Nifong asks to withdraw from case

The evil Michael Nifong’s pursuit of the Great White Defendant ends as did Ahab’s pursuit of the Great White Whale, with Ahab pinned, dead, to the innocent creature he had demonized and sought to destroy. Duff Wilson and David Barstow report in the New York Times (be sure to see Paul Nachman’s comments at the end of the Times story):

DURHAM, N.C., Jan. 12—The district attorney in the Duke lacrosse sexual assault case asked the state attorney general on Friday to take over the troubled prosecution, saying he faced a conflict of interest because of ethics charges filed against him by the state bar, officials involved in the case said….

Friday’s action marked a stinging professional defeat for Mr. Nifong, who has faced accusations of incompetence, prosecutorial misconduct and ethical violations for his handling of the case. In his letter to Mr. Cooper, Mr. Nifong said the accusations of ethical wrongdoing, which were brought last month by the state bar, presented him with a conflict of interest between defending his own conduct and prosecuting this case.

“He feels very disappointed that he can’t go on for her,” said David B. Freedman, Mr. Nifong’s lawyer in the ethics case. “Mike at this point, as a result of the bar complaint, doesn’t want to be a distraction to the case or take away from the prosecution of the case, which the witness still feels very strongly about.”

According to friends, Mr. Nifong’s resolve had begun to falter even before the ethics charges were brought against him.

At a court hearing on Dec. 15, a DNA laboratory director admitted that he and Mr. Nifong had deliberately withheld exculpatory information from a report. Mr. Nifong prided himself on integrity, having been a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, yet the laboratory director’s testimony and his acknowledgment of the error undercut his reputation.

Things only worsened from there.

Some fellow district attorneys advised Mr. Nifong privately in Raleigh on Dec. 19 to take himself off the case. Mr. Nifong felt stunned and subdued, friends say, yet still could not bring himself to exit. In an interview with The New York Times two days later, he described such a step as tantamount to letting defendants handpick their own prosecutors.

But then the North Carolina State Bar filed an ethics complaint on Dec. 28, taking him to task for his early public comments about the case. It was an unprecedented rebuke for a prosecutor in the middle of a legal brawl. The next day, the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys issued a news release asking him to recuse himself immediately.

Mr. Nifong’s friends told him he had two choices: dismiss the case or ask the attorney general to take it over. It was a bitter decision, friends said. His reputation hung in the balance. Mr. Nifong decided he had to do something he had left to his investigators over the 10 months since the alleged assault: talk about it directly with the woman he called “my victim.”

The defendants, who are white, were initially portrayed as boys gone wild. But in time, with the fraying of the evidence and careful maneuvering by their legal team, they emerged in news accounts as victims of a kind of reverse discrimination, promising young men whose lives were being destroyed by concocted accusations.

The accuser, who is black, was at first embraced at candlelight vigils. Investigators depicted her as the victim of a brutal assault. But her shifting and inconsistent accounts of what happened, combined with the absence of incriminating DNA evidence, have resulted in her being branded a false accuser.

But no one was more fully transformed in this case than Mr. Nifong. Once an obscure but respected career prosecutor, he is now routinely portrayed as having recklessly and stubbornly pursued a weak case for political gain.

Mr. Nifong compounded his troubles with seemingly avoidable blunders, most in the earliest weeks, before anyone was indicted. He ordered a lineup that violated standard police procedures. He spoke misleadingly in public about evidence in the case and disparaged the Duke lacrosse team as “hooligans” whose “daddies” would “buy them big-time lawyers.” He refused to hear out defense lawyers who proffered photographs and phone records intended to prove their clients’ innocence. Most significantly, he mishandled the DNA test results by failing to turn them over to defense lawyers for seven months.

After the indictments, he was repeatedly outgunned and outmaneuvered in the courts and in the news media by some of the best defense lawyers in North Carolina.

Never was the mismatch clearer than on Dec. 15, when defense lawyers pounced on his handling of the DNA test results. In court that day, with family and friends of the defendants in the audience, Mr. Nifong seemed almost disengaged, slumping in his seat, asking few questions as the defense team delivered body blows to his case.

