TOWERVIEW MAY 2013
How Duke Law freed a man after 17 years behind bars
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Coach K on the runway
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MBA meets the military
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Buying Central 1Campus TOWERVIEW
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MAY 2013 • VOL. 14 • issue 7 Blah dee blah bee bhad yo
what that talk yo walk like THE PLAZA
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that yo Campus, then and now: ALSO +MBA students get Central a taste of Special Forces Adarsh Dave sor ts through its training storied past
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BUS STOP Who’d ya get? A look at what personalities are giving commencement speeches around the nation
6 Tying it all together: Andrew Beaton looks for deeper meaning in Coach K’s tie selection
FEATURES 16 JUSTICE 17 years ago, LaMonte Armstrong was wrongly convicted of murder. Today, he is a free man—here’s his story. BY NICOLE KYLE
22 SHUTTER Snapshots of spring’s arrival at Duke and Durham
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THE LINK
What’s the connection between ethics, literature and medicine? Karla Holloway provides some answers
ON THE COVER Graphic by Melissa Yeo
TOWERVIEW | 3
A NOTE From the Editors
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Dear readers,
the chronicle’s news & Culture maga zine
EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Matthew Chase and Sonia Havele PHOTOGRAPHY DIRECTOR CREATIVE DIRECTOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR EXECUTIVE EDITOR
Addison Corriher Melissa Yeo Chris Cusack Ciaran O’Connor Nicole Kyle Yeshwanth Kandimalla
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Andrew Beaton, Adarsh Dave, Caitlin Moyles and Julian Spector CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Eliza Bray, Chris Dall, Stephanie Engle, Eric Lin, Julia May, Chelsea Pieroni, Elysia Su, Julian Spector and Jisoo Yoon CONTRIBUTING STAFF Lauren Carroll, Tracy Huang, Ashley Mooney GENERAL MANAGER ADVERTISING DIRECTOR CREATIVE DIRECTOR OPERATIONS MANAGER DIGITAL SALES MANAGER @TowerviewMag Towerview Magazine
Chrissy Beck Rebecca Dickenson Barbara Starbuck Mary Weaver Megan McGinity dukechronicle.com/ towerview towerviewletters@ gmail.com
Towerview is a subsidiary of The Chronicle and is published by the Duke Student Publishing Company, Inc., a non-profit corporation independent of Duke University. The opinions expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of Duke University, its students, faculty, staff, administration or trustees. Columns, letters and cartoons represent the views of the authors. To reach The Chronicle’s editorial office at 301 Flowers Building, call (919) 684-2663 or fax (919) 684-4696. To reach The Chronicle’s business office at 103 West Union Building, call (919) 684-3811. To reach The Chronicle’s advertising office at 101 West Union Building, call (919) 684-3811 or fax (919) 684-8295. Contact the advertising office for information on subscriptions. Visit The Chronicle and Towerview online at dukechronicle.com 2010 The Chronicle, Box 90858, Durham, N.C. 27708. All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without the prior, written permission of the business office. Each individual is entitled to one free copy.
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The idyllic spring weather that floods campus in the final weeks of school is always a sign of some new beginning, be it the start of college for the hordes of pre-frosh wandering campus, the beginning of an internship or a summer project, or the initiation to the “real world” for those of us seniors who are finally being forced out of the security of being “college students.” Here at Towerview, spring has another meaning. It marks the last time we will drop photos and edit articles, the last time we send out desperate emails in search of content, the last time we submit our pages—late—to the press, the last time we can define ourselves as college journalists. It marks the end of a volume, the moment when we must come to terms with the fact that we can no longer realize our own “dreams” for this position. But it also signifies the celebration of the volume that we crafted, all 224 pages of it. We entered this office four years ago in awe of the seemingly mature and professional upperclassmen that ran The Chronicle, cherishing those first DSG meetings and research study stories, the first front pages, our first interviews with administrators and researchers. And we leave largely disillusioned, more preoccupied with the articles left half-complete, the angles left unexplored, the interviews that should have been and the Oxford commas that shouldn’t have. We see ourselves not as the mature leaders we once envisioned, but as typical naïve 20-somethings trying to absorb the most out of college while we still can. We may lose that ambition every once in a while—perhaps best manifested by those issues hastily put together to make our deadline (hint: this issue’s one of them)—but at least we can’t say we didn’t try. Ultimately, it’s that mix of failure and persistent ambition that defines us as student journalists. In a sense, one could say that this issue focuses on those very two topics. In these pages, Nicole Kyle chronicles how the ambition of a group of law students seeks to exonerate wrongly-convicted individuals—the failures of our justice system, if you will. Julian Spector documents Fuqua students taking on the tasks traditionally reserved for the U.S. Army Special Forces—a pretty ambitious feat, to say the least. And Caitlin Moyles’s interview with Karla Holloway touches on the issue of grappling with setbacks, especially Holloway’s comments on the complexity of life itself. Holloway hopes that students emerge from her Bioethics and Literature course knowing not to fool themselves into thinking that there is only one answer to issues of medicine—which is really a mantra for life itself. Readers will also find images of the arrival of spring in the back of this issue—snapshots of March Madness, parades downtown and afternoons on the plaza—which serve as yet another reminder that something new is near. As we sign off, we hope that our successors, Ashley Mooney and Caitlin Moyles, find this magazine—this experiment—to be as just as ambitious and challenging as we have. Isn’t that what college is all about?
Bus Stop
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Wow!
Dalai Lama Spiritual leader of Tibet TULANE
Ben Bernanke Chairman of Federal Reserve PRINCETON
GET?
Take a look at upcoming commencement speakers across the nation
Melinda Gates Businesswoman and philanthropist DUKE
Julie Andrews Actress, singer (played Mary Poppins) UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO-BOULDER
Oprah Winfrey Media proprietor HARVARD
Stephen Colbert Comedian UVA
Prime time
Political
Michael Bloomberg Mayor of New York City STANFORD
WHO’D
Nate Silver Statistician and NY Times blogger RIPON COLLEGE
Steve Case Co-founder of AOL UNC-Chapel Hill
Cory Booker Mayor of Newark, NJ YALE Hamdi Ulukaya Founder of Chobani SAGE COLLEGES
WHO?
Michael Uslan Producer of “Batman” Mohawk Valley Community College
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TIE GAME
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by
Andrew Beaton
Famous writer Oscar Wilde once said a well-tied tie is the first serious step in life. There are many reasons Duke basketball head coach Mike Krzyzewski is already the all-time Division I men’s basketball leader in wins. But could the secret be in his crisply knotted half-windsors? The Blue Devils finished the season 30-6 with their title run ending in the Elite Eight against Louisville. In the team’s 36 regularseason games, Krzyzewski donned 18 different ties.
