The EMU rape/murder case is troubling for many reasons–I mean aside from the awful fact that it happened at all. For one thing, we learn from Laurie Morrow’s account at Frontpage that the EMU police, suspecting homicide, called in several levels of law enforcement–the Ypsilanti Police, the Michigan State Police, and the Major Crimes Task Force of the Washtenaw County (Michigan) Sheriff’s Office. They all agreed that there had been a homicide and yet the head of the EMU Department of Public Safety, Cindy Hall, was allowed to have it reported as a “death investigation” and to keep the truth from the community and the campus for ten weeks, during which a possible rapist/murderer was on the loose. Is law enforcement that servile to campus bureaucracy? Who has ascendancy when crimes are committed on campuses? The campus administration or the nation’s law enforcement agencies?
It is also puzzling why the parents of the victim, Laura Dickinson, did not want to know more about how their daughter had died.
Also, the mistrial of the accused in the case, Orange Taylor, seems pretty clearly to be a case of O.J.Simpson-style jury nullification by at least one, possibly two jurors. Juror Lauretta Codrington has spoken to the media and has made clear that she obviously and irrationally and blithely discounted all the evidence as inadequate, including the fact that Taylor’s semen was found on the victim. She says that she did not believe the prosecution had proven that Taylor was even in Laura’s room that day, although the defense had actually conceded that fact. Codrington is so full of some kind of politicized self-regard that she does not realize how stupid she sounds.