Brendan Nyhan

ABC News reports that the defense is claiming that latest DNA tests in the Duke lacrosse case are not conclusive:

A lawyer for one of the players on the Duke University lacrosse team said the results of the second round of DNA testing in the investigation of rape allegations showed “no conclusive match” with any player on the team.

“Categorically, this report shows no conclusive match between any genetic material taken on or from the false accuser and any genetic material of any Duke lacrosse player,” said Joe Chesire, an attorney for one of the team members not accused in the case, at a news conference hours after the results of the new testing were released.

A vaginal swab from the accuser did find genetic material from one “single male source,” but that source was not any member of the lacrosse team, Chesire said.

The AP adds that “Cheshire said the testing did find some genetic material from several people on a plastic fingernail found in a bathroom trash can of the house where the team held the March 13 party,” adding that the defense attorney “said some of that material had the ‘same characteristics’ – a link short of a conclusive match – to some of the players, but not the two who have charged with rape, kidnapping and sexual assault.”

In short, Nifong appears to have a non-conclusive link to non-suspects on a fingernail in a trash can with lots of other items in it plus semen from someone who isn’t a lacrosse player. That’s not much.

ABC News is reporting that a third lacrosse player may be indicted based on a partial identification and a partial DNA match — not exactly convincing evidence:

Prosecutors believe they have DNA evidence to tie a third Duke lacrosse player to the alleged attack of a 27-year-old exotic dancer, sources close to the investigation tell ABC News.

Sources say the third player is the same person who was identified with “90 percent” certainty by the alleged victim in a photo lineup. That lineup was conducted by police weeks after the March 13 off-campus lacrosse team party where the alleged incident took place.

After a first set of DNA tests failed to link two lacrosse players to the alleged crime, it was widely considered that DNA evidence would not be part of the case. New results from this second round of testing will help the prosecution’s case, sources close to the investigation say.

The potential evidence — a DNA sample found under a fake fingernail worn by the alleged victim and linked to the lacrosse player — was recovered from the off-campus home where the alleged attack took place. The fingernail was found in a garbage can in the house, sources close to the investigation told ABC News.

Until the full results are released, it is not yet clear how useful the new tests will be to the prosecution. That complete report is expected to be returned on Monday — the same day a grand jury is expected to meet and could indict the player whose DNA was allegedly found.

…Earlier in the case, Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong said he had hoped to indict a third player in the alleged crime but did not have enough evidence at the time.

“Investigation into the identity of the third assailant will continue in the hope that he can also be identified with certainty,” Nifong said in media reports.

The Durham Herald Sun newspaper in North Carolina reported today that the tissue sample used for testing did not allow for a 100 percent match, but that it was “consistent” with the DNA of the third player. Because a complete DNA pattern was not obtained from the sample on the fingernail, it was impossible to match that sample with near certainty to the third player, the newspaper said.

That newspaper’s reporting largely mirrors what sources close to the investigation have told ABC News. When pressed, however, those sources would not say there was a perfect match between the third player and the sample tested.

Defense sources said the results from an initial round of DNA testing had failed to produce any DNA evidence. They point out, to this day, that no DNA evidence matching the lacrosse players has been found on the alleged victim. They insist that results from this set of DNA tests are also inconclusive and that there is no match, and that to say otherwise is “very misleading.”

They also say it would not be unusual to find players’ DNA in the bathroom or garbage can of a house where some of them lived and many others spent time.

The defense will almost certainly argue that these new DNA results should not be permitted in court, because they are not a perfect match. In cases where DNA evidence is not a perfect match it is sometimes considered inadmissible as evidence.

Yesterday, I posted about the stunning claim in a Duke report that the accuser in the lacrosse rape case initially said twenty men raped her. Since then, this claim has come into serious question.

In the initial Durham Herald Sun report from yesterday morning, City Manager Patrick Baker and District Attorney Mike Nifong deny the claim:

City Manager Patrick Baker cast doubt on the report, saying he hadn’t previously heard that anyone in the Police Department questioned the woman’s credibility.