The Mason Plumlee
Coach K wore one tie seven times throughout the season: a chic but not showy striped one that alternates between thin slivers of silver and thinner grey ones. Like senior forward Mason Plumlee, who averaged 17.1 points and 10.0 rebounds per game, this was Coach K’s go-to weapon throughout the season and it consistently produced. The Blue Devils won their first six games when Krzyzewski wore The Plumlee. They romped Temple and Clemson by an average of 25.5 points the first two times he wore it, then he put it back in the closet for more than a month, only to whip it out once again for the home game against Nor th Carolina. Duke stormed back to beat the Tar Heels by five. He later wore it on back-to-back games against Virginia Tech and Boston College (average victory margin of 26.5 points), and he wore it again against the Hokies in Plumlee and the seniors’ home finale. But he wore it one more time, ruining his perfect record with the tie: at the ACC Tournament in Greensboro, N.C. when Duke lost to Maryland in the quarterfinals. He didn’t wear it the rest of the season. 6 | TOWERVIEW
The ‘Sheed
Like The Plumlee, The ‘Sheed is a striped black and silver cravat, only with slightly thicker stripes. The Blue Devils went 3-0 when Coach K donned The ‘Sheed. Why “The ‘Sheed”? Sulaimon had two of the best games of his freshman year when Coach K wore this tie. The first time was against then-No. 4 Ohio State, when Duke trailed by eight at halftime. Sulaimon went scoreless in the first half but scored 17 in the second to lead Duke to victory. Coach K then wore it in the home game against Maryland, when ‘Sheed scored a then-career high 25 points.
THE BESt
The Bright Raven
Although Krzyzewski steered clear of loud ties all season, he went with an almost-metallic fuchsia in the home game against Miami, which marked the return of senior forward Ryan Kelly. After missing 13 games with a foot injury, Kelly—a.k.a. “The White Raven”—scored a career-high 36 points against the Hurricanes, leading the Blue Devils to a 79-76 victory. When Duke played Miami without Kelly, they lost by 27 while Coach K donned a gray tie that he wore in no other game during the season. Coach K rode The Bright Raven hard down the stretch, also throwing it on for the final game of the regular season—a 16-point win against Nor th Carolina. The Bright Raven’s luck ran out, though, when he wore it for a third time in the season finale against Louisville. But Coach K stuck firm with it, never even loosening it as the team returned to campus at 1 a.m. that night.
OF tHE
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The Blue Devil: Unlike some coaches, Coach K isn’t one to tout his school’s colors with a standout jacket (see Roy Williams’ baby blue blazers). But Coach K wore a strong blue tie twice. The first was the season-opening win against Georgia State, and the second was the team’s 23-point win against Santa Clara.
The Calipari: Coach K showed Kentucky head coach John Calipari who’s boss in Atlanta, showing up with a powerful silver tie (though not a classic power tie), as the Blue Devils beat the then-No. 3 Wildcats 75-68 in Atlanta.
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one-strike policy
Coach K never forgave a tie after a loss this year. The team’s first defeat came against N.C. State when he was wearing a navy cravat with white dots. He wore it earlier in the year against Cornell—a 41-point win—but never put it on again after the Blue Devils lost to the Wolfpack. The same held true with ties during the other losses: Miami (gray); Maryland (silver with blue stripes); Virginia (dark tie with silver dots, also wore it in the win against Wake Forest); The Mason Plumlee; The Bright Raven.
The Curry: Coach K brought out a new tie for the team’s first game in the NCAA Tournament, a classily understated blue one with white stripes. Curry must have liked it, scoring a game-high 29 points to lead the Blue Devils past Albany. Coach K hung it back up for the Round of 32—when Curry scored just 17. But when he brought it out again for the Sweet 16 against Michigan State, Curry scored a game-high 29 points on 10-of-14 shooting.
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From the Vault:
Uncovering the real ‘Mill Village’
One perspective on Central Campus’s acquisition By Adarsh Dave
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PHOTOS BY CHELSEA PIERONI
very year, a new class of students deals with the inevitable fact of a university surrounded by an actual city—there are Dukies and there are Durhamites. The perceived divide prompted an ethnography my freshman year that answered a single question: “Why is Durham so ‘other’ to Duke?” My research in Rubenstein Library uncovered a 2004 graduate thesis on the “town-gown” relationships of the Triangle area: “Carolina’s Campus and Community” by Eric Moyen, a graduate student pursuing a degree in anthropology at the University of Kentucky. One particular chapter of the thesis framed Duke’s historical relations to Durham with the University’s acquisition of Central Campus. I was interested. Central Campus, even to the thousand students it houses, is an enigma. The stout apartment complexes sprouting under dim yellow light do not afford their residents insight into the campus’s past. With Moyen’s thesis in hand, I followed an archival trail to report the intriguing saga of Central’s acquisition—a trail that leads all the way to a former University president. The story begins from the Duke Ar-
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chives vault, in the year 1950. West Durham was a company town, formed around its driving economic force, Erwin Cotton Mills; the 400plus families supported by the cotton mill lived in company-owned housing next door. Coined by Moyen as the “Mill Village,” the community occupied the land that would become Central Campus. Different neighborhoods formed individual identities. The area between Swift Avenue and Anderson Street became “Monkey-Bottom,” while the area between Trent Drive and Anderson Street became “Hickstown.” Moyen describes both areas as “alternating between lower-middle class and destitution.” The capricious economy cradling these enclaves slumped in the 1960s and 1970s with the opening of Northgate Mall, a damaging event for the retail ecosystem that had developed around the cotton mill. In 1965, University President Douglas Knight penned a series of memos to his closest advisors discussing the land on which “Mill Village” stood. An overwhelming number of Knight’s personal letters, tax appraisals of the land and transaction ledgers are preserved, making investigation difficult. But the memos
themselves, now held in the Rubenstein Library, detail seven months of politick between University administrators, cotton mill owners and villagers in perfect chronological order. The land and its 153 homesteads were initially sold by the Erwin Cotton Mills to a holding agency in response to the local recession. The contract for the transaction, penned by the holding agency, promised the village residents “18 months of non-transferred ownership” in April 1965—meaning the land would remain an agency possession for that term. Moyen believed this promise was absolutely essential to the villagers’ livelihoods: “a short-term guarantee” promising a village “base” from which to work, build a safety net and remain financially afloat for eventual relocation. In his memos, Knight appears to have hatched a conflicting plan. Fresh off of a publicity coup in which Dukeowned apartments were sold to create public housing for African-Americans in a traditionally white area, the administration steamed forward with University purchase of the land. Why? The administration’s haste in the purchase can be traced to a May 1965 memo, in which Knight enthusiasti-
