I've been remiss in failing to link to Stuart Taylor's Slate takedown of the recent New York Times article hyping the prosecution's side of the Duke lacrosse case (which Steve Verdon pointed out in a comment on my post about the article).
Here are the money grafs:
The Wilson-Glater piece highlights every superficially incriminating piece of evidence in the case, selectively omits important exculpatory evidence, and reports hotly disputed statements by not-very-credible police officers and the mentally unstable accuser as if they were established facts. With comical credulity, it features as its centerpiece a leaked, transparently contrived, 33-page police sergeant's memo that seeks to paper over some of the most obvious holes in the prosecution's evidence.
This memo was concocted from memory, nearly four months after the underlying witness interviews, by Durham police Sgt. Mark Gottlieb, the lead investigator. Gottlieb says he took no contemporaneous notes, an inexplicable and indefensible police practice. Gottlieb had drawn fire before the alleged Duke rape—perhaps unbeknownst to the Times—as a Dukie-basher who reveled in throwing kids into jail for petty drinking infractions, noise violations, and the like, sometimes with violent criminals as cellmates.
Gottlieb's memo is contradicted on critical points by the contemporaneous notes of other police officers, as well as by hospital records seeming to show that the accuser did not have the injuries Gottlieb claims to have observed. The Times blandly mentions these contradictions while avoiding the obvious inference that the Gottlieb memo is thus unworthy of belief.
In related news, the Duke Chronicle has published an article about student charges of misconduct against Gottlieb in previous incidents:
Gottlieb has occasionally used violent tactics and misrepresented the truth in court, students who he has arrested allege.
Gottlieb also jailed students for noise violations while allowing a non-student charged with the more serious charge of carrying a concealed weapon to walk away with a citation, according to his documented arrest history.
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