Even before the DNA hearing, dozens of people had filed complaints against Mr. Nifong with the state bar. Mr. Nifong initially responded by saying he welcomed a review of all the lawyers—once the case was over.

He misjudged the bar.

A special section of the bar’s ethics code applies to public comments by prosecutors—but not private lawyers—and the bar had opened an investigation on March 30, just three days after Mr. Nifong began his media blitz.

The investigation culminated in last month’s formal complaint, which accused Mr. Nifong of making improper, inflammatory and misleading comments about the case. Mr. Nifong is to appear before a bar disciplinary committee on May 11.

Tom Lunsford, executive director of the state bar, said the complaint started with a grievance filed by a private lawyer.

Was it a lawyer from the defense team? “Can’t say,” he replied.

Nevertheless, no one can remember the North Carolina bar ever filing a complaint against a prosecutor for prejudicial publicity, much less in the middle of a case….

As the public criticism of Mr. Nifong escalated, his fellow district attorneys began to hear rumblings that some state legislators were threatening to seek new oversight laws for all district attorneys. The DNA revelations on Dec. 15 only heightened their alarm.

On Dec. 19, several district attorneys met with Mr. Nifong and advised him to hand the case to a special prosecutor.

He had hoped they would stand together; instead they wanted him to pull out. Mr. Nifong was stunned.

Any hope he had of regaining their support probably ended three days later, on Dec. 22, when Mr. Nifong dropped rape charges against all three defendants, though he continued to press other sex offense charges. Mr. Nifong said he had acted after the woman told his investigator she could not be certain she had been penetrated by a penis. Although he did not say so at the time, the woman also changed several other major aspects of her story during that interview, including that just two, not three, lacrosse players had taken part in the attack. The third, she said, had only stood by.

Among his peers, the questions were obvious: Why had he not closely questioned his victim months earlier? How could he pursue a case with such divergent accounts from the key witness? Where was the proof?

The state bar filed its complaint on Dec. 28. Better than anyone, the district attorneys understood its rarity and potential political significance.

“That is what pushed us into action,” Mr. Keith said.

Two weeks later, Mr. Nifong asked the state attorney general to take over the case.

- end of initial entry -

Paul Nachmen notes the inevitable liberal language in the Times’ Nifong article which repeatedly tries to soften and relativize the brute facts of Nifong’s misconduct and the accuser’s lies by making it seem as though these things were mere impressions created by clever defense lawyers, rather than, very simply, the truth coming out. Such is the evil of the Times in particular and of liberalism in general. When liberals have no choice but to admit a non-liberal truth, especially the truth that liberals have been lying, they will do so, but with dishonest language thrown in that suggests, without actually saying so, that the non-liberal truth now being admitted is merely spin generated by evil, non-liberal forces, in this case the defense attorneys. These tactics enable the Times’ liberal readers to avoid facing head-on the simple truth about this case, which is that it was a liberal fraud from the start.

Here are excerpts from the article with Mr. Nachman’s comments bolded and bracketed:

The defendants, who are white, were initially portrayed as boys gone wild. But in time, with the fraying of the evidence and careful maneuvering by their legal team, they emerged in news accounts as victims of a kind of reverse discrimination, promising young men whose lives were being destroyed by concocted accusations. [So it’s not the result of the truth, but of careful maneuvering by defense lawyers?! A kind of reverse discrimination?!?!]

The accuser, who is black, was at first embraced at candlelight vigils. Investigators depicted her as the victim of a brutal assault. But her shifting and inconsistent accounts of what happened, combined with the absence of incriminating DNA evidence, have resulted in her being branded a false accuser. [She gives conflicting accounts, so she’s being branded.]

But no one was more fully transformed in this case than Mr. Nifong. Once an obscure but respected career prosecutor, he is now routinely portrayed as having recklessly and stubbornly pursued a weak case for political gain.

Mr. Nifong compounded his troubles with seemingly avoidable blunders, most in the earliest weeks, before anyone was indicted. He ordered a lineup that violated standard police procedures. He spoke misleadingly in public about evidence in the case and disparaged the Duke lacrosse team as “hooligans” whose “daddies” would “buy them big-time lawyers.”

He refused to hear out defense lawyers who proffered photographs and phone records intended to prove their clients’ innocence. Most significantly, he mishandled the DNA test results by failing to turn them over to defense lawyers for seven months.

After the indictments, he was repeatedly outgunned and outmaneuvered in the courts and in the news media by some of the best defense lawyers in North Carolina. [So what happened was that he was outgunned and outmaneuvered, not that he was revealed as an obvious sleazeball. Again, that’s tarring the defense lawyers.]

Shrewsbury writes:

“Atrocity in Knoxville” is a commendably tough-minded and intrepid post.

I had not known of this crime, and in fact have not looked at the article to which you link because I don’t want to have to know the specifics, but was already writing you in utter disgust on the matter of the Duke lacrosse “rape” trial and the response to it: the candlelight vigils against the young white men, the manifesto by 88 academics and so forth, specifically the grotesquerie of all this occurring smack in the midst of the Balkans- or Central African-like campaign of ethnic rape and murder by blacks against whites in the USA, that goes on year after year without anyone even being allowed to notice it or take precautions against it. Fifteen thousand young white women are savaged by blacks every year, and what do we get—a show trial of young white men charged with raping a black woman, without a shred of evidence other than the continually-shifting blitherings of a drug-addled stripper.

This is some bizarre, twisted social pathology all right. And precisely because we live in the midst of such severe pathology, even glancingly to advert to it is of course to be banished forever from polite society. Years ago, at the beginning of the Blog Age, in some context or other I attempted to raise this issue with the Great Instapundit Vacuum, and he emails back, uncharacteristically but apparently in a panic, “Don’t give me that crap.” You think we’ll be reading a column on this topic by Mark Steyn or Jonah Goldberg any time soon? No. (For one thing, even if one of them summoned up the thumos from somewhere, his editor would reject the piece, and probably cancel his contract.) Do you think we’ll be seeing candelight vigils held by feminist groups for the 15,000 white women raped annually by blacks? No? How about at least the 41 raped yesterday? That’s a more manageable number, isn’t it? No again? Does it bother anybody that a very sizable percentage of those young women fell victim precisely because they had been trained all their lives never to think of a black man as a possible criminal? No, yet again? How peculiar.

Well, we’ll know that society is finally trending back towards some semblance of sanity when we can at least mention this without instantly finding ourselves surrounded by screeching hysteria.

N. writes:

If Nifong actually testified under oath that he had not withheld any exculpatory evidence in 2006 while ordering lab techs to do just that, he committed perjury. He should be indicted, and tried. If convicted, he should go to prison.

Will any of this happen? I am not optimistic.

Michael K. writes:

My point in an earlier e-mail was not that Nifong “had no choice” and wasn’t “responsible for his actions”—Nifong is a craven and odious figure who should be disbarred, denied his pension, sued by his victims, and worse—but that his actions are inconceivable apart from the influence of blacks and their white apologists and sycophants.

Would this insanity still be going on if the accuser were white, all other details being identical? Of course not. Nifong would have either dropped all charges months ago or he would not have charged anyone with anything in the first place, no matter how shrill the howls of feminists. And if the accused had been black, no one would have even been arrested, so preposterous are the charges, and they have been so from the beginning.

Nifong is obviously more to blame for this outrage than any other single individual. But it’s absurd to argue that Nifong by himself is more culpable than everyone else put together: the black drug addict and criminal whose lies started everything; three judges who ruled in favor of Nifong and enabled his unethical and criminal actions; a grand jury which had the legal power to end this madness long ago; the Duke administration, faculty, and student body; the governor, the state legislature, the legal establishment, the media, etc., and, of course, BLACKS. Read Nicholas Stix’s long article at Vdare.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 13, 2007 10:39 AM | Send