“To the contrary, as I have stated in the past, the Durham Police Department immediately launched a full investigation into these allegations,” Baker wrote in an e-mail. “I am at a loss for why we would go through such an extensive initial investigatory exercise and assign two investigators to work on this case if we thought the allegations were not credible or that the matter was going to blow over.”

…District Attorney Mike Nifong said Monday he had not previously heard that the accuser allegedly changed the number of men she claimed attacked her.

“I hadn’t heard anything about 20 as opposed to three,” Nifong said upon learning of the new Duke report.

“It’s not something I believe to be true,” he added. “Other than that, I wouldn’t specifically have any comment. I haven’t seen the report and have no knowledge of it.”

And today, reports in the News & Observer and the Herald Sun indicate that this information came from a shaky source — a Duke police officer who overheard one side of a Durham police officer’s cell phone conversation. It should therefore be regarded as totally unconfirmed. What a mess…

Somehow I failed to notice this explosive information from the latest report on the Duke lacrosse incident:

The day after the March 13 team party where a 27-year-old black woman claimed she was raped, Durham police told campus officers that “this will blow over,” the report said. The woman initially told police she was raped by 20 white men, then said she was attacked by three, the report said.

Here are the exact words from page 2 of the report (PDF):

After the victim of the alleged assaults was taken to the Emergency Room of the Duke Hospital in the early morning hours of March 14, having earlier told Durham police that she was raped and sexually assaulted by approximately 20 white members of a Duke team (a charge later modified to allege an attack by three individuals in a bathroom), the official report of the Duke Police Department was submitted and reviewed by the Duke Police Director, Robert Dean, at 7:30 a.m. on March 14.

No wonder the Durham police questioned the accuser’s credibility. Wouldn’t you?

Update 5/10 8:25 AM EST: This information has been called into question — please read my followup post. I’ve updated the title to reflect this new information.

A couple of weeks ago, I announced a contest to name the next conservative bestseller. The key is to leverage some powerful pejorative term like fascism, treason, slander, etc.

It’s time to announce a winner: Ann Coulter! She just announced that her latest book is titled Godless: The Church of Liberalism. How can my readers compete with the master?

Second prize goes to Seth Kramer for his creative suggestion of Child-eating Vampire Nazis: Why the Evil Liberal Menace Hate Our Troops. Maybe next time, Seth!

Today a committee appointed by Duke President Richard Brodhead released a report (PDF) on the administration’s response to the alleged lacrosse team rape. The conclusion, not surprisingly, is that the administration failed to move quickly enough to address the situation — in part because it took a shocking ten days for the administration that the accuser was black and two weeks to learn of the alleged racial slurs made by team members.

The report also confirms one rumor I had heard, stating definitively that the Durham police regarded the accuser as non-credible. It states the following on pages 4-5:

There are reports from several sources that members of the Durham police force initially (March 14) made comments to Duke police officers and others to the effect that the complainant “kept changing her story and was not credible;” that “if any charges were brought, they would be no more than misdemeanors;” and that “this will all blow over.” When Dean Wasiolek called her colleagues to inform them of the incident, she also conveyed the police’s assessment that the alleged victim was not credible. The discounting by police and others of the importance of the seriousness of the allegations may have reflected a belief that the matter would not be pressed because the charging party was not that important or reliable. When President Brodhead first learned of the allegations on March 20, he called Vice President Moneta, who told him that “the accusations were not credible and were unlikely to amount to anything.”

Clearly, the administration miscalculated. Still, this raises a serious question: how did Mike Nifong, the district attorney, reach such a different judgment about the credibility of the accuser than the Durham police?

