ON THE night of March 13th 2006, 47 lacrosse players at Duke University, North Carolina, paid a couple of strippers to entertain them. Things went badly from the start. The girls arrived late. One of them, Crystal Mangum, was so drunk that she could not utter a coherent sentence. Her “dance” lasted four minutes. But over the next few days a sordid evening mutated into a life-ruining tragedy. Ms Mangum alleged that some of the players had beaten and gang-raped her. And the full force of the American legal system and media machine was deployed against a group of young men who were presumed to embody all the evils of America's demons of racism and sexism. The students Ms Mangum accused are white: Ms Mangum is black.

The accusation was a transparent lie from the start. Ms Mangum, who had been picked up by the police, brought up the subject of rape only when she was confronted with the possibility of a spell in a mental hospital. She recanted her accusation and then recanted her recantation. She told conflicting stories that numbered her assailants at anything from two to 20. Her co-dancer described her claims as “a crock”. The police who interviewed her on the first night regarded her charges as incredible—and, in truth, she had a long record of alcohol and drug abuse, mental instability and making up far-fetched stories.

Yet, a few weeks later, three of the students were arrested and charged with rape amid the usual media frenzy. Why did such a tissue of lies produce a high-profile prosecution? And why did the media and many of Duke's faculty side with the stripper, not the lacrosse players? This is the subject of “Until Proven Innocent”, a superb new book by Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson: a book that not only reads like a legal thriller (John Grisham provides one of the blurbs), but also exposes deep problems with America's legal system and academic culture.

The architect of the disaster was Mike Nifong, the district attorney for Durham County, North Carolina. Mr Nifong faced a close election campaign, and he relentlessly went after the young men. He ignored a mass of contradictory evidence when he took up the case. He spent hours talking to the press and smearing his victims. When DNA evidence failed to support Ms Mangum's story, he first refused to hand it over to the defence and then ignored it. Mr Nifong was ably assisted by the national media and Duke faculty. The print media churned out headlines about “a night of racial slurs, growing fear and finally sexual violence”, and the TV talking heads revelled in the story line. This column, to its shame, echoed the prevailing wisdom.

Radical students stomped around the campus banging pots and demanding justice (one sign recommended castration). And a crowd of radical professors pronounced the students guilty as sin. Some professors used the “rape” to illustrate lectures on racial and sexual repression. Several gave invective-laden interviews to the press. On April 6th 2006, 88 faculty members took out a full-page advertisement in the college newspaper condemning the lacrosse players. In April 2007, all charges were dropped.

The case provides a vivid example of the way in which a rogue prosecutor can warp the legal system. “The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty and reputation than any other person in America,” wrote Robert Jackson, one of America's great attorneys-general, in 1940. “While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst.”

There are more of them out there

Mr Nifong was clearly one of the worst. But he is not alone: American prosecutors increasingly mimic the win-at-any-cost ethic of defence lawyers. A study by the Centre for Public Integrity in 2003 found that numerous prosecutors had stretched, bent or broken the rules. The case also provides a vivid example of the evils of political correctness, which is rampant in the media. One writer noted that “You couldn't invent a story so precisely tuned to the outrage frequency of the modern, metropolitan, bien pensant journalist.”

A striking number of professors were willing to trample all over legal process in their rush to declare the lacrosse players guilty before charge, let along trial. And they did so solely on the basis of the players' race and gender. One professor, Houston Baker, denounced the lacrosse players as “young white, violent, drunken men veritably given licence to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech”. Duke's politically-correct faculty thus produced a mirror image of the worst racism of the South in the 1950s, when people were pronounced guilty—and denied their legal rights—solely because they were black. While all this was going on Duke's president, Richard Brodhead, did little, if anything, to defend the lacrosse players or to criticise the faculty for its lynch-mob mentality. A university that charges students over $40,000 per year essentially abandoned three of them to the bullying of an out-of-control prosecutor.

Some people have at least learned from the disaster at Duke. Mr Nifong has been sacked and stripped of his law licence. Last week he was sent to jail, though only for a day, for his numerous misdemeanours. The press has struggled to put the record straight—and several people have written their own mea culpas.

The only people who, it seems, have learned nothing from all this are Mr Nifong's enablers in the Duke faculty. Even after it was clear that the athletes were innocent, 87 faculty members published a letter categorically rejecting calls to recant their condemnation. And one professor, proving that some academics are as far beyond parody as they are beneath contempt, offered a course called “Hooking up at Duke” that purported to illustrate what the lacrosse scandals tell us about “power, difference and raced, classed, gendered and sexed normativity in the US.”