I’ve written frequently about how a mob mentality took hold in a case familiar to Houstonians and led to a grave injustice for a large number of businesspersons, particularly two men and their families (examples here, here and here). The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz examines in this OpinionJournal op-ed how a similar dynamic resulted in the demonization of several young men in what will now forever be known as the Duke lacrosse team case. Rabinowitz analogizes the Duke students’ case to that of the phony child-abuse cases that she has previously exposed, but the dynamic is the same in many high-profile cases in which certain elements of the government, media and the public jump to a conclusion about guilt when a reasoned, objective and deliberate examination of the facts of the case would result in a far different and more nuanced conclusion. Larry Ribstein and the WSJ’s ($) Holman Jenkins have masterfully presented how the same dynamic has led to the unnecessary destruction of careers and lives in connection with the media-inspired scandal regarding the widespread policy of backdating options as a means of compensating corporate personnel (Larry analyzes today’s news of the newly-reported criminal investigation of Apple here). In the Duke lacrosse team case, it is particularly ironic that many in the media and on Duke’s faculty were enablers of abusive, dishonest law enforcement and prosecution tactics that are far more often used in cases against minorities that those enablers would decry. They now share responsibility for the continued use of such tactics long after the spotlight on the Duke lacrosse team case has moved on to the next fixation of the mob.