I’m fascinated by Jonah Goldberg’s move to try sever conservatism’s fate from that of President Bush by arguing that the President is not a conservative:

[T]here is one area where we can make somewhat useful comparisons between Nixon and Bush: their status as liberal Republicans…

Bush is certainly to the right of Nixon on many issues. But at the philosophical level, he shares the Nixonians’ supreme confidence in the power of the state. Bush rejects limited government and many of the philosophical assumptions that underlie that position. He favors instead strong government. He believes, as he said in 2003, that when “somebody hurts, government has got to move.” His compassionate conservatism shares with Nixon’s moderate Republicanism a core faith that not only can the government love you, but it should spend money to prove its love. Beyond that, there seems to be no core set of principles that define Bush’s approach, and therefore, much like Nixon, no clearly communicable message that explains why he does things other than political calculation and expediency.

The idea, of course, is to not let Bush’s failure damage conservatism as a political movement. As Glenn Greenwald points out, however, conservatives happily claimed Bush as one of their own when he was popular even though he displayed some big government tendencies. But now that he’s unpopular, it’s likely we’ll see more “Bush is not a conservative” rhetoric.

This rhetorical tactic is fascinating because it inverts what Democrats did after the debacle of the 1980/1984/1988 elections. Democrats started denying they were liberals, whereas conservatives today are denying that Republicans are conservatives.

It also conveniently reverses the way conservatives interpreted President Clinton’s ideology. Every move toward the center that Clinton made was interpreted as a sign of political expediency that just masked his underlying liberalism. By contrast, President Bush’s moves toward the center (education, prescription drugs, immigration, refusing to propose major budget cuts) are interpreted as revealing his true liberal tendencies.

The other absurd aspect of this is Goldberg’s suggestion that Bush is unpopular because he’s too liberal:

Perhaps this unnoticed fact [Bush’s alleged liberalism on domestic issues] explains part of Bush’s falling poll numbers more than most observers are willing to admit. The modern conservative movement, from Goldwater to Reagan, was formed as a backlash against Nixonism. Today, Reaganite conservatives make up a majority of the Republican party. If Bush held the Reaganite line on liberty at home the way he does on liberty abroad, he’d be in a lot better shape. After all, if Bush’s own base supported him at their natural level, his job-approval numbers wouldn’t be stellar, but they wouldn’t have his enemies cackling, either.

USA Today/Gallup happened to ask a poll question about precisely this issue, and the results indicate exactly the opposite. 45% of Americans think Bush is too conservative, 28% think he’s just about right, and only 19% think he’s too liberal. Part of the most recent decline in Bush’s poll numbers is certainly due to growing conservative discontent, but that’s only because there’s no one else left to alienate — liberals and moderates already disapprove of Bush in massive numbers (according to USA Today/Gallup, 52% of conservatives approve of Bush, compared with 28% of moderates and 7% of liberals). If the President moved meaningfully toward the center, he’d almost surely gain in popularity. Conversely, moving further to the right would likely hurt his overall political standing. It’s hard to imagine that more hard-edged conservatism would leave Bush in “a lot better shape,” as Goldberg claims.

Did you know USA Today/Gallup polled the Duke lacrosse case? I didn’t. Here’s a summary of their findings from the poll, which was conducted April 28-30 with a nationally representative sample:

Women are significantly more likely than men to say the charges that two Duke University lacrosse players sexually assaulted a woman at a March 13 team party are true; women are less likely than men to believe that their accuser is being treated fairly. Overall, Americans are more likely to say the charges are true rather than not true, according to a recent USA Today/Gallup poll, though a substantial percentage do not offer an opinion. More than half of Americans say that both the players and the woman are being treated fairly in this case. Six in 10 Americans say they are closely following the case, which represents a mid-range level of interest compared with other news stories measured over the last decade or so.

Read the whole thing for more details.

Two months after being deleted from Google, I’m back in their index, although I only have about fifty pages indexed.

In other search-related news, I added a Rollyo site search box to the left sidebar. To search this site, just click on the pulldown menu that says “Select Search Engine” and choose “Search brendan-nyhan.com.” It uses Yahoo Search to search the whole blog at once. Until Google re-indexes the whole site, that’s your best option for finding posts on particular topics.

Breaking news from the News & Observer: “Colleges find drinking deeply rooted.” Coming next week: “Area schools find homework deeply disliked.”