How a career criminal will possibly free the Duke men — but what of Nifong?
Here is the case that may lead to the exoneration of the Duke Lacrosse players, and, hopefully, the long incarceration of Mike Nifong for any number of crimes, reported via an anti-death penalty group:
In 1998, Alan Gell was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of Allen Ray Jenkins in Aulander, North Carolina. The sole evidence linking him to the crime was the testimony of two teenage girls who had participated in Jenkins’ murder. No physical evidence connected Gell to the crime. The girls were allowed to plea bargain to lesser charges in exchange for their testimony….
Gell spent nearly three years in jail awaiting his trial. The Attorney General’s office, who prosecuted the case, failed to turn over any of the 17 witness statements to Gell’s defense attorneys prior to his trial. Nor did they disclose a secret tape recording of Gell’s codefendants describing their efforts to make up a story to tell the police….Gell was convicted and sentenced to death…
Gell’s conviction was overturned, and he was retried and acquitted in February 2004, after attorneys found the evidence that had been withheld prior to Gell’s first trial. Gell’s incarceration and the threat of the death penalty did him no good, by the way. He is apparently still a career criminal.
However, the overturning of Gell’s conviction led to North Carolina’s passing of an Open File Discovery law, though not to a criminal probe of prosecutorial misconduct in that case. The Dicovery law was signed by Governor Mike Easley later in 2004. Easley had been Attorney General at the time of Gell’s original conviction, so the prosecution team in that first trial served under him. AP:
North Carolina Governor Mike Easley signed a bill into law that requires prosecutors to share their files in all felony cases. The bill was approved in the wake of allegations that prosecutors withheld evidence in the capital murder trial of Alan Gell, who was later exonerated and freed from death row. The new open discovery statute requires district attorneys to open their investigative files in felony cases to defense lawyers who request such access prior to trial. The law requires DAs to provide such things as police investigator notes, defendant and witness statements, test results and a list of probable witnesses for the trial. In return, defense attorneys will have to provide the state with witness lists and details about the grounds on which they plan to defend their client. Dick Taylor of the North Carolina Academy of Trial Lawyers said the law should “result in less surprise, less ambush and more fair trials.” He went on to note, “I think it’s one of the most significant developments in our criminal procedure for a number of years.”
The law was specific in calling for the turning over of “test results,” according to the AP story. Nifong did not do so in the Duke case, rather the opposite in fact. The evidence of collusion between the DNA lab and Mike Nifong to hide exculpatory evidence appears overwhelming in the Duke case (see here, here, here and here, for example).
So the question becomes, why did Mike Nifong take the risk of conspiring with his evidence vendor to conceal facts that make his prosecution a farce — in effect, flagrantly mocking North Carolina’s Open File Discovery law. The answer is that the prosecution bar in North Carolina watches out for its own, and in previous cases of the grossest abuses by proesecutors, there have been no significant penalties assessed. By historical standards, Nifong has nothing to fear.
The issue in the Duke case is no longer the obviously innocent lacrosse players. Nor is the issue bringing to justice the obviously disturbed and pathetic false accuser, Crystal Gail Mangum. The issue is whether Michael B. Nifong will be given justice. The indifference of the authorities of North Carolina to past transgressions points to the answer being no, as does the forgetfulness of the MSM when the story no longer serves their chosen narrative. We, on the other hand, would like to see Mr. Nifong be given a fair and speedy trial for his multiple violations of the civil rights of the Duke men — precisely the kind of justice he passionately sought to deny them.