Nifong must go! Now!

This afternoon I asked retired NC journalist Bob Wilson if he'd be willing to write "an editorial for tomorrow's paper." He agreed. Here it is.
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Nifong must go! Now!

For a hoax with more distortion than a house of mirrors, the Duke lacