Slate Rundown

This may sound like a broken record, but I'm a big fan of Slate.com. I feel the Today's Papers (a summary of the 5 major newspapers) and Jurisprudence (law and legal matters) columns are essential reading. Slate also has superb business columns as well as great dispatches pieces and solid articles on basically everything current. Anyway, here are a couple article links on interesting news stories.

Many of you may remember the Duke Lacrosse/Stripper Rape story a couple of months back. Well if you are wondering what happened to the story, the Slate article has a superb summary on the major facts and why the story is no longer major news. The gist of it is that the prosecution's case is thin at best. The Stripper's story has been equivocal and she has changed it throughout the investigation. There is also strong evidence (time stamped digital photos and credit card reciepts) that place the alleged rapists away from the alleged bathroom in which the rape took place. And while the Stripper is responsible for what strongly seems to be fraudulent rape allegations, blame doesn't simply rest with her. As the Slate article points out, the police and district attorney in the case have pressed on with the rape allegations through incompetence, political sensationalism, and borderline deceit. The Slate article reports on all this by taking apart a recent NYTimes article on why the DA is going ahead with the case. It is a very interesting read, so for those interested here's the link:

http://www.slate.com/id/2148546/

Now, before I move on to the second Slate article, I'd like to mention a few things. While this seems to be an incident of a fraudulent rape victim, one can look up state and/or national crime statistics and find substantial cases of genuine rape. Crime and social data also point out that rape/sexual assualt is most likely underreported. And let's face it, rape is still a taboo subject which also disadvantages rape victims because of a despicable social stigma that we, once again, don't really talk about and confront. The point is, just because one victim may be a fake does not mean that rape/sexual assualt is not a major problem.

Second, I believe one of the greatest tragedies in this story is the misconduct and incompentence by the police and DA. As someone who is gearing up towards a legal education I am becoming more and more familiar with our justice system. And while I'm sure there are staunchly ethical and competent police officers and prosecutors, the more I learn about the problems of the judicial system the more I hear and read about police and prosecutors being incompetent, acting towards political benefit, stubbornly avoiding or rejecting contrary evidence, and other abuses of power. The silver lining is that these abuses were eventually caught and placed into the official record so I (and others) could learn from them. But it's still rather heartbreaking to relentlessly read about and hear about such travesties of justice.

I've written a decent amount. So I'll introduce the second article very succintly. Team USA recently lost to Greece in the FIBA championships. We did rebound and crushed Argentina in the Bronze Medal game (which we won again --- Bronze at the previous Olympics as well). Anyway, Rob Weintraub does a great job in explaining why we lost (mainly that International Basketball is slightly different from the NBA and that the rest of the world has gotten significantly better) and makes a insightful comparison to our showing in the recent World Cup. Here's the link to the article for those interested:

http://www.slate.com/id/2148903/