Could it have ended any other way?

Nifong: The Dog Ate My Law License

AUGUST 15--In a pathetic end to the Mike Nifong saga, the disgraced North Carolina prosecutor who handled the Duke rape investigation has turned in his law license, noting that he never framed or displayed the document because it had been damaged "by a puppy in her chewing stage." Additionally, in an August 7 letter to the North Carolina State Bar, Nifong noted that the law license also contained a misspelling of his middle name (which is Byron). A copy of Nifong's "the dog ate my law license" letter can be found below. Nifong was stripped of his license as a result of his unethical stewardship of the Duke probe, which resulted in felony charges being dropped against three students who had been charged with the sexual assault of a stripper who had performed at a March 2006 off-campus party attended by members of the school's lacrosse team. (1 page)

You almost feel sort of sorry for him.

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.

HWT Understatement of the Decade Award

“It has become increasingly apparent, during the course of this week, in some ways that it might not have been before, that my presence as the district attorney in Durham is not furthering the cause of justice,”

- Mike Nifong

You might have though of that before you ruined three young men's lives by trying to railroad them for a crime they didn't commit. All so you could show predominantly black Durham County how willing you were to prosecute "rich white frat boys".

All you need is a rope and a tree

RALEIGH, N.C. — More than a year after shocking allegations emerged about Duke University's lacrosse team, prosecutor Mike Nifong is heading to trial -- as a defendant.

The North Carolina State Bar has charged Nifong, the district attorney in Durham County, with several violations of the state's rules of professional conduct, all tied to his handling of the lacrosse case.

Nifong arrived shortly after 9 a.m., escorted by his wife and teenage son. As they took up a seat in the front row behind the defense table, he disappeared into a side room with his attorneys. He is expected to testify at the trial, which will last for five days.

"This didn't have to happen and the horrible consequences were entirely foreseeable," State Bar Counsel Katherine E. Jean said during her opening statement. "The harm done to these three young men and their families and the justice system of North Carolina is devastating."

In her opening statement, Jean detailed at length statements Nifong made to the media as well as meetings he had with the director of the DNA laboratory he hired, at which she said Nifong learned that none of the players' DNA matched that material found in and on the accuser.

The Bar has accused Nifong of keeping those test results from the defense and that he lied to both the court and Bar investigators.

It is unfortunate that the NC State Bar cannot send Nifong to jail to serve every minute of the sentence which he attempted to railroad these innocent young men into. Because that would be the only true justice which could come out of this.

The Blond One on Duke

Here is Ann's take on the rapidly unraveling Duke rape case and the nation's paper of record's comments on it:

Stuart Taylor Jr., the liberal but brilliant legal reporter for the National Journal, described the New York Times' coverage of the Duke lacrosse rape case as "[w]orse, perhaps, than the other recent Times embarrassments." For a newspaper that carries Maureen Dowd's column, that's saying something.

As the Times' most loyal reader, this came as welcome news. I had briefly suspected the Times was engaging in fair reporting of the alleged rape case at Duke University. Taylor's article documenting the Times' massive misrepresentations restored order and coherence to my world.
The first part of the story – the lie part – was angrily reported in the Times. But as the accuser's story began to unravel, the Times gave only a selective account of the facts, using its famed lie-by-omission technique.

Among the many gigantic omissions from the Times' pretend-balanced article ("Files From Duke Rape Case Give Details but No Answers") is the fact that the only remaining particulars about the case that are not completely exculpatory come from a memo by Sgt. Mark Gottlieb – written four months after the alleged incident.

Gottlieb, the lead investigator on the alleged rape case, took no contemporaneous notes when he interviewed the accuser, but rather waited for the facts to come in – and his case to be falling apart – to write a memo recalling her statements during that initial investigation. The statements he recalled were surprisingly favorable to the prosecution!

The only problem with his memo, besides being preposterous on its face, is that it is contradicted by the contemporaneous notes taken by other people involved in the investigation. Indeed, the only thing Gottlieb's memo was consistent with were the facts as the prosecution was then alleging them.

Of course, it was hard to keep straight what facts the prosecution was alleging. The accuser made up so many stories about the incident that the Times was forced to offer her Jayson Blair's old position.

Go read the rest, it is very worth it. Usually Anne uses hyperbole, obvious exaggerations intended to drive home her point. In this case she pretty much sticks to the facts and yet to anyone not familiar with the case it would come off as her most over-the-top column to date.

A new perspective

From The Washington Post:

RALEIGH, N.C., Jan. 13 -- North Carolina's attorney general on Saturday promised a "careful and deliberate review" of the sexual abuse case against three Duke lacrosse players but noted that "anything can happen," even new charges, as his office reviews the evidence.

