Crystal Gale Mangum, 33, has been charged with attempted murder and arson. Mangum was the stripper who falsely accused members of the Duke lacrosse team.
Mangum allegedly assaulted her boyfriend, threatened to stab him and set his clothes on fire in the bathroom.
The fire department had to be called to put out the flames. There were three children — aged 3, 9, and 10 — in the house at the time. She is also accused of resisting the officers and identity theft after using a fake name (“Marella Mangum” and age). That last charge seems a bit questionable.
Mangum is the author of the memoir “Last Dance for Grace.” I remain completely astonished that prosecutors, after finding that she lied about the rape, refused to prosecute her for the false claims. Ironically, the 2006 case was taken from the Durham D.A. Mike Nifong because he violated ethical rules and politicized the prosecution. Yet, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper took the politically expedient move of refusing to indict Mangum. The result was that she was allowed to ruin the lives of players like David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann and seek their long incarceration on false charges — only to be given a pass by the system.
For the story, click here.
And the reason Nifong wanted to prosecute those young men was that he needed to win an election so that he’d get his pension credit.
Nifong should have been put in prison, too.
Sorry to be off topic – I don’t see a good way to submit interesting stories:
Tag with “Are they really so stupid as to do such a thing” category
Apparently a school system supplied students with laptops, then secretly and remotely turned on the webcams/microphones from the laptops to spy on the students both in school and while the children were at home:
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/17/school-used-student.html
The article links to a PDF that appears to be the class action complaint on behalf of the students and families against the school district for spying on them in their homes. The guts of the allegation start at the bottom of page 5. (Perhaps someone with access to Lexis or similar can verify that this PDF is real?)
On one hand, such spying is perfectly inevitable based on human nature. On the other, it’s so obviously stupid and insane to spy on people like that, that this case is almost hard to believe.
Just reinforcing the “Home(land) Security depends on Duct Tape” link. In this case, it’s duct tape over the camera and microphone.
Wayne Jarvis:
“That’s wild. I never realized she was named after a Country and Western singer.”
*************
Don’t it make your brown eyes — bug out of your head.
That’s wild. I never realized she was named after a Country and Western singer.
How easy it is nowadays to ruin a person’s reputation and life with unfounded allegations splattered across front page news, as occurred with the Lacrosse players; furthermore, people never remember the retractions or exonerations posted—if at all—on the next to last page of the newspaper ‘after’ the classified ads.
Well maybe she will seek revenge against the daddy babys mommas system yet again.
Another example of the American jurisprudence system.
Think of all the cases while less public – notable, where someone has not been treated ‘justly’ by our legal system.
With all the pluses – positive aspects of American judicial system, there sure is room for IMPROVEMENTS. Most of which are not likely to happen in my / our lifetime.