cally anticipated announcing a grand “campus unification” during that year’s September convocation. At this point, the heroes and villains of my narrative mushed and melted into a morally gray molasses. In the memos, Knight’s closest advisers recommended a policy of maximized net revenue from the property, claiming that a 50 percent rent increase on the land’s tenants would be “in-line” with the current housing market. Their reasoning obscures the truth of the mill village situation—a depressed area sustained by what commercial records show to be a shrinking industry. The Knight administration finalized the purchase of the land from the holding agency in November, just seven months after the promise to not sell the land for 18 months. The immediate result of the purchase, according to historical records channeled by the Moyen thesis, was the demolition of 15 percent of village homes. These houses were those deemed too expensive to repair to housing standards. Memos show that residents of the newly-minted Central Campus area were given six months to find new homes, after which the land was developed with apartments to replace those sold earlier as public housing. Amidst rent increases, eviction and demolition, the grey molasses persisted. Duke defended the homes from de-
molition as the Durham Freeway was fits; the land gained via eviction of cotbuilt, a lucky fate not shared by some ton mill workers with a cutesy general of the immediately adjacent, predomi- store and mill-style buildings must cernately black neighborhoods. Moyen tainly resemble its older counterpart. claims that the administration, and Sarcasm aside, it is important that Knight himself, saw itself as a benevo- campus history is known. Duke’s aclent father to the surrounding Durham tions and relationship to Durham durcommunities, ing the purchase “repurposing” were informed by The most visible mark of the “other”-ing their low-income housing toward Central’s history is the name of Durham. The “worthier,” aca- of the portion between the memos and redemic pursuits basketball courts and Yearby search of the time (using Moyen’s showed a real cur– “Mill Village.” I guess that rent of elitism in language based off of the Knight fits; the land gained via evic- Duke’s regard of memos). Even if tion of cotton mill workers Durham. Just as I the administra- with a cutesy general store intended, the stotive attitude was ry of Erwin Cotand mill-style buildings must ton Mill’s town benevolent, such paternalism soon certainly resemble its older touches on the soured. Duke’s question I set out counterpart. actions displaced to answer. Now, swathes of workas the city goving-class West Durham. Knight reflects ernment struggles with a loss of nearly un-ironically in his memoirs that he $1.7 million in revenue from the federal was honored by the University’s in- government, Duke continues to expand volvement in solving the public housing farther into Durham via more “repurproblem of Durham, despite the unfa- posing” efforts in downtown. Lowvorable net total of houses destroyed by income housing is a nagging issue for Duke’s expansion. lofty Bull City dreams, rooted in issues Indeed, the saga did not end so much similar to the four-decade-old cotton as peter out. The most visible mark of village struggle. Central’s history is the name of the porThe issues between Duke and Durtion between the basketball courts and ham are historical, but our attitude toYearby—“Mill Village.” I guess that day remains in many ways the same— we are the academic institute and they are strange. For Duke-Durham relations to truly work, every Dukie needs to view our Durhamite environment as no other from ourselves. And, like the real “Mill Village,” this time, Duke cannot put a matching sign up and call it the real thing. n
“
”
ABOVE, an excerpt from Sept. 13, 1965 memo from former University President Douglas Knight; BELOW, an excerpt from another September memo from Knight officially accepting the offer to buy the property.
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story and photos by Julian
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T
he man tested his balance, stepping gingerly forward on the beam, retreating when the wood started to wobble and shift. Once he had found equilibrium, he shouted back to his squadmates on the other side. “Knot up the rope and toss it over. We’ll haul this beam across, get our people to the other shore, then come back and get you. Just make sure you have enough slack. We can’t let it fall in the water.” The teammate on the other side hesitated, weighing the bundle of rope in his hand before reaching back and heaving it over the current. The others, balanced precariously on a log in the middle of the river, caught the rope and began hauling up the beam that they had crossed over. It wasn’t much: 16 feet long, perhaps four inches by four inches thick—slim enough that it shuddered when a full grown man put his weight on it. With the rope knotted around the far end of the beam, the group in the middle of the river hoisted until the slender piece of wood stood vertically in the middle of their small rocky outcropping, a minute island in an unstable sea. Now they just had to get it to the other shore. These men and women were on patrol in foreign territory. Their home base lay some 80 miles to the northwest, at the Fuqua School of Business. The mission, Operation Blue Devil, brought 23 MBA students through a truncated version of the recruitment process for the Army Special Forces to expand their business leadership and teamwork skills. The Blue Devils had forged an alliance with the Green Berets. Within the next few years, the Fuqua students will likely head to jobs as corporate strategists and consultants, but for two days they were potential recruits undergoing the U.S. Army Special Forces Selection and Assessment procedure. They camped out in the barracks at the Special Forces center at Camp Mackall, a swath of soaring pines and sandy plains in North Carolina’s Sandhills region. The camp houses the “schoolhouse” for the Green Berets—one of the nation’s elite unconventional forces. They specialize in entering an environment and working with the indigenous population to achieve a strategic mission. Somewhere among these Carolina pines were full-sized Afghan villages populated by foreign role players, where the Special Forces practice missions before heading overseas. Businesses and the military have changed their strategies drastically to adjust to the increasingly globalized and digital age. Although businesses focus on disruptive technologies and new markets, the military must face an ambiguous enemy in a global war on terror. The textbook cases no longer apply. “If you were going to be an Army Ranger, there’s a Ranger handbook,” said Maj. Brian Decker, the commander of Army Special Forces Assessment and Selection. “There is no Special Forces handbook. I exceeded everything I ever learned in the qualification course 10 minutes into combat, minus the ability to think.” Decker oversees the 19-day selection process that whittles down 3,500 recruits from within the military to 1,200 12 | TOWERVIEW
new members of the Special Forces. His philosophy is that “the best predictor of future behavior is current behavior in a simulated environment.” The training regimen that he helped develop and now oversees creates a simulation of the complex and changing environments that Special Forces operate in while on deployment. “You immediately are in uncharted territory,” Decker said. “That’s the reason why we put so much emphasis on adaptability: Do you see the utility of your training beyond what it was designed for? Linear thinking is not something that we value.”
Class at Camp Mackall The day began for the new recruits at 7:30 with breakfast and running. They then spent most of the day conducting exercises on the edge of a vast airstrip, whipped by high winds that kept the temperature cold and might have made things difficult for the paratroopers practicing their craft further down the field. In one exercise, two teams of about a dozen each constructed a vehicle out of available materials to carry a heavy water-filled barrel. Then, they set off on a physical challenge, dragging human-sized sandbags out and back across a stretch of field. The real special forces candidates use sandbags weighing 400 pounds, but the loads today were somewhat reduced. Later, the MBA students approached one of their most team-oriented challenges: crossing a river together without falling in. With the bridge-pole standing vertically on the precarious rocky outcropping, and most of the squad members balanced along a log atop the rock, the men in the middle
began lowering the beam to the other side of the river. The environment ruled out the possibility of trial and error: any slip-up in the beam’s descent could send it spinning out of control and out of reach. The stronger members at the center braced the base of the lowering beam as the few men remaining on the near side of the river slowly played out the rope. “Give us some, slack, more, more—hold it!” The beam hovered over the stream at a 50 degree angle, swaying laterally. The men at the base adjusted themselves, repositioning their feet on the scant available surface. “OK, drop it down.” The beam connected with the ground on the far side, landing with the sort of “thwack” that foretells good things to come. The squad members on the island began to move. One slim woman shuttled across, barely swaying the beam as she stepped with the poise of a dancer. The rest followed, easing themselves off the slab of wood on the outcropping, pausing when the wood threatened to tip and tumble. Then there were two men left in the middle, and two men waiting on the original shore until there was space in the middle. All that remained was to bring the beam back and do the whole thing over again. The duo that remained on the outcropping hoisted the beam back from the shore where most of the squad
“Do you see the utility of your training beyond what it was designed for?” TOWERVIEW | 13
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now stood waiting beneath the airy canopy of pines. The men tugged and heaved until the 16-foot beam was standing vertically with them. They bent their knees and hefted it a little forward to set a fulcrum. “You got the weight OK?” “Yeah we can handle it. It’s just a straight shot back to you.” “All right, send it over.” The men angled the beam back to the remnants of the team, letting it fall in a controlled slide into the home stretch. One inch, two inches, then faster toward the spit of land on that side of the river until a quirk of gravity or wind sent the beam veering off to the left and into the water. The teammates in the middle of the river lurched forward to stop its errant fall, but were so close to the fulcrum that they could not stop its momentum. Instead, they unbalanced the platform they were standing on and pitched forward into the depths of the river. These depths were not so deep, though—in fact, the men weren’t even wet. The river was made of woodchips. The Special Forces officers standing by the side chuckled a bit at the sudden demise of this attempt as the MBA students groaned and moved to help their teammates to their feet. Touching the ground meant starting the exercise over again. “That’s enough for now, let’s move on to the next exercise!” one officer shouted. This environment had proven itself suitably dynamic to thwart these future business leaders. But there would be more time for reflection on the bus
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ride home. Now it was time to see if their teamwork could spring them free from a POW camp.
Mind Matters Green Berets might encounter adaptable situations when trying to secure a border town where multiple tribes compete for control with the vestiges of a national government. Second-year MBA student Bee-Lian Quah, who has signed an offer to work in corporate strategy for IBM, had never participated in military activities before, but found them applicable to her leadership in business. The emphasis on communication in tight-knit squad based operations crosses over to consulting, where one’s influence comes not from rank, but from persuasiveness. She also noted that in the business context, leaders selling a new product have to react with prudence to the appearance of rival products or new regulatory schemes, which can throw an initial business plan into chaos. “What [the Special Forces] look for in selecting these adaptable leaders will be what’s most important as we become leaders in business,” Quah said. “You are still in ambiguous situations where you need to be adaptable and aware of your situation.” The tasks at Camp Mackall challenged the participants physically, intellectually and psychologically. For all the pop-culture depictions of the Army as a culture of physical prowess and sheer strength, the Special Forces see the physicality as just one part of the puzzle. The average soldier selected for Special Forces has an IQ
of 118, putting him around the 80th percentile of Americans, Decker said. The intellectual tests correlate highly with success in other areas, such as the map and compass navigation task. Special Forces also must master a language and understand the culture of the region to which they are assigned. In Decker’s words, this requires “an interdisciplinary approach,” much like the approach that Duke takes for educating its students. “Special Forces is different from a lot of the stuff you see on TV,” Decker said. “It’s less about the shooting... than it is about working with indigenous forces Above, Maj. Brian Decker, around the world. It’s who oversees selection for your ability to influence the Army Special Forces. and navigate that human When asked if he had played terrain and get people to the video game “Call of Duty: work and to do things on Black Ops,” he said, “No, I get enough of that at work.” your behalf.” n
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Greensboro native LaMonte Armstrong has received two life-altering rulings at the hands of a Guilford County judge, and the two prescriptions could not be more different. The first one—in August 1995—was a life sentence without parole after being convicted for the 1988 murder of Ernestine Compton, a professor at North Carolina A&T State University. “The judge said ‘by a jury of your peers, I find you guilty. And I sentence you to the department of corrections for the rest of your natural life,’” Armstrong recounts. “That’s the most devastating thing I’ve ever heard in my life, especially knowing that I hadn’t even done a crime.” The second decision—in June 2012—was a judge’s order for Armstrong’s release after 17 years of wrongful imprisonment. Armstrong was fully exonerated when the murder charge was formally dropped nine
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months later. A team from the School of Law’s Wrongful Convictions Clinic—including faculty, alumni and students—had been working with Armstrong, investigating his case for nearly five years to prove his innocence. “I call them my nine angels—the ATeam. These guys brought hope, a lot of understanding and patience,” 62-year-old Armstrong says. “In the final court appearance, the judge held up the motion the team had filed and said, ‘This is what your Duke team thought of you, they brought this up and got our attention.’ And you know what? He was right. I knew they worked hard to get me out of here.”
PHOTO COURTESY OF JON GARDINER/DUKE PHOTOGRAPHY
FIGHTING FOR
Right: the “A-Team” that helped in the exoneration of LaMonte Armstrong. From left to right, Wrongful Convictions Clinic co-directors James Coleman and Theresa Newman; David Pishko, Law ’77; Natasha Alladina, Law ’11; Matt McGee, Law ’10; and John Hibbard, Law ’13. Not pictured: Michael Horowitz, Law ’09; and Jamie Rietema Horowitz, Law ’09.
