Joseph Neff of the News & Observer reports additional details on the photos the lacrosse players’ attorneys claim are exculpatory 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:

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.

And we have an echo of scandals past:

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.

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 before, 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 speculative timeline, 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?

I went shopping today at Southpoint, and outside Barnes and Noble a street performer called “Juggleboy” was, um, juggling, with some Eurotrash rock in the background. I was 99% tempted to shout “it’s not a trick, it’s an ILLUSION!” at the top of my lungs, but I didn’t want to be evicted from the property. Plus, nobody would have gotten it anyway…

Thanks to Silflay Hraka and John in Carolina for their kind words and links; both have interesting posts of their own on the Duke lacrosse rape allegations (which I linked earlier this sentence) that are worth reading.

Steven Taylor and Bryan S. take different sides on the issue of leaks; I think Bryan has the better argument:

“Unnamed Sources” damage the credibility of journalists, who often use such sources on stories that have absolutely no real need for such anonymous sourcing. From a political perspective, leaking is not so problematic. From the journalism perspective, it is a cancer on the Washington press corps, which has shown itself craven by not refusing such charades.

On the lighter side, Joy went to see Death Cab and Franz Ferdinand on Saturday night and has reactions to the evening. Now if I can just get tickets for Jimmy Eat World’s next tour my belated transformation into an emo kid will be complete.

In my previous post, I speculated that Duke’s men’s lacrosse program will go the way of the dodo, stating the following reasoning:

It is not particularly popular in the region; it doesn’t recruit a very ethnically diverse pool of athletes; and it loses money. Getting rid of the program would also help Duke improve its Title IX situation and save the headache of searching for a new coach.

The first three points are self-evident; I need not belabor them. The Title IX issue is worth some discussion; the NCAA has recently adopted a rule modeled on that of the SEC requiring Division I institutions to have two more womens’ sports than mens’ sports, and while the NCAA has said that cutting mens’ sports is not a desirable approach to achieving this standard, in practice mens’ sports have been cut to help achieve it.

When you combine that fact with the need to find a new coach, and the negative publicity that will dog the team for the coming years—even if the rape charges are proved beyond any shadow of a doubt to be fabrications, the other repellent behavior by team members is embarrassing enough—cutting the university’s losses may simply be the prudent course of action, not as punishment but just to save money and foster better community relations.

At some point—perhaps in a few days, perhaps in a few months—the Duke lacrosse rape allegations will be resolved, at least in terms of the criminal issues. The question arises as to what Duke should do then. Dealing with the players is the easy stuff (these expectations are my predictions and are not normative):

• Any players charged with battery, assault, or the like will almost certainly be expelled from the university (or suspended indefinitely, with expulsion to follow upon conviction). Even if acquitted, I doubt they would be welcome to return to the university.
• Other players present at the party probably won’t be expelled; I would expect any players with past disciplinary issues to be suspended from the university for a semester or year, and others to receive some probationary sanction. If no charges for violent offenses are filed against any players, I would expect any player present at the party to be subject to these sanctions.
• Ryan McFadyen will probably be allowed to return to the university if no rape or battery charges are filed against anyone. My guess is that he probably will choose not to return, though.

What is to be done about the men’s lacrosse program and athletics in general? Assume, for the sake of argument, that it is decided there has been a lack of institutional control over student-athletes’ behavior—which probably is a fair assessment. If that is the case, I think a number of solutions present themselves:

• I expect that Duke will abandon running a men’s lacrosse program. It is not particularly popular in the region; it doesn’t recruit a very ethnically diverse pool of athletes; and it loses money. Getting rid of the program would also help Duke improve its Title IX situation and save the headache of searching for a new coach. I expect this decision to be made soon; in fact, I suspect it has already been decided, probably as a condition of AD Joe Alleva keeping his job.
• I expect that student athletes will be required to live on campus for four years starting in August 2007. If this requires letting other students out of the six-semester obligation in order to have sufficient housing over the short term, so be it.
• Student-athletes will probably also be housed across campus and not allowed to be concentrated in particular quads. They might even be barred from living on Central, which might require letting non-athlete sophomores live on Central.

I also expect that many suggestions for “consciousness raising,” “encouraging substance-free living,” and “diversity awareness” will be made, and accepted, by the committees studying these issues. No doubt these proponents will overlook the fact that the men’s lacrosse team was, if anything, exposed more to these things than most students—and they proved completely ineffective in curbing their abhorrent behavior.

Over the long term, I expect that the six-semester requirement to live on campus will be replaced by an eight-semester requirement for all students, which will finally snuff out the “unofficial fraternities.” This, of course, will require additional housing space, but the university has plenty of empty land on West and East (if necessary) to construct the additional needed beds, in addition to the net addition of beds already planned for Central. If this means that Pratt has to forgo increasing enrollment for now, they’ll survive.

