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That means that each of three lawyers intends to make at least $4 million dollars off the citizens of Durham, for a total of $12 million. It's a shame.
According to the Durham Herald-Sun, the lawyers wrote in superlatives when they claimed their case is "one of the most chilling episodes of premeditated police, prosecutorial and scientific misconduct in modern American history." Hmmm . . .
Hundreds of lynchings from the late nineteenth century into the past decade have usually had the cooperation of law enforcement. The reporting of Ida B. Wells and others helped to reveal the collusion of the legal system with these festive gatherings for murder. The entire history of the enslavement of Africans included the cooperation of the legal system, with laws to enforce the subjugation. Laws would clearly be a kind of premeditated action.
In 1999 in the town of Tulia, Texas, an undercover cop organized a major "drug bust" based only on his testimony, in which 46 people were rounded up, including over 10% of all black residents of the town. By 2003, the discredited undercover cop was convicted of perjury, the Texas legislature had passed several laws to reform the system that had allowed this travesty, and all who had been convicted (and sentenced to as many as 431 years in prison) had been released. Judges and law enforcement officials had supported the prosecutions based on fabricated evidence.
As for scientific misconduct, the single word Tuskegee speaks volumes.
How many years did these young men spend in jail? How many of them were grabbed and beaten by a mob? How many died of their mistreatement?
What was done to them was wrong, but "one of the most chilling episodes" is way over the top.