FREEDOM But the start of this story goes back several year. In 2006, the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence flagged Armstrong’s case as one that had a strong claim of a wrongful conviction. The state nonprofit then turned the case over to the Duke Law Innocence Project, which researches cases before assigning them to the clinic. Armstrong began writing letters to universities and state innocence projects seven months after being incarcerated. Armstrong mailed a letter to Duke in early 2006, using two stamps borrowed from another prisoner. The Duke Law Innocence Project began working on his case later that year and assigned it to the Wrongful Convictions Clinic in 2008. Current third-year law student John Hibbard became involved with the Armstrong case as the team was preparing to complete its motion for appropriate relief. The motion was submitted in December 2011. “I came on at the end and took all this great work that people before me had done and attempted to put it into a document that would persuade the district attorney to reopen [the case] and the judge to grant relief.” It was this document—easily six or seven inches thick— that was presented to the Guilford County Court judge at the hearing June 29, 2012. Armstrong was released later that day. At the hearing, Guilford County Judge Joseph Turner said he was convinced that Armstrong was innocent, praising the Duke team. “At the end of the day, [judges] leave hoping that we did justice, but we never know. We believe—you know
BY NICOLE KYLE
I believe that I do justice on a daily basis—but believing isn’t knowing,” Turner said at the hearing. “I was telling a colleague earlier today, probably this is as close to knowing I’m doing justice as I will ever experience in my career.”
Due process
Armstrong’s imprisonment was in many ways the result of “the usual suspects” phenomenon, says Theresa Newman, co-director of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic and Law ’88. There was no biological evidence that ever tied Armstrong to the scene. Although none of the prints found at the scene matched Armstrong, investigators pursued him as a suspect. “The only evidence against him were the statements of four men who were incentivized—four men testified against LaMonte, each of whom received a benefit,” says Newman, who also serves as faculty adviser to the student-led Innocence Project. Three of these men eventually admitted that they lied. In the summer of 2010 there was a breakthrough in the case: a recantation from one of the witnesses who had placed Armstrong at the scene. “It was then that I sort of knew I’m coming out of here. I just don’t know when,” Armstrong says. The evidence that finally persuaded the state in Armstrong’s favor was a rescanning of a palm print found at the scene above the victim’s body. The palm print was accounted for in a physical evidence chart that Natasha Alladina, Law ’11, and a classmate had composed. Little did she know that the chart would hold the key to
overturning the conviction. “When we started uncovering info that wasn’t passed over to LaMonte’s counsel, that was a moment that said we could really make a difference here,” says Alladina, who was assigned to the Armstrong case when she enrolled in the clinic as a secondyear law student in 2009. The December 2011 motion presented evidence from the team’s reinvestigation and exposed mistakes in the original one. The Guilford County district attorney’s office found the document so persuasive that the Greensboro detective resubmitted some of the evidence—including the palm print—for testing. “[The detectives] called us in June and said we have a match, and we’d like you to come talk to us,” Newman says. “They told us if they didn’t think a mistake was made, they would not have run the print again.” The palm print matched that of Christopher Caviness, who had been a suspect in the original investigation and whose prints had been tested in 1992—when Caviness was already in prison for murdering his father six months after Compton’s death—but no match was made. The most recent match was only made possible because Caviness’s prints had just been uploaded to a more sophisticated system in the summer of 2012. “If the palm print had been run earlier, we wouldn’t have had a match,” Newman points out. By the time the match had been made, however, Caviness was dead, having been killed in a June 2010 car accident.
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RIGHTING A WRONG Wrongfully imprisoned
Armstrong recounts the details of his trial, his imprisonment and then the subsequent days working with the clinic team with nothing short of total recall—sequential, precise and vivid. “One of my friends... he’ll say to me now, ‘You know man, one thing I give you credit for is you were tough enough to hang through this stuff, and... every time you tell me anything about this whole situation, it’s always been the same story. You never miss a beat.’” He can retell every turn in his case with complete clarity, a testament to the immense struggle that the last 17 years had been for him and his family. “You can do the truth like that, it’s lies you can’t recall and remember,” Armstrong says. “The truth can always be remembered because the truth is what it is.” Armstrong’s time in prison was in many ways characterized by silence:
silence from the many clinics and innocence projects he reached out to, and then a silencing of his own hope in 2001, when his mother passed away. “When she died on me, I didn’t have a lot of communication with anyone,” Armstrong recounts. Hope was renewed when Duke responded in 2006. Groups of students visited four times that year, and then in Spring 2008, Newman made her first visit to Armstrong. As the visits became more frequent, Armstrong says he began to gain confidence in his Duke team, recognizing its genuine investment in his cause. “In the latter part of 2008, I started to see that these Duke people were different. Professor Newman was always writing me back, and they were quick. I was impressed. I was starting to trust Duke,” he says. And as the case went on, the bonds between the team and LaMonte strengthened. “Professor Newman visited me on
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my birthday in June 2010, and that was the first time I’d had a visit on my birthday in 15 years,” LaMonte recalls. Two other team members—now professional lawyers—came to visit that June to sing him happy birthday. And that relationship has lasted well beyond his release. Armstrong speaks to Newman every other day and keeps in touch with other members of the team—sending well wishes to those who have received new jobs or those who have recently moved back to North Carolina. “I can call any of them at any given time and ask them a question, and it doesn’t have to be about law it can be about life, and they’ll do whatever they can to help me,” he says. “Those nine guys and girls are tremendous.” As someone who was wrongfully incarcerated for 17 years, one might expect Armstrong to be bitter and defeated. But within moments of speaking with him, his warmth and enduring energy are apparent. Today, Armstrong works as a counselor at a recovery center for addicts in Chapel Hill and is taking classes to earn Certified Substance Abuse Counselor status. But, understandably, his attitudes toward the criminal justice system have been at odds ever since the state sent him to jail for life. “I used to sit on the same side of the table as you, I thought that everything that the courts, the detectives, the DA put in the newspaper was true until it slapped me right in the face,” he says.
