Disbarred!

From The Washington Post:

RALEIGH, N.C., June 16 -- Hours after he was found guilty of ethics violations in his prosecution of three Duke University lacrosse players falsely accused of sexual assault, Durham County District Attorney Michael B. Nifong on Saturday surrendered his law license to the state bar and said he would waive his right to appeal.

A three-person North Carolina State Bar disciplinary panel, on the fifth day of an ethics hearing, said the evidence showed that Nifong had withheld crucial information from the students' defense attorneys and engaged in "dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation" during his prosecution of the case. The panelists were about to announce whether Nifong should be disbarred when his attorney announced that Nifong had decided disbarment was the appropriate punishment. Nifong had already said he would quit his Durham position.

It marks the first time in North Carolina that a sitting district attorney has been disbarred.

The panel chairman, Lane Williamson, said after a 35-minute deliberation that the panel agreed "there is no disciplinary action short of disbarment appropriate in this case given the magnitude of the offenses found." Calling the case a "fiasco," he said that Nifong's motives appeared to arise not from any evil but rather from "self-interest and self-deception."

Not from any evil, but "self-interest and self deception". Where I come from someone who is willing to ruin the lives of innocent young men to advance his career is considered evil.

Nifong was running for reelection in an area with a large black population. Blacks have been convinced by the American grievance industry that there is something deeply unfair about the fact that a large percentage of defendants in criminal cases and convicts in state prisons are black. The fact that blacks commit a hugely disproportionate percentage of the nation's crimes should not matter. They should only be arrested, tried, convicted and jailed in proportion to their percentage of the population. At least that's what the Rev. Sharpton says.

Having all of this uppermost in his mind as he planned his campaign Nifong was handed what he, at the time, considered a gift directly from the hand of the deity. A bunch of rich, white, frat-boys had been accused of rape by a "po' black chile". Nifong realized that in both the local black community and the ultra-liberal campus community of Duke University whites accused of racist violence against a black or men accused of sexual violence against a woman would automatically be assumed to be guilty and that virtually nothing could convince them otherwise.

The narrative of the oppressing race and sex against the oppressed race and sex would be too compelling and fit in too well with the liberal worldview and be too useful as a cause around which to rally to be abandoned for anything less than overwhelming evidence. And Nifong knew that it was only necessary to keep the case alive for a few months past the election. Then if the evidence was not sufficient to generate a guilty verdict in a trial Nifong could simply drop the case secure in the knowledge that most people in the black community would assume that "the system" simply puts too many hurdles in the path of a DA who wishes to prosecute rich whites for acts of violence against poor blacks. By this time the University faculty and students would have held their "take back the night marches" and issued their manifestos denouncing violence against women (or womyn) and moved on to the next "cause of the day".

The fact that dropping the case for lack of evidence that could be taken to court would not equal exoneration in the eyes of most of the public and that the stigma of the rape accusation would follow the young men throughout their lives and taint their reputations, affecting their ability to find employment and form relationships, as well as the crushing debt which their families would incur in funding their defenses (because they were not, in fact, rich) was a matter of absolutely no consequence to Nifong.

He played with and would have destroyed their lives for personal gain in as callous a manner as any criminal sociopath brutalizing a helpless victim. He saw himself as special, an officer of the court, an elected official, a member of the ruling class entitled to serve his own interests at the expense of lesser beings.

And I'll bet that in his own mind he still doesn't understand that what he did was evil. To him he was only doing what District Attorneys do, what prosecutors of all kinds do. Rudolph Giuliani, Nifong is likely saying to himself right now, did exactly the same kind of thing as a US attorney and he's likely to be the next president.

Nifong should be grateful that he is only facing disgrace and loss of his livelihood and civil litigation which will leave him destitute. If there were true justice in this case he would be sent to jail to serve the prison sentences he attempted to railroad those innocent men into serving.