Not the only guilty one
Today’s news on an old matter, via AP:
Disgraced former prosecutor Mike Nifong pleaded not guilty Thursday to criminal contempt charges stemming from his failure to turn over complete DNA testing results during the now-discredited Duke lacrosse rape case. If found in contempt, Nifong could face up to 30 days in jail and a fine of up to $500…Nifong’s attorney, Jim Glover, told Superior Court Judge W. Osmond Smith III during the hearing Thursday that it wasn’t about whether the statements were true or false but “were they willfully and intentionally false and were they also part of an effort…to hide potentially exculpatory evidence.”
We now recall the words of Professor KC Johnson, who covered the contempt hearing yesterday, from his interview last year in Front Page Magazine:
Nifong’s conduct in this case is the most unethical of any district attorney I have ever seen; I cannot recall a case in the last 15-20 years in which this many procedural violations were known at this stage of the process.
This is a man who violated multiple provisions of the North Carolina Rules of Professional Conduct simply to get a case. His most damaging violation was ordering the Durham Police not to follow their own procedures in the line-up that resulted in the identification of the three players charged. The procedures required five filler photos per every suspect; Nifong told police to confine the line-up to suspects—members of the lacrosse team.
The media, of course, were not initially quiet: led by the New York Times, early coverage all but had the players tried and convicted. The case fit into a comfortable narrative for a liberal media elite of out-of-control wealthy white athletes violating a poor African-American woman. As the case has collapsed, most media—with the crucial exception of the Raleigh News & Observer and CBS’s 60 Minutes—abandoned interest in the affair, rather than revisiting their early flawed reporting. The New York Times, meanwhile, published a widely ridiculed August article that read more like a public relations piece for Nifong than a piece of journalism. The article contained four out-and-out errors of fact, all of which tilted the story in favor of the prosecution, and all of which the Times refused to correct…
In the first week of the investigation (March 16-23), Duke administrators actively assisted the state. Without informing President Richard Brodhead, administrators demanded from the captains a candid account of the evening’s events, allegedly citing a non-existent “student-faculty” privilege to encourage the captains to disclose any criminal activity. Multiple sources told me that Coach Mike Pressler, apparently acting on orders from above, instructed the other players not to tell their parents about the police inquiry. Meanwhile, Dean Sue Wasiolek arranged for a local lawyer, Wes Covington, to act as a “facilitator” in arranging for a group meeting with police.
After Nifong began his publicity barrage on March 27, faculty leftists became involved. Houston Baker, a professor of English and Afro-American Studies, issued a public letter denouncing the “abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed amongst us” and demanding the “immediate dismissals” of “the team itself and its players.” Then, on April 6, 88 members of Duke’s arts and sciences faculty signed a public statement saying “thank you” to campus demonstrators who had distributed a “wanted” poster of the lacrosse players and publicly branded the players “rapists.”
Johnson’s book is called Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case. Nifong would appear to be getting his due. What about the others?