The end result: a Duke that has retreated further within its walls as a protective measure to ensure that these problems don’t recur. Is that a good thing? I don’t know; I think a bit more interaction between Duke’s students and the wider community would be, on average, a good thing, even if the students who the community encounters in their neighborhoods haven’t always been the best ambassadors the university has to offer. But I think a bit of disengagement from the neighborhoods around East may be an important first step in reducing the enmity between Duke and the wider community—and if that hurts the 9th Street Merchants’ Association, so be it.

Today’s News & Observer breathlessly reports that under ex-coach Bill Hillier, the Duke baseball team “had trouble with heavy drinking, rowdiness and academic problems.” Reporter Ned Bennett goes on to say that, after canning Hillier,

the university did not undertake the kind of sweeping assessment of its athletic culture that has been triggered by the lacrosse team. Had it done so, it might have uncovered conditions similar to what led to the lacrosse incident. The baseball players, too, had a practice of bringing strippers to team parties.

“We always had parties at the baseball house,” said DeMarco, now a graduate student at Fairfield University. “The thing to do was to get strippers.”

At a party he attended, DeMarco said, the dancer brought an imposing male bodyguard.

“I remember that night with the stripper,” he said. “There were video cameras, some big, tough guy there guarding her. It was pretty shady.”

Is this evidence of a lack of institutional control, or just part of an effort by the N&O to further poison (if that’s even possible at this point) town-gown relations?

An interesting passage from this week’s Newsweek article on the case:

Two sources close to the team, who asked for anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that the e-mail was a reference to a movie called “American Psycho.” In the movie, which the sources described as a cult favorite that had been viewed by a number of players on the team, a Wall Street banker goes crazy and kills several women, though possibly only in his dreams. After seeing the e-mail, sent on McFadyen’s e-mail account, one of the team members remarked, “I’ll bring the Phil Collins music,” the sources said. In “American Psycho,” the killer delivers a tribute to the music of pop singer Collins as he cavorts with intended victims.

The sources suggested that the e-mail was intended as an ironic joke. If so, that may say something about the humor of Duke lacrosse players. College students, and not just athletes, can be astonishingly raunchy and degraded in their recreational behavior. Interestingly, McFadyen was seen at a Take Back the Night rally held by Duke students protesting sexual violence and the alleged rape itself two weeks after the incident.

Advantage, SN.

Sunday’s Herald-Sun reports that attorneys for players accused in the Duke lacrosse rape case have photos taken at the party that contradict the victim’s account of events:

The photos show the woman attempting to get back inside the house at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. where the attack allegedly occurred on the night of March 13–14, said attorney Bill Thomas, who represents one of the lacrosse players.

“She had a big smile on her face,” Thomas said.

Then the woman fell down at the back door of the house and lay on the ground “for quite some time” as if she were intoxicated or asleep, Thomas added.

In addition, the time-stamped photos indicate the woman was severely bruised on her legs and face, and had cuts on her legs, knees and feet when she arrived at the home—and before the rape allegedly occurred—Thomas said.

One wonders if the photos siezed by the police in their two searches are consistent with—or contradict—these. Without some serious forensic investigation of the source media, forging the timestamps on pictures to make them look like they were taken at a time other than when they actually were is almost trivial. And even if the woman did arrive at the party with visible bruising and cuts, that doesn’t necessarily mean she wasn’t raped at the party.

Another story looks at the trial-by-media atmosphere surrounding the case.

At the Herald-Sun’s competitor, in the silence of Righteous Townie DA Mike Nifong, the News & Observer tries its hand at a bit of jury tampering of its own:

But taken as a body of work, the charges track the noisy passage of a championship lacrosse team with a reputation for a swaggering sense of entitlement and privilege. They underscore the hard-drinking image of the Duke lacrosse team—which some residents say is a super-sized version of the university’s elitist, party-hearty ethos.

“There is a culture at Duke of an entitlement to be drunk in the evenings and on the weekends,” said Robert Panoff, a former Notre Dame club lacrosse player who has lived for more than a decade in Trinity Park, the neighborhood on the edge of Duke’s east campus where the lacrosse team captains lived.

“That’s the attitude that pervades the Duke campus, and it’s not just the lacrosse team,” said Panoff, founder and executive director of a nonprofit research and education organization. “There is a particular swagger at Duke. Is there a particular machismo and variation of that swagger on the lacrosse team? Absolutely.”

Panoff is quick to point out that lacrosse is not a monolithic culture. But for other Durham residents, the lacrosse imbroglio has raised racial tensions.