Flaws in the system
“THE TRUTH CAN ALWAYS BE REMEMBERED BECause the truth is what is.” -Lamonte armstrong 18 | TOWERVIEW
Armstrong’s exoneration certainly exposes inequities and inefficiencies in today’s legal system. Newman and fellow clinic co-director and law professor James Coleman maintain that drawing attention to these problems is nearly as important as securing justice for their clients. Uncorroborated testimony of witnesses was a huge factor in Arm-
strong’s wrongful conviction. Problems arise when the prosecution exchanges the testimony of a witness for a reduced sentence, early parole or some other form of compensation, Newman says. These trades simply encourage the witness to admit whatever the prosecution wants to hear and can often put the wrong people behind bars. “One change we have to pursue is the use of incentivized witnesses,” she says. “ [The state] often over-incentivizes witnesses without concern and yet nothing they testify to is independently corroborated—this is partly because of the prosecution’s caseload and partly because they don’t care.” This is particularly frustrating when testimony contradicts physical evidence. “They found six sets of fingerprints in my case, and they don’t match me, and they claim they couldn’t find a match,” Armstrong adds. “They sent me away on the basis of testimony from four inmates trying to get reduced sentences. What kind of message are we sending to the public? That the forensic science doesn’t work?” The clinic often finds that testimony and evidence has not been made available to both the defense and the prosecution. Alladina noted the need for every individual to have his or her “fair day in court.” “I still can’t believe that there was so much evidence that was favorable to LaMonte that didn’t get uncovered until this late. That really does show that there are serious flaws in the system.” In the last four years, the Wrongful Convictions Clinic has produced three other exonerations that have exposed further shortfalls in the criminal justice system. Mecklenberg County resident Noe Moreno—exonerated in August 2012 with the help of the clinic—had pleaded guilty to several charges, including second-degree murder and assault,
“It reminds you right at the beginning why you came to law school.” -KaTIE Claire Hoffman
ADDISON CORRIHER/TOWERVIEW because his lawyer had not prepared an adequate defense and because police had not conducted a complete investigation. Moreno was sentenced in 2007 to between 18 and 22 years in prison. Exoneree Shawn Massey served 12 years in prison for crimes he did not commit because of a misidentification by an eyewitness due to cultural factors. The white victim had said the person who attacked her wore braids. When the clinic discovered that the victim in fact had meant cornrows— not braids—the Duke team was able to persuade the court to release Massey seeing as he had never worn his hair long enough for cornrows. In the case of Jonathan Pierpoint, who was accused of sexually abusing a minor, there was simply no crime. When Duke re-examined the evidence of the claim of sexual assault, the team was able to show that there was a medical explanation for the evidence rather than anything corresponding to sexual abuse. Pierpoint had served 17 years of a life sentence upon his exoneration in 2011. “Sometimes there are mistakes. Sometimes prosecutors or law enforcement agents overreach,” says Duke Law Dean David Levi, calling the criminal justice system “imper-
fect.” “It is essential to a fair system that there be some sort of effective postconviction review. Our clinic is one way to provide this review.” In all four of the clinic’s exoneration cases, district attorneys agreed with the findings of the clinic’s reinvestigations, and none of these cases had to go back to trial. The clinic teams work with—not against—the state to attain release for their clients. Supervising attorney for the clinic Jamie Lau, Law ’09 added that this is a testament to the iron-clad work of the clinic teams. “We always attempt to work with the state first before litigating,” he says.
A clinic like no other
The Wrongful Convictions Clinic is one of eight clinics offered at the School of Law. Led by faculty members Newman, Coleman and Lau, the for-credit clinic is part of the Law School’s Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility. The center, which is the umbrella organization for the clinic and Innocence Project, is funded by a $1.25 million grant from the provost’s office that will run out next year. The grant was issued in 2007 partly as a response to problems
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Above, the four wrongly-convicted individuals whose cases the Wrongful Convictions Clinic has worked to exonerate. From top to bottom, Shawn Massey, Jonathan Pierpoint, Noe Moreno and LaMonte Armstrong.
in the North Carolina judicial system illuminated by the 2006 Duke lacrosse case. Prior to the clinic’s establishment, Newman and Coleman had been teaching a course on wrongful convictions and supervising the Innocence Project, a studentled group that had been founded six years earlier and was able to move case investigations only very slowly. This year, there are about 70 volunteers at the Innocence Project, making it the largest extracurricular activity at the school. Coleman and Newman both noted the need for renewed and increased resources if the work done in both the clinic and at the Innocence Project is to expand. Students can earn course credit through the Wrongful Convictions Clinic for up to two semesters. The clinic is one of the
law school’s more popular, says Coleman, adding that many students stay on with their clinic cases even after earning their maximum course credit, working as volunteers. In a given semester, between eight and 12 students are enrolled in the clinic for credit. Newman says it is the pathos of the clinic’s work—and the human connection it produces—that keeps students and alumni coming back. It is both an intellectual and emotional investment, she says. “You meet the client at the beginning of the semester and are required to spend many, many hours in the clinic but you end up spending many more than required. When they visit, they know the only way he is able to walk out is if they solve the puzzle: how did they get convicted and how do we prove innocence?” With four exonerations to date— two in 2010 and two in 2012—the clinic is one of the more successful among its counterparts at law schools nationwide, Coleman says. “We have a very good infrastructure of faculty who are able to work full-time on this and help with the investigations. In that sense, in terms of a clinic that’s only been around for four years, we have been very successful, and we are also very good at what we do.” Between the clinic and the Innocence Project, there are about 20 cases currently in progress, eight of which are currently in the clinic. The remaining cases are still in their initial investigation phases at the Innocence Project. In the Fall, two more cases will be moved from the Innocence Project to the clinic, Coleman added. The oldest case that the clinic is working on is a 1976 conviction, for which it recently filed a motion to overturn. Unlike some of its peers, the
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Wrongful Convictions Clinic is not DNA-based, meaning it does not take on cases that can be resolved simply with DNA testing. “Most people who are wrongfully convicted aren’t ones who had biological evidence in their cases,” Coleman explains. Instead, the Duke clinic takes on cases that need a full reinvestigation.
