More on the photos

2006-04-09T23:34:48Z 2006-04-09T23:34:48Z More on the photos 2006-04-09T23:34:48Z

Joseph Neff of the <cite>News & Observer</cite> <a href="http://www.newsobserver.com/1185/story/427087.html">reports</a> additional details on <a href="http://blog.lordsutch.com/archives/3355" title="Duke under siege, day fourteen: defense claims photos exculpatory">the photos the lacrosse players’ attorneys claim are exculpatory</a> based on an account by attorney Joe Cheshire. There are definitely more details than previous accounts, and not all of them are all that flattering to the team: <blockquote> The lacrosse players line the room, drinking out of beer cans and plastic cups, and one photo shows a player unconscious on the floor, his shorts pulled down and his underwear wet. </blockquote> And we have an echo of scandals past: <blockquote> Cheshire said the time-stamped photos have a 27-minute gap between when the two women stopped dancing and when the accuser was photographed outside the house. During that period, the dancers locked themselves in a bathroom and then went outside, he said. </blockquote> I suppose I’m baffled that the media would run with a story based on a few attorneys’ descriptions of photographs; given the photos’ content, however, I suppose the lawyers don’t want to make them public unless absolutely necessary, but my suspicion is that they’ll have to come out at some point unless Nifong drops the case. This 27-minute gap in the photos seems just a wee bit weird, as well. I’ll leave the Nixon jokes to others… but there are certainly ways to tell if photos were deleted from the camera’s memory cards, and perhaps even recover deleted pictures. (On the other hand, if you were forging timestamps on pictures, you would probably make the 27-minute gap shrink and “discredit” the accuser’s story by “showing” she was only in the bathroom for 3–5 minutes.) Color me skeptical on the verbal accounts of these photos until they’re shown to someone more impartial. Cheshire’s account does, however, make more sense than the accuser’s in at least one regard; as I’ve noted <a href="http://blog.lordsutch.com/archives/3354">before</a>, the two dancers arrived separately, yet left together. The accuser’s account fails to explain why the second dancer (who didn’t even know her) would wait around for 30 minutes outside the house while she was still inside; the defense story indicates that both women left around the same time. If the timestamps on the photos are valid—a big “if,” mind you—it would also confirm the timeline as being closer to my <a href="http://blog.lordsutch.com/archives/3347">speculative timeline</a>, because it has the women gone from the house by 12:15 or so, putting them who-knows-where for the next hour and change until they show up at Kroger. The timestamps also would turn the nosy neighbor’s account of the times he saw/heard things into complete garbage. The other question—where did the guys go? Assume they broke up the party by 12:30; Ryan McFadyen doesn’t send his idiotic email for another 90 minutes, give or take. Some probably went home. Did some of them go to their reputed hangout, Charlie’s, just a few blocks to the west? Witnesses? http://blog.lordsutch.com/archives/3362 http://blog.lordsutch.com/atom.cgi/entryid=3362