Duke II?
Here’s a fine article on a Ghanian soccer star who’s doing six years for rape in California (ESPN, 7/13/09). Eric Frimpong is, according to everyone who knows him, the best of men. He’s cheerful, optimistic, kind and entirely incapable of harming another person. He’s the type of man who makes the people around him happier and more upbeat. Even his fellow prisoners say so. Into the bargain, he’s a heckuva soccer player. In 2007, he led little-known UC Santa Barbara to the collegiate men’s soccer championship over perennial powerhouse UCLA. He was headed to a professional career in the North American Soccer League.
But as the article shows, none of that was enough to keep him from being accused and convicted of rape. Neither was the absence of his DNA on or in his accuser. Neither was the presence of her boyfriend’s DNA. Neither was the fact that she was too drunk to remember what happened. Neither was the fact that the bite mark on her cheek matched the teeth of her boyfriend, but not Frimpong. Neither was the fact that the victim’s boyfriend saw her walking with Frimpong that night and got jealous.
But what the Duke III had, Frimpong lacked. The Lacrosse team men at Duke had such overwhelming proof of their innocence, the Attorney General of North Carolina eventually proclaimed it publicly. In Frimpong’s case, he didn’t have a rock-solid alibi. None of his friends could say for certain that he couldn’t have been on the beach where the young woman was assaulted. And in the end, a zealous prosecutor, a victim with a motive to protect her boyfriend, an all-white community, a black defendant, an overconfident defense attorney and a judge who was a former DA, combined to put behind bars a man who looks innocent.
Let’s be clear. This is the way the American judicial system works. It’s aimed at putting people in prison and does so with ruthless efficiency. Most of those people committed the illegal acts they’re charged with. But that same system can be equally ruthless when an innocent person finds himself on the conveyor belt that begins with a charge, runs through court and ends in prison.
The people it conveys to prison are overwhelmingly (93%) male and disproportionately black and hispanic. The Duke Lacrosse case was an extreme aberration. There, the facts and witnesses for the prosecution were so bad, and the resources at the disposal of the defendants were so great, that justice was actually served.
The Eric Frimpongs of the world see a different side of justice in America.
|
| More from Robert Franklin, Esq.
Stumble It!
