The three young men who were falsely accused and publicly abused by disgraced former District Attorney Mike Nifong have filed criminal complaints against him. Good for these guys! A few comments on the overall situation…
College students all over the country know how their civil liberties are trashed on a near-constant basis because the few “bad apples” in the bunch ruin the image for the greater group. As I’ve said time and time again, as an undergraduate I routinely had police officers just open my front door and walk through my house at all hours of the day from the early morning to the late night. It got to the point where it was near-comical. We went so far as to even call the FBI for their help (our reasoning was – when the police are the ones who are breaking the law, who do you call?).
What Mike Nifong did to these boys is criminal. He attempted to prosecute them while KNOWING they were innocent and that the evidence proved them to be innocent. He ruined their college years, he ruined their immediate post-college years, and he greatly damaged the justice system in his district. He’s disgusting and a fraud and he deserves both jail time and to give these boys a just financial sum. Imagine if you were in the place that these boys were in – imagine that you were Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty or Dave Evans.
First, you are falsely accused of rape and while you KNOW you’re innocent, a corrupt system keeps beating you down. Then you have to endure public criticism from the anti-collegiate crowd. Furthermore, you have racist groups threatening to “take care of” your situation if the legal system does not (how are these groups allowed to hold the legal system hostage like that?). Your parents are blowing through millions of dollars to defend you in court because – as we now know in America – you are guilty until you PROVE yourself innocent. Oh, and to top it off – your own SCHOOL convicts you before the justice system by suspending you as soon as you are charged! Another epidemic affecting America’s college campuses are administrators who feel that they are judge, jury, and executioner when it comes to adjudicating off-campus activities. These administrators were not at the event, had second and third had FALSE reports about the event, and still decided to suspend the students.
And this is in America, people!
I hope that Reade, Collin, and Dave take Nifong to the limit. I hope they bankrupt him and send him straight to jail. All these kids did was be college students and you know what? There’s NOTHING wrong with that! And for you idiots out there who are completely against college students being college students, go see a psychiatrist. Yes, students should be respectful when living off-campus. But when they ARE respectful and you don’t hear a peep out of them – STOP trying to look into their homes and their lives and passing judgment on them.
Because you know what? Sometimes the chickens come home to roost – just ask Mike Nifong about it.
