Lacrosse ugliness at U.Va.

I'm already sick of the grand indictment of lacrosse in general. This is lazy journalism at its worst. Don't have any info? Go the public records route and find every bad thing a student did. Moralize about the sport breeding arrogance.
You never hear or read these types of stories that link music departments, computer geeks or other non-sports associations of killers. Is football worse? better? What about baseball? Basketball? And yet some lacrosse player kills his girlfriend and every lacrosse player is a sexist arrogant prick with homicidal tendencies?
I don't get it.
I also read Peter King's article on Lawrence Taylor saying he wasn't surprised. Maybe. But do you really want to put it in print? No doubt LT has been troubled, but drug problems is one thing, raping a minor is another.
I'm not defending the accused - I just expect a bit more from journalists than trying to gin up a narrative because they don't have any facts to report. It's one thing to "root" for a story, be it Butler or the Saints - it's another to push a storyline that may or may not be there on matters of criminal justice.

 

http://www2.timesdispatch.com/rtd/news/state_regional/article/UVAA07_20100506-232202/342822/

CHARLOTTESVILLE -- A law-enforcement spokeswoman is wary of making law-enforcement officials notify universities when students are arrested anywhere in Virginia, but some state legislators are open to the idea.

The University of Virginia says if it had known lacrosse men's player George Huguely had been arrested and convicted in Lexington on drinking and resisting-arrest charges a year and a half ago, it might have been able to intervene.

 

Here's an example of someone who looked up the kid's record and put it out there in public without knowing all the facts. Talk about piss-poor journalism.

To summarize from the ABC News link below: Huguely and his dad were on a yacht (there could have been other passengers). Dad calls police about domestic violence. Kid swims to shore. Journalist says it's not known who the complaint was against. No arrests were made. But the story ends up in the article and we're clearly supposed to assume he was committing violence against his dad and swam to shore to escape police. WTF? Could've been anything. Could have been he mom wielding a knife at the dad and kid wants to get the hell out of there. But this thing ends up near the top of a story about how no one "put it all together" about the kid. AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGHHHHHH

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/TheLaw/yeardley-love-death-warning-signs-missed-ahead-university/story?id=10581761&page=1

 

The mom was wielding a knife, so the 230-pound stud athlete, instead of trying to disarm Dear Old Mom, jumped off the boat when police were called. Go with that. Totally believable. Especially in light of other cases and more recent events that show he has a slight mean streak.

You are probably also believing the lawyer who says Huguely kicked down the door and shook her head against the wall on accident.

 

I agree. The same people who are indicting lacrosse probably shit themselves when some moron writes that rap is the cause of street violence in urban cities.

There are bad people out there and to say rap or lacrosse is part of the problem are excuses.

 

The lawyer is not saying the break-in or the beating was an accident. He's saying that the death was. I know that SportsJournalists.com is the place where nuance goes to die, but if we're going to rip on the defense lawyer - for doing his job, by the way - at least we should start representing his argument accurately.

 

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"We are confident that Ms. Love's death was not intended but an accident with a tragic outcome." Translation: He didn't mean to kill her, Your Honor, he just wanted to mess her up real bad!

There is not one part of Huguely's actions that can be termed accidental. Except by the lawyer. Who is just doing his job and therefore gets to lie about an event he did not witness and to which he could not possibly have any insight.

 

It is perfectly reasonable that he didn't intend to kill her. And you initially said that the lawyer said he shook her accidentally. Which he didn't say. But if you want to argue that he killed her on purpose, then that's a different argument. And it's the argument that is going to play out over the next few months. And there's an excellent chance the "lying" lawyer will win that argument.

 

Are the people equating the public reporting of arrests with McCarthyism familiar with this thing they print in the paper called the "Police Blotter"?

Just asking, because I thought this was a journalism website.

 

It was my shorthand for the hysteria that often accompanies isolated incidents.

One kid goes off the rails at one school - and, yes, it was tragic - and now we are demanding universities screen applicants like they are applying for the highest level of CIA security clearance.

 

I read a stat in one of these UVA articles the other day that 1 in 5 women experience some sort of violence on college campuses.

Is this problem really an isolated incident?

 

What percentage of those would have been prevented by this time-consuming, expensive background check on tens of thousands of applicants a year?

I suspect you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater because you are emotionally affected by this incident and want to believe it was preventable and that someone is to blame.

Maybe we shouldn't have roads any more, either. After all, as long as there are roads, there are going to be accident fatalities every year. Guaranteed.