This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 20th, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Nearly a year after the Duke Lacrosse rape case fell apart, the question remains.

How did our justice system allow three men to be so publicly impugned for a crime they clearly

didn't commit?

National Journal reporter Stuart Taylor is co-author of the book

until proven innocent, political correctness and the shameful injustices of the

Duke Lacrosse rape case. In addition toling the events that led up to the

collapse of the case he also suggests a few remedies that may prevent prosecutorial

abuses surrounding a false rape claim in the future.

Well, Mike Nai Fong, the chief prosecutor, the district attorney, the chief

villain, knew what I've just described or was in a position

of it from the beginning.

Nonetheless, in the face of this and other evidence that she was lying, on March 27th he began

a, for the purpose of winning an election a huge

demagogic almost unprecedented campaign of vilifying these kids as rapists as

racist as Laos leading to the indictments that came on April 17th.

This dragged out for a while.

Now the media at the very beginning and everyone else had good reason to think well gee you know prosecutors don't

usually do that unless they've got the evidence and therefore it was pretty

logical presumption of innocence to be sure. It was pretty logical to assume at the beginning

that he must have the evidence. But that kind of stopped pretty soon a series of things that would have alerted any careful

...