Order this book.
“Brutally honest, unflinching, exhaustively researched, and compulsively readable, Until Proven Innocent excoriates those who led the stampede—the prosecutor, the cops, the media—but it also exposes the cowardice of Duke’s administration and faculty. Until Proven Innocent smothers any lingering doubts that in this country the presumption of innocence is dead, dead, dead.”
--John Grisham
“From the Scottsboro Boys to Clarence Gideon, some of the most memorable legal narratives have been tales of the wrongly accused. Now Until Proven Innocent, a new book about the false allegations of rape against three Duke lacrosse players, can join these galvanizing cautionary tales . . , Taylor and Johnson have made a gripping contribution to the literature of the wrongly accused.”
--Jeffrey Rosen, New York Times Book Review
“Until Proven Innocent is a stunning book. It recounts the Duke lacrosse case in fascinating detail and offers, along the way, a damning portrait of the institutions—legal, educational and journalistic—that do so much to shape contemporary American culture.”
--Abigail Thernstrom, Wall Street Journal |
What began that night shocked Duke University and Durham, North Carolina.
And it continues to captivate the nation: the Duke lacrosse team
members‘ alleged rape of an African-American stripper and the
unraveling of the case against them.
In this ever-deepening
American tragedy, Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson argue, law
enforcement, a campaigning prosecutor, biased journalists, and
left-leaning academics repeatedly refused to pursue the truth while
scapegoats were made of these young men, recklessly tarnishing their
lives.
The story harbors multiple dramas, including the
actions of a DA running for office; the inappropriate charges that
should have been apparent to academics at Duke many months ago; the
local and national media, who were so slow to take account of the
publicly available evidence; and the appalling reactions of law
enforcement, academia, and many black leaders.
Until Proven Innocent is
the only book that covers all five aspects of the case (personal,
legal, academic, political, and media) in a comprehensive fashion.
Based on interviews with key members of the defense team, many of the
unindicted lacrosse players, and Duke officials, it is also the only
book to include interviews with all three of the defendants, their
families, and their legal teams.
Taylor and Johnson‘s
coverage of the Duke case was the earliest, most honest, and most
comprehensive in the country, and here they take the idiocies and
dishonesty of right- and left-wingers alike head on, shedding new light
on the dangers of rogue prosecutors and police and a cultural tendency
toward media-fueled travesties of justice. The context of the Duke case
has vast import and contains likable heroes, unfortunate victims, and
memorable villains—and in its full telling, it is captivating
nonfiction with broad political, racial, and cultural relevance to our
times.
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Stuart Taylor Jr. is a columnist for National Journal and contributing editor for Newsweek, writing about legal, policy, and political issues. A Harvard Law graduate, he covered legal affairs and the Supreme Court during eight years at The New York Times. He is a nonresident senior fellow with the Brookings Institution and was nominated by The New York Times for a Pulitzer Prize for his Supreme Court coverage and by National Journal for a National Magazine Award for his columns on the Duke case.
KC Johnson is a history professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He has written over 800 posts of news-breaking analysis about the Duke case on his blog, Durham-in-Wonderland, and was a consultant to ABC's Law and Justice Unit for the case. The author of four books, he has a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
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