An educational mission
Current third-year law student Katie Claire Hoffmann contends that the practical skills she learned in the clinic have enhanced her law education in ways that classes cannot. The hours put in for the clinic’s casework exceed that of a normal class greatly because of the unpredictable and persistent nature of the work. “For the wrongful convictions clinic, we’re out there in the world tracking down witnesses, interviewing them, picking up files, visiting clients in prisons all over the state,” she recalls. “It’s a lot of car time and a lot of interactions with people outside the walls of the law school.” Hoffmann, Trinity ’07, says she came to law school with little direction or an idea of what she wanted to get out of it. Like many other students, she was inspired to become involved with innocence work during the law school’s orientation week, when Winston-Salem exoneree Darryl Hunt, who was relieved of rape and murder charges in 2004, spoke to the incoming students. “It reminds you right at the beginning why you came to law school,” Hoffman says. After Hunt’s remarks, Hoffmann became involved with the Duke Law Innocence Project, and now serves as the group’s case management director. Hoffmann joined the Wrongful Convictions clinic in her second year and was placed on a case team. She has completed the clinic but is still working on the case as a volunteer. Hoffmann’s work at the clinic encouraged her to pursue work in a public defender’s office after she
RIGHTING A WRONG graduates. She cited the clinic as an unprecedented opportunity to observe “good lawyering,” noting the benefits of working so closely with Newman, Coleman and Lau. “What we do in the clinic is primarily what lawyers do in the profession. Lawyers are problem solvers,” Coleman adds. “We are all working together on all aspects of the case. Students interview the inmate when we need to do that. They help to discover new evidence, they are doing the investigation, we are supervising it. When we get to the point where we’re going to file a motion, they’re involved with drafting and putting together the exhibits. They’re very present.” Third-year law student John Hibbard, who was part of Armstrong’s “A-Team,” says that his work in the clinic and with the Innocence Project is what makes law school—and its price tag—worthwhile. “The exonerations have been the best part of law school. It’s the best justification for tuition,” says Hibbard, who serves as the special projects director for the Innocence Project. “They’re the best things that have happened to me here, and I couldn’t imagine going to a different law school because of it.” The clinic work is also successful in connecting current law students to alumni. The Armstrong case saw an unprecedented amount of retention even after students
ADDISON CORRIHER/TOWERVIEW graduated and went on to work at large firms. Alladina is one example of this phenomenon, having worked on the case as student from 2009 to 2011 and then incorporating the case into her pro bono work as an associate at Alston & Bird in Atlanta. In addition to the bond with her professors and peers, she says Armstrong himself was a big reason why she decided to stay on with the project after graduating. “Once you meet him, you can’t help but become a champion for his cause.” n
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SHUTTER
+ Students participate in Global Health Week on “Preventive Health Day.” JISOO YOON
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RIGHT, paraders on Rigsbee Avenue at the Marry Durham celebration, which is intended to remind residents to protect—and cherish—their city. ELIZA BRAY
FAR RIGHT, spring arrives at the Chapel. JISOO YOON
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FAR LEFT, swing dancers in Page Auditorium April 4. STEPHANIE ENGLE
LEFT, women’s basketball head coach Joanne P. McCallie at the team’s loss to Notre Dame in the Elite Eight. ERIC LIN
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THE LINK Humanities and the Human Race
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magine
cience
languag rac
thics aw
literature
ide tity
euroscience
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After a Bioethics and Literature class one Monday morning, Towerview’s Caitlin Moyles sat down with Karla Holloway in her spacious Allen Building office, where they chatted about the relevance of her bioethics scholarship to Duke undergraduates, the complexity of words and how literature makes us more mindful people. Holloway is a James B. Duke Professor of English and holds appointments in the Law School and in the Women’s Studies and African and African American Studies departments. A Duke English professor of 19 years, Holloway also holds a law degree from Duke and spent the spring of 2008 as a fellow at Harvard University’s DuBois Institute. The book she completed during that fellowship, “Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics,” is the foundation of her current Bioethics and Literature class. In addition to teaching courses about law and literature in the English department and Duke School of Law, Holloway has authored eight books, including “Passed On: African-American Mourning Stories” and “BookMarks— Reading in Black and White, A Memoir.”
are
In “Private Bodies, Public Texts” you consider race, gender and cultural bioethics. What makes this scholarship unique in the field of bioethics? There are many kinds of disciplinary bioethics, including narrative ethics, women’s ethics, and I presume that they all have a cultural context. Rather than being able to extract identity from medical ethics questions, my argument is that identity is always present. Unless we acknowledge that, we’re not attending to the way in which we operate in culture. We have made race and gender matter in culture. To pretend that medical ethics can consider questions of autonomy without understanding that identity matters…. I insist that it does. That’s where I’m a little bit different. Could you give some examples of uses of modern science and medicine that you believe demand our ethical scrutiny? Certainly clinical ethics for children. How do we do a clinical trial that involves children? How do we think about their vulnerabilities? That’s very important for me, as are the ways in which clinical trials are exported. That’s probably the most contentious area. The reason clinical trials in the United States are exported to other countries is most ordinarily [because] we don’t have to operate under the same federal guidelines. So what sort of efficiencies are we after that contract the ethical landscape that make populations more vulnerable? So I’m concerned about our exporting clinical trials, especially to countries in which the same cautionary regulations that happen in the United States don’t work, although the cautionary regulations in the United States should still endure a lot of scrutiny.
The foundation board that I’m on, the Bioethics Advisory Board, I’m one of six people on this board. The head of this board is at Duke, his name is James Tulsky, he’s a palliative care physician. There’s a philosopher and an English professor, two physicians and a lawyer, and us. The philosopher is well known in medical ethics, so his work has always been on this [humanities] side. I think I’m the person who always thinks about identity the most, in terms of the humanities. How someone’s presumption of what your identity is affects the medical treatment you get. I think that I want to be freer, to have identity be flexible, but medicine is not going towards flexibility of identity. If we can say, “This is a child between the ages of 3 and 10, then we can put them in a certain demographic.” If we can say, “This is a black person, this is an Asian person.” So the efficiencies of categories in medicine keep people pretty much bound to those identities. And I see a personal identity as more flexible than that. I don’t know who I am today, yet. I’ll figure it out before the end of the day.
Could you talk about some of the bioethics conferences you have been invited to attend? I’m remembering a [National Institutes of Health] conference in September on care at the end of life. I was on a panel with a group of physicians, and I was the humanities person on the panel. At some point, I remember asking the question, “At what point will we allow the end of life not to be an experimental site but a place of spiritual transition?” And I remember the audience saying, “Ohhh….” Everything cannot be a research opportunity. If we continue to think of every moment in one’s life as a particular kind of medical opportunity, then I think we forget the way in which laypersons, a humanist for example, would think about life. So we have to be careful about medicalizing life and death to the extent that everything is an opportunity for study, rather than everything being an opportunity for experience….
Do these fluid aspects of identity have an effect on the medical care that you get? I think so, absolutely. For example, if you were to ask me a question, would my being a woman be more important at any given time than my being an African American? What if I’m in a medical situation that involves my being female? I might be answering from that frame more than from another. I think that how we see ourselves at any given time is mediated by the situation we’re in, by the experiences we’ve had, by the particular time of day! Whether or not I’ve just had to do my hair, you know? So it’s an issue of medicine allowing for that not to be such a fixed category, even though medicine would require that fixity in order to be more efficient. I’ve heard you say that you are often the only person with a humanities background at bioethics conferences. What can doctors and scientists learn from an English professor with a law degree? When you say “an English professor with a law degree,” that changes me, because sometimes I’m an English professor with a law degree and sometimes I’m just a person who reads fiction. In the last conversation from this advisory group I’m in, one person, not the humanist, said, “Do people really use books anymore?” If I had been able to raise my hand—we were in a conference call—I would have said, “Yes! We do. We read. We imagine.” Books, fiction especially, allows us to think of situations differently than we would ordinarily. And yes, those are critically relevant to our imaginations, to our capacity to grow. One day I tweeted, these are words that used to be words in
GRAPHIC BY MELISSA YEO
“Categories in medicine keep people bound to those identities.”
