She went in on Jameis too
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/14/s...ns-in-florida-state-case.html?ref=julietmacur
ZEPHYRHILLS, Fla. — Patricia Carroll, the lawyer for the college student who accused the Florida State football star Jameis Winston of raping her last year, came to her Friday news conference prepared.
Flanked by two police officers, she walked to a makeshift lectern that had been set up on the banks of a lake in a small city park. Her secretary trailed behind, carrying a cardboard box filled with stacks of evidence. Carroll said the evidence showed that a state attorney was wrong last week when he decided not to charge Winston, the quarterback of the top-ranked Seminoles, with rape.
About 50 people gathered to hear Carroll speak. Many were reporters and camera technicians, but more than a dozen were senior citizens who lived in the trailer park next door. An older man set up a folding chair near the podium, as if he were there to watch a parade. Another rode up on an electric wheelchair, curious about the commotion.
Carroll was there to make serious points. She said she would ask Florida’s attorney general to begin an independent investigation of the case. Shielding her eyes from the sun at times, she said she believed that the Tallahassee Police Department’s inquiry was skewed to protect Winston, and that the state attorney’s office had followed suit. She called the police investigation shoddy and filled with errors, and charged that there were discrepancies between the accuser’s copies of her hospital records and the copies of those records provided to Carroll and reporters by the state.
“I don’t know who would’ve done this,” Carroll said, stopping just short of accusing the authorities of tampering with evidence.
She waved a thick stack of pages in the air. The evidence she received from the state comprised 248 pages, she said, but 152 of them were related to the victim, including her phone records, text messages and Twitter posts. Only 11 pages, give or take, bore Winston’s name, Carroll said.
“If this doesn’t strongly ring of an investigation of a rape victim instead of a rape suspect,” she said, “I don’t know what does.”
She made her case for more than 90 minutes, but it was unclear if anyone outside the park was listening.
In a parallel universe, the other parties in the matter have moved on. Florida officials appear to have no interest in reopening the case, which Winston, his lawyer and Florida State clearly consider closed.
The attorney general’s office said only Gov. Rick Scott had the authority to appoint a special prosecutor. The governor’s office said that the case had concluded and that “no further action is required.” The Florida Department of Law Enforcement said it was “not a quality-control monitor.”
On Thursday, Winston, who has insisted for weeks that he did nothing wrong, accepted the Walter Camp Award as college football’s player of the year. He then flew to New York City to prepare for this weekend’s Heisman Trophy presentation. On Saturday night, most likely to cheers, he is expected to win college football’s highest honor in a landslide.
Back in Florida, the accuser is trying to make it through her final exams. Carroll said her client had had to leave Florida State for her safety and the safety of her sorority sisters, who have reported having their tires slashed in the wake of the accusations. It has been a difficult time for the victim, Carroll said, especially last week, when the state attorney, Willie Meggs, held a news conference announcing he would not press charges. Before television cameras and a phalanx of police officials, Meggs smiled and joked about sensitive details of the case. A former state senator guffawed at his side.
The question on Friday was whether anyone would address Carroll’s concerns. For now, she and her client seem powerless, at least compared with the Tallahassee Police Department, a university that lives and breathes football, and a justice system that, at the very least, should feel compelled to review a case that has raised questions about impartiality and investigative delays.
Whether authorities realize it or not — and they should — the way the Winston case has been handled has already affected the willingness of rape victims in Tallahassee and elsewhere to come forward. It is hard enough for a woman to admit she was raped. It is infinitely harder if she knows some of the facts of the Winston case: how the police department took nearly a year to complete an investigation involving a prominent local athlete; how a state attorney who initially had been kept in the dark about that inquiry laughed about the case for the world to see; and how the victim was left with little recourse when the state attorney decided not to file charges.
We may never know exactly what happened between Winston and his accuser that December night a year ago. But the public perception is that the case was not handled as other cases might have been, and that might be all that it takes to deter other victims from reporting sexual assaults, especially if it means going to the campus police to accuse a star athlete.
Bob Dekle, director of the criminal prosecution unit at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law, said that in cases of great public interest, a state attorney in Florida normally gets involved “right away.” In the Winston case, the state attorney said he was not notified until 11 months after the incident.
Carroll called that “fishy.”
Any negro coming in here capping just because of the color of his skin.