"Agreeing to accept the prosecution of these cases doesn't guarantee a trial, nor does it suggest a dismissal," Attorney General Roy Cooper said at a news briefing, one day after Durham District Attorney Michael B. Nifong asked Cooper's office to take over the case against the three players accused of raping a 28-year-old stripper at a team party last spring.

He emphasized that his prosecutors will be looking at this case with fresh eyes, and that while the review could lead to dropped charges, it could also lead to new charges or reinstatement of rape charges dropped last month.

"Whatever charges -- if any -- are appropriate would be pursued," he said.

Cooper also said his office would not talk about details of the case while it is reviewing the sexual assault and kidnapping charges against Reade Seligmann of Essex Fells, N.J., Collin Finnerty of Garden City, N.Y., and David Evans of Bethesda.

The takeover of the case comes after Nifong sought to recuse himself, and follows weeks of increasing criticism of his handling of the case. Last month, the North Carolina State Bar charged Nifong with ethics violations.

Nifong is an idiot. That much is obvious from looking at everything he has done up to this point. The question I have is this, how big an idiot is he? What I mean is this. If he had known that the case would blow up in his face and probably ruin his career he certainly wouldn't have taken it. If he was suicidal to that degree he would have already blown his brains out or slit his wrists.

So what led him to think he could get away with doing what he has done? Is it so common for district attorneys to frame innocent defendants that this seemed like just another day at the office for him? Is the only thing different about this case the amount of media attention that made it impossible to just railroad these young men?

Is Nifong so much of a left-liberal that it just never occurred to him that rich White college boys, and athletes to boot, could possibly be innocent of committing a crime against a Black woman?

Or was he just so stupid and evil that he figured that by the time he got around to dropping the charges because of the unreliable nature of the prosecution witness that the election would be long won and the media would have long ago turned its attention to the latest suicide bombing in Iraq and everyone would have forgotten about him and the Duke rape case?

The rat leaves the sinking ship

From The Washington Post:

After months of stinging criticism about his handling of the Duke University sexual assault investigation, Durham District Attorney Michael B. Nifong sought to bow out of the case yesterday, requesting that the North Carolina Attorney General's Office handle the prosecution.

His decision to recuse himself was welcomed by the defense team representing the three Duke lacrosse players initially accused of raping a 28-year-old stripper at a team party.

"We feel very good about this. It's a fresh set of eyes looking at the case," said William Cotter of Raleigh, one of three attorneys for Collin Finnerty of Garden City, N.Y. "We think it's more likely that they will listen to us and we will certainly be cooperative with him or her."

The defense believes that another prosecutor would, after reviewing the contradictions of the alleged victim's accounts and the paucity of physical evidence, drop the case.

Nifong wants out so that he won't be the prosecutor of record when the case is dropped or dismissed. This is not going to help him, however. By abusing the power of his office to ruin the lives of a group of innocent men in order to further his own political career he has exposed not only his own immoral, unethical and corrupt nature, but the excesses to which any out of control district attorney can commit.

In other words Nifong has pulled aside the curtin and the rest of the criminal justice establishment will not forgive him for it.

Others who will not forgive him include the families of the men he has tormented. From CBS:

The fact that Nifong withheld the information and knew it before he indicted their sons has outraged the parents of the accused. "You felt like someone hit you with a baseball bat. … It was almost too much to bear, as we sat there," says Kathy Seligmann, whose son, Reade, is among the three indicted players. "And [Nifong is] sitting 10 feet away from us."

It enraged Mary Ellen Finnerty, mother of Collin Finnerty, another indicted player. "I think [I felt] one of the strongest feelings of rage that I've had … I literally had to turn to my husband, because I was shaking from my head to my toe, and say, 'Hold me down,'" recalls Finnerty. Adds Seligmann, "And we had to hold on to each other because when you sit there and put two and two together and realize that it was calculated … set up to make these boys appear to be guilty of something they didn't do."

When asked what they would say to Nifong if he were in the room, Rae Evans, the mother of indicted player David Evans, says, "I would say with a smile on my face, 'Mr. Nifong, you've picked on the wrong families … and you will pay every day for the rest of your life.'"

The size of the law suit which the families will bring against Nifong and Durham County, and which they will win, will be greater thant the gross national product of several African, South American or Asian nations.

There is a way in which Durham County can exempt itself from a judgment. If it is found that Nifong knew that the young men were innocent and proceeded with the prosecution anyway for personal reasons then the County can argue that Nifong was not simply doing his duty.

If a court will find that Nifong was not acting in good faith then he will lose the indemnification normally enjoyed by government workers in the performance of their duties and the County, and its insurance carriers, can divorce themselves from Nifong and leave him alone - twisting in the breeze. This would leave him personally responsible for any award of damages.

