorney who brought the case, as a"rogue prosecutor." Nifong was not only disbarred and disgraced; his name has become a synonym for gross prosecutorial abuse. To be"Nifonged" now means to be railroaded.

In their riveting narrative, Stuart Taylor Jr., one of America's most insightful legal commentators (and a former reporter at The New York Times), and KC Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York, portray Nifong as"evil or deluded or both." They call him a"race-baiting demagogue" who tried to fan racial hatred against innocent white students (and lock them up for 30 years) in order to win black votes in his re-election campaign. Soon after an African-American stripper claimed she had been gang-raped at a Duke lacrosse party, the authors charge, Nifong should have known that the woman he called"my victim" was lying. She made the claim of rape only when threatened with confinement in a mental health center. She then recanted and re-recanted, offering a series of contradictory claims to having been raped by 20, five, four, three and two players, before finally settling on three, none of whom she could confidently identify. Her fellow stripper at the party called her story a" crock."

Nifong didn't know all this, however, because, incredibly, he never interviewed his"victim" about the facts. Instead, he set out systematically to demonize the accused players, violating pretrial publicity rules while suppressing evidence of their innocence. After the accuser proved unable to identify her assailants during two photo lineups, Nifong told the police to give her a third chance, showing her pictures only of the 46 white lacrosse players without any pictures of"fillers," or nonsuspects. This violated local, state and federal rules for reliable identification procedures. He refused to drop the charges after no DNA from any of the players was found on the accuser. When the DNA of as many as four other men, none of them Duke students, was found on her, Nifong refused to turn over this crucial exculpatory evidence to the defense. And he refused even to meet with defense lawyers to consider the conclusive"digital alibis" they had assembled from cellphone calls, A.T.M. deposits and time-stamped photos proving their clients could not have committed the crime. In this case, the technologies of the surveillance state served the cause of liberty.

Nifong's sins are now well known, but Taylor and Johnson argue that he was aided and abetted by the news media and the Duke faculty. They are withering about the"lynch mob mentality" (in the words of a defense lawyer) created by bloviating cable news pundits on the left and the right. But they are also sharply critical of what they call the one-sided reporting of the nation's leading newspapers, including The New York Times. With a few exceptions, the authors suggest, The Times's coverage consistently showed a"pro-Nifong bias," most notably in a front-page article apparently trying to resurrect the case after it seemed on the verge of collapse.

At least"many of the journalists misled by Nifong eventually adjusted their views as evidence of innocence" came to light, the authors conclude. That's more than can be said for Duke's"activist professors," 88 of whom signed an inflammatory letter encouraging a rush to judgment by the student protesters who were plastering the campus with wanted posters of the lacrosse team and waving a banner declaring"Castrate." Even when confronted with DNA evidence of the players' innocence, these professors refused to apologize and instead incoherently attacked their critics. In the same spirit, the authors charge, the president of Duke, Richard Brodhead, fired the lacrosse coach, canceled the season and condemned the team members for more than eight months. The pandering Brodhead, in this account, is more concerned about placating faculty ideologues than about understanding the realities of student life on his raunchy campus.

In their final chapters, the authors go further. They believe that Brodhead was trying to avoid the fate of Lawrence Summers, deposed as president of Harvard for his incorrect views about gender equality, and that in the"alternative universe" of academia, no university president can challenge the conceits of political correctness that are corrupting our greatest campuses. Here the book becomes a little hyperbolic and reads more like a blog than like the meticulous narrative that has come before. But if the authors are at times carried away by righteous indignation, they can surely be forgiven in light of the consequences of the abuses they describe. Taylor and Johnson have made a gripping contribution to the literature of the wrongly accused. They remind us of the importance of constitutional checks on prosecutorial abuse. And they emphasize the lesson that Duke callously advised its own students to ignore: if you're unjustly suspected of any crime, immediately call the best lawyer you can afford.