Duke lacrosse: Is Nifong America's worst DA?

At SignonSanDiego.com blogger Chris Reed has a post much like one I’ve been working on this morning. So I’m just going to paste most of it here.

As an exchange, I’ll retrieve a Nifong post I did some weeks ago after Nifong revoked misdemeanor agreements his office had reached with Duke lacrosse players for priors because they attended the party. That same week Nifong agreed to a bail reduction for Kim, the second “dancer,” after she became a “cooperative witness.

One difference with Chris: I’d have put a question mark after the title because, while Nifong’s terrible and should be removed from office, I don’t know if he’s the worst.
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"America's worst district attorney"

It's Durham County, N.C., DA Mike Nifong, as every new revelation in the Duke lacrosse case makes clear. Ruth Marcus, a Washington Post pundit who was certain the three accused men were guilty in the case's early days, now finds it simply incredible that Nifong is pursuing the prosecution:

[The accuser] gave six different accounts of what happened the night of the incident: She did not originally mention rape to the police when they found her in a car outside a grocery store; raised the rape allegation after being taken to a substance abuse facility; later said that "no one forced her to have sex"; and gave accounts of the alleged incident that differed in various ways, including the number of attackers and the type of assault.

This is what the public has learned over the months as more official evidence has been released. Nifong has known it all along. And yet he refused to accept the evidence that one of the accused's lawyers provided that made plain the dancer was lying:

Reade Seligmann's lawyer has presented evidence that during the post-midnight time frame in which the attack allegedly occurred, Seligmann called his girlfriend six times and another person twice (12:05 to 12:14); was picked up by a cab (12:19); used an ATM (12:24) and returned to his dorm (12:45). The lawyer tried to present this evidence to the prosecutor before the indictment but was rebuffed.

This is despicable. Nifong is a disgrace.

There's an odd dynamic to this case. The fact that the accuser is a minority and the accused are wealthy jocks at a snooty private school seems to have lessened the media fury that otherwise might be expected over a prosecutor ruining three students' lives to win re-election. […]
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Post URLs:

http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/003978.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/27/AR2006062701545.html