Goodbye house, car, investment portfolio, bank account, job, law license, reputation and probably wife and friends.

OK Nifong, repeat after me, "Do you want fires with that?".

A good point

Paul Hollander has written an excellent essay on today's Front Page Magazine comparing the current Duke rape case to the Twana Brawley incident in New York:

The recent case of the lacrosse players at Duke University accused of raping a young black woman brings to mind the case of Tawana Brawley, the black teenager who in 1988 made similar charges against a group of white men in Wappinger Falls , NY.

In both cases, what turned out to be unfounded charges were widely given credit and generated immense publicity; celebrities and politicians rallied to the cause of the alleged victims, lengthy and costly legal investigations followed, and at last it emerged that the accusations were groundless. In both incidents, the charges were seized upon as self-evident, incontrovertible proof of the incorrigible and ineradicable racism that continues to permeate and infect every pore of American society.

The comparison is valid. One thing I will say, though, is that the long-term consequences of the Duke affair will not be as destructive as the Tawana Brawley business.

The reason is that Nifong is White. The worst outcome of the Brawley business was that it catapulted odious race-pimp Al Sharpton onto the national stage. Because Sharpton is Black there were no real negative consequences for his wretched behavior. Nifong is not so fortunate. He is facing the real possibility of disbarment and law suit and even prison.

More on the Duke Rape Case

Subtitle: Get the fork ready to stick in Nifong cause he's just about done.

Jamie Glazov has a fascinating interview up on today's Front Page Magazine website about the Duke rape case:

Frontpage Interview's guest today is KC Johnson, a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. With a B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, he specializes in 20th century U.S. political, constitutional, and diplomatic history. He writes a blog, Durham-in-Wonderland, which offers comments and analysis about the Duke/Nifong case.

Here some of the more interesting bits:

In a word, no prosecutor with any integrity would continue with this case—but if we have learned nothing else over the past nine months, Mike Nifong is not a man of integrity.

At this point, no pretense exists that anything but self-preservation motivates Nifong. By dropping the rape charges, Nifong effectively impeached his only witness. On April 4, the accuser was shown photographs of the 46 white players on the Duke lacrosse team. In that lineup, the accuser made multiple errors (for starters: claiming to have seen two players who could prove they weren't at the party and incorrectly identifying the player who made the broomstick comment). But she identified four people as possible attackers, and Nifong chose three to indict.

She did more than identify, however: she described what each of the alleged attackers did to her. By offering a new version of events 282 days after the party, Nifong argues for disbelieving the accuser's on-tape descriptions of acts from the April 4 ID session.

But Nifong needed to impeach the accuser to help his own cause. In a December 15 court session, Dr. Brian Meehan, head of a private DNA lab, stated under oath that he and Nifong entered into an agreement to intentionally withhold exculpatory DNA evidence. This move violated North Carolina's Open Discovery Law and contradicted the principle of the Brady decision, which requires turning over any potentially exculpatory material to the defense.

Like a prospective defendant in an ethics or possibly even criminal case, Nifong needed to find ways to minimize the significance of the exculpatory evidence he and Meehan conspired to prevent the defense from seeing.

The bizarre decision to drop the rape charges but retain the others can only be explained by looking at Nifong's legal needs. By claiming that no rape occurred, Nifong can, perhaps, rationalize the decision reached by Meehan and him that the DNA from five, unidentified males was irrelevant to the case, and therefore should be excluded in Meehan's report.

This is very interesting. It seems that Nifong is manipulating a criminal case which he is prosecuting in order to better position himself as a defendant in a civil (or even criminal) case which he anticipates being involved in. The DA manipulating a case fro personal gain had to be right up there at the top of corrupt practices that would form grounds for impeachment and disbarment.

But it doesn't stop here. Other of the left-wing "usual suspects" are indited as well:

Before this incident, the North Carolina NAACP had a recent record of aggressively demanding procedural changes that would ensure fairness for criminal defendants. For instance, the state NAACP backed a 2004 law mandating that prosecutors turn over their entire files to the defense; and also had championed new eyewitness ID procedures calling for use of seven filler photos for every suspect and other due process-friendly changes.

In this case, Nifong created a lineup confined to suspects (the lacrosse players), while on December 15, the head of a private DNA lab admitted under oath that he and Nifong agreed to withhold exculpatory DNA evidence.

Yet not only has the state NAACP not protested the prosecutor's actions, it has consistently defended Nifong. A defense motion requesting a change of venue laid out the extent of the NAACP's actions, which included a posting on the organization's website containing demonstrably false statements about the lacrosse players. Meanwhile, the group designated a case "monitor,' NCCU professor Irving Joyner, who has aggressively bolstered Nifong's case in interviews, falling back on the argument that the prosecutor "must have something" that hasn't been revealed and wholly ignoring the procedural misconduct.

In light of its behavior in this case, it would be difficult to take seriously anything we hear in the future from the NAACP about the civil liberties of criminal defendants.

And:

In June, NOW issued a statement condemning the defense attorneys and the media in the case, suggesting that any criticism of the accuser's veracity (this in a case where the accuser gave at least ten different versions of events, and never told a police officer the same story twice) constituted an assault on her privacy.

Ironically, most criticism (from attorneys and from both the mainstream media and the blogosphere) has focused on Nifong, not the accuser. The impression that many feminists have left—whether intentional or not—is that any criticism of a rape case prosecution, even of a prosecutor who's behaving in an unethical fashion, constitutes unacceptable attacks on the accuser. That isn't a tenable position.

Go read the rest. I didn't even include what he says about the Duke faculty hypocrites.

Mother Calhoon has a saying fro when some bigshot has a well deserved fall. She says they "go down like a big fat hog".

It's going to be fun watching Nifong go down like a big fat hog.

The Duke rape case continues to fall apart

From The Washington Post:

Prosecutors dropped rape charges yesterday against three Duke University lacrosse players accused of assaulting an exotic dancer at a team party, saying in court documents that although the accuser "initially believed" she had been raped, she can no longer testify with certainty about crucial aspects of the alleged assault.

The dismissal of the rape charges eliminates a serious accusation facing the players but leaves the trio facing kidnapping and sexual-offense counts, which carry significant prison terms.

With no DNA linking any members of the lacrosse team to the victim, defense lawyers said District Attorney Michael B. Nifong should go further and dismiss the case.
"End this suffering . . . end this case -- because there is no case to bring," said Wade Smith, an attorney for Collin Finnerty, one of the three Duke students charged.

Nifong should never have brought this case to begin with. From the beginning it was about nothing but politics. Nifong was trying to get reelected in an area which not only has a large Black population but is one of the most stridently left-liberal regions in the state.

The chance to demonstrate his progressive credentials by prosecuting a group of "rich White-boy" students at the elite university for raping a poor Black woman was just the thing he needed to put him over the top in the coming election.

Nifong seized the opportunity and ran with it. he went before the press and labeled the lacrosse players "racists" and "rapists" and assured the public that the DNA would conclusively prove their guilt. However the case began to unravel almost as soon as it was filed. The stripper's credibility was called into question by the other stripper who was with her when the supposed rape occurred.

One of the students who she positively identified as one of the rapists turned out to have not been at the party when the alleged rape took place, and to have eyewitness and photographic evidence to back him up.

The DNA test showed that although DNA from several men was on the stripper none of it belonged to any of the lacrosse players. It also came out that Nifong suppressed this information.

Then we found out that the photo lineup which led to the identification of the lacrosse players by the alleged victim was tainted. She was shown a PowerPoint presentation of the 46 members of the team with no photographs of other young men of similar age and appearance added. The lineup became a "multiple choice test with no wrong answers". It was impossible for the accuser to damage her credibility by picking someone who could not possibly have been at the party because she was never given the chance to do so.

Since a man cannot rape a woman without leaving some DNA evidence on her body (even if he wears a condom he will leave some DNA on his victim unless he showers and scrubs all the dead skin off his body, shaves all his head and body hair off and then wears a mask and gown like a surgeon in the operating room) the charge of rape became unsustainable. Rather than do the honorable thing and dismiss the all the charges Nifong has dug in his heels and only given as much ground as he absolutely had to.

The reason for his stubbornness is, I think, that the dynamics of the case have changed. Originally he had a case which was weak, but still had enough credibility to make him look good to the local press and population. He set the trial date for the Spring if 2007 in order to move it well past the election season so that when it fell apart and was dropped it would not harm him politically. After all months would have passed and other stories would be in the headlines and not many people would be paying attention.

He clearly did not count on the ability of talk radio and the Internet to turn his prosecutorial malfeasance into a major issue with long legs. Legs long enough to keep pace with him as each detail of his mishandling of the case emerged.

Nifong is in the position now of having no choice but to press forward and attempt to get some kind, any kind, of conviction. Because if he doesn't - if the case falls apart so badly that he has to dismiss all charges before it even goes to trial -he faces the realistic possibility of impeachment from office and disbarment.

If this happens it will not only mean disgrace and the ruin of his career, but both Durham county and Nifong individually will be subject to lawsuits from the falsely accused lacrosse players with will amount to tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars.

Mr. Nifong has painted himself into a corner from which there is no way out which does not leave him seriously damaged. However it is a position in which he did not have to be in. His own dishonesty and unscrupulous behavior in carrying out the duties of his office have landed him where he is and he deserves no sympathy.