I know Sacco and Vanzetti are both innocent. I know Julius Rosenberg is innocent. And, of course, Alger Hiss is innocent. too. But, for sure, Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty and Dave Evans are guilty and have been guilty since the moment a stripper-mom who happens to be black said she had been violently shtupped--from the rear, no less--at a lacrosse team party just off the Duke University campus. That means these young men, who may well be callow and snotty (but we don't have much evidence for either of these traits), have been carrying the mark of Cain on their heads for a year. It now turns out that the D.A. who indicted them, fixed evidence against them, and broke many rules regarding prosecutorial misbehavior, is something of a crackpot. He has no legal career ahead of him, and that is the best that justice can do in this case. The three indictees have lost a year of their lives to the miseries caused by his malign obsessions. Frankly, it was clear to me (or my instincts) that this was a fraud from the beginning. I am not proud that TNR failed to take up this case. But Al Sharpton did, and Jesse Jackson, too, though from the other side. Still, they had the nasal allergies not to linger in Durham. After all, Sharpton had taken up the false accusations of another troubled young black woman. He didn't need a second Tawana Brawley. There are three heroes in this case, two journalists and one a constitutional historian at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. The first is Stuart Taylor of the National Journal, who has written since the beginning about the systematic falsifications of the prosecutor and the misbegotten "evidence." The second is my former student Evan Thomas writing in Newsweek. The third is K.C. Johnson who has been doing an informative, no-holds-barred blog called "Durham in Wonderland." Just browsing through this interpretive narrative will show you that the outcome of this travesty was inevitable. Taylor and Johnson are also writing a book about this scandal set to publish in September. One factor in the case I hadn't read much about was the Group of 88. Its statement, "What Does a Social Disaster Sound Like?", and the 88 signatories are included in Johnson's blog. Now this hysterical statement was actually signed not only by individuals but also by entire departments and programs: the predictable Afro-American Studies, Women's Studies, Latino Studies, Asian and African Languages etc. And here's a program of which I'd never heard: "Critical U.S. Studies." How self-conscious and pompous can these academics be! I did not recognize more than three names of the list of 88 faculty who signed the inflammatory ad. One is Ariel Dorfman, an Argentinian-Chilean-Jewish novelist who is now professor of comparative literature at Duke. His life's trauma was the violent overthrow of Salvador Allende by Augusto Pinochet. (Dorfman's Death and the Maiden was turned into a film by Roman Polanski, who has a feckless record in his treatment of woman.) The second is Houston Baker, a Duke professor of English literature who had a revealing exchange with the university's provost Peter Lange shortly after the incident. The last in Alice Kaplan, professor of Romance Studies and an expert of French collaborationists. The rest have not come across by screen. Maybe that's says nothing. On the other hand, maybe it says a lot. But the statement says everything. It is venomous and also thoughtless. It comes from the university Nan Keohane made.