District Court Judge Ron Stephens has pretty much gotten a pass for his early involvement in the Duke lacrosse prosecution. Except for the omniscient denizens of the LieStoppers forum and the equally omniscient KC Johnson, no one has much mentioned Stephens’ role. But it deserves some investigation. Enter Bill Anderson, the Frostburg State professor who has covered this case from the start. In a column titled “In Praise of Ryan McFadyen,” he points out how the Durham police gave McFadyen, a Duke lacrosse player, two choices: lie for us and say there was a rape or suffer humiliation and embarrassment by having your illegally obtained email revealed to the world. As Anderson writes:
After McFadyen’s refusal to commit perjury, Judge Ronald Stephens, the former Durham County prosecutor who covered for his one-time employee, Nifong, then released the email, which was given to journalists all over the country. Stephens, a judge who has sworn to uphold the law, ordered that an illegally-obtained email that had nothing to do with the case be released and publicized because the young man who wrote it was refusing to break the law (which Stephens had sworn to uphold) by lying under oath.
The email, as we all know by now, was taken grossly out of context. It was a parody of a character in American Psycho, a book that is required reading in many classes at Duke, and whose parody nature would have been obvious to anyone who had read it. As embarrassing as he knew the email would be, McFadyen spurned the offer to commit perjury. Anderson again:
Ryan McFadyen is someone who paid a very heavy price for being honest. Duke University has an honor code, but when one of the university’s students demonstrated honor under real pressure, the university suspended him. Perhaps President Richard Brodhead would have preferred that McFadyen lie under oath and save the university the embarrassment of one of its students having written a sophomoric email (for which McFadyen has apologized repeatedly).