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PHOTO COURTESY OF DUKE PHOTOGRAPHY
science fiction that are now used in science. So there’s a You’ve said that Owen Barfield’s “Speaker’s Meaning” whole vocabulary that was once imaginative that is now had a profound influence on the way you think about a part of scientific literacy. So science folk need us, medi- words and language. What should all Duke students uncine needs us, because of the capacity to be creative and derstand about the complexity of the words in our everyimagine. If not that, what kind of humans would we be? day lexicon? I think in recent months I’ve ended a couple of tweets How did going to law school inf luence the way you with “language matters.” Sort of like, “See, I told you, read literature? language matters.” I think our being conscious not only First, I almost had to forget of the way in which we use words the way I read literature when but the way in which they are I was in law school, because it heard is one thing that Barfield requires such a different mindtalks about. Your intent placed set for reading. And that was a next to the listener’s intent, a really hard transition for me, lexical meaning versus a speakbecause I had been reading as er’s meaning. I think it makes a literature person for so long. us have a responsibility to be Now, because of the classes that more cautious around the words I teach about law and literature, we use, to be intentional. To be I look for the legal in a literary cautious that words have social, text. I look for an issue that recultural histories that may be volves around contract. Or how heard very differently from the rights are imagined. I was espeway you say them. That doesn’t cially interested in books with mean that you have a responsitrials in them. Whereas before bility for everybody’s social and as an English major, certainly cultural history, but if you’re I would read those books and thoughtful, and careful, then enjoy them, but now I’m not you will realize that potential. only looking for a certain kind I think that Duke students, uniof, “Oh, I know where this stoversity students, young people ry is going because of a dying and us elders have a responsibiltestimonial.” In literature, the ity to be mindful with our lanmoment of dying is important, “Duke students...young people and guage. That’s one thing I’m very but in law it holds a truth val- us elders have a responsibility to intentional about, even though I ue which I wouldn’t normally have learned in recent years how have ascribed to it. So I look be mindful with our language.” easy it is to pull someone’s lanfor the intersections now, in a way that I didn’t before. guage away from them. That surprised me. Part of that is our new Internet age and all of that. But it’s made me feel What do you mean by “truth value?” very good that I’ve always been an intentional language A dying testimonial in law is held to be true. What- user. But my mother was an English teacher so I had no ever you say at the moment of dying, that can be used choice. in a courtroom as a truth. Now, as a literary scholar I think, “Okay, at the moment of dying I can blame Can you give an example of a word that has a very whoever I want!” But the law holds a really interest- complex meaning that people often misuse? ing notion around what you say at the moment of dyLet’s take one from class, the idea of vulnerability. I’ve ing. It has to do with accountability, and that there’s actually written an essay about medical vulnerability. no longer a stake that you have in the matter because We’ve used it in medicine to mean, “These are vulneryou’re dying. So as a literature person, I’m saying, able populations. We have to be careful when we develop “That’s a moment to claim a stake!” I think I’m going policies around them, practice medicine around them.” to teach a whole course around dying testimonials one But we don’t often think about how we are responsible day because they’re so much fun. When you’re reading for those vulnerabilities. Our own biases, our own judgFaulkner’s “As I Lay Dying,” you can get a whole other ments and stereotypes have created a vulnerability. It’s discussion around that. And I did before I thought of, nothing intrinsic, in other words. Vulnerable populations “Gee, what’s the truth value in what Addie is saying?” is a good one because I still see that in medicine as, “Oh, So there’s a lot of fun in law and literature, especially we have to be careful about them,” without returning to, when you see the presumptions of one held up against “I have to reexamine how I think about people.” I’d like the imagination of the other. So that’s what I like to medicine to be more responsive to its own instantiations look for now. See, you’re making me smile just think- of authority and judgment, to say, “Oh, I did that,” rather ing about it. than, “It comes with a person.”
What do you hope students will take away from your English course, Bioethics and Literature? That it’s complicated, and it’s OK. That although we are responsible in our professional lives—whatever they are going to be—to make a judgment, to know that we are selecting out a particular solution out of many possible solutions. And not to fool ourselves into thinking, “We’ve got the right answer here.” We’ve got the usable answer, perhaps, or the necessary answer…. There are many possibilities. We can’t go through life just engaging every one of those complexities. But at least we can know that it’s complex. I’d like students in this class to think, especially those who are headed into professions where they will have to make medical judgments or legal judgments, to know that they are correctly moving toward an answer, but that they recognize that there were other possibilities. I want us to stop fooling ourselves into thinking, “I’ve got it! This is it! This is the only thing.” But I don’t want to hamper our ability to perform. As part of the Kenan Institute for Ethics’ project, “Good Question: An Exploration in Ethics,” Professor Michael Moses posed and responded to the question, “Can novels and films make us better people?” In the context of Bioethics and Literature, how would you respond to this question? I would interrogate “better.” What does “better” mean
here? I think novels and literature can make us more mindful. Mindfulness is a quality I really treasure. Having the time to think about a word, to think about its utility, its meaning. So I think that potential for being more mindful is certainly a good thing. It can make us aware of universes that we would not ordinarily imagine. There’s a line in astronomy for the known universe. And now scientists are saying, “We’re talking about the known universe.” So in my head, I think, “There’s an unknown one. How do I even think about that?” I want to be able to think about that, and that’s what I think literature and novels allow us to do. They allow us to imagine things that would not be an ordinary encounter in our day. Certainly Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” is not an ordinary encounter. Or having a savior sibling [like Anna in Jodi Picoult’s “My Sister’s Keeper”]. Or having a school full of clones [as in Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go”]. So what does it mean to place yourself in an extraordinary situation, and where do you go from there? That’s what I think literature and novels allow us to do. I pull back when people say, “I want to read things about me. I want to see myself in the book.” I’m saying, “Why do I want to see myself ? I want to see somebody else, something I never would have imagined.” That’s what I like about fiction. It places me into a realm that I wouldn’t have ordinarily engaged. n
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