Did Duke Case Impact Jones Investigators?

Back in April, an 18-year-old college student from the Twin Cities area alleged that she was sexually assaulted by a group of men, later found to all be members of the Minnesota Gopher football team.

Three players were arrested in early April, and were detained for a weekend while authorities tried to piece together what happened. When charges weren't ready to be filed by the following Monday, the players were released without being charged. At that point, officials said the investigation would continue.

As we pointed out earlier this week, the Sunday night arrest of another player, cornerback Dominic Jones, is related to the case. Jones was charged with third-degree criminal sexual conduct on Monday, and the rather graphic charging document alleges Jones engaged in a sex act with a drunk woman described as "physically helpless".

At his initial court appearance Tuesday, Jones did not enter a plea (he was not obligated to do so). He said nothing besides "Yes, sir" and "No, sir" to the judge and bail was set at $25,000. Jones has since been released on bail. Attorney Earl Gray, representing Jones, said Jones intends to fight the charges, and he would like to play football again if he is acquitted.

While Jones was charged, the three players originally arrested in the case have still not been charged. Alex Daniels, Keith Massey, and E.J. Jones are all named in the charging document, and Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman said Monday that the three were still suspects. Freeman noted that only one of the three has given a statement, and he said the other two haven't been cooperative.

Without getting into speculation about the particulars surrounding the case, I did find one quote from Freeman to be quite interesting.

"Everything done in this case was subject to intense scrutiny. Because of that, we want to make sure we do it right."

I'm not a mind-reader, but my brain automatically turned to the Duke lacrosse case when I read this quote from Freeman. I did speculate about the Duke lacrosse case making these investigators a little more careful and thorough than they may normally have been, but I didn't think too seriously about it at the time. The more I think about it now, the more sense it makes. The bottom line is that no prosecutor or detective wants to be compared to Mike Nifong or anyone involved in that botched case ... certainly not when the story is still fresh in everyone's minds.

In the end, the meticulous nature of this investigation might lead some folks to believe that there isn't much to the case, and that it simply took the authorities this long to put anything together that could make charges stick.

The reality is that the authorities did what they felt was right. Freeman and the investigators were stuck dealing with the evidence they could collect, and they didn't want to get their names in the paper for the wrong reasons.

Previously at FanHouse
Dominic Jones Is So Going To Jail
Gopher Starting CB Jones Arrested
Three Gophers Arrested in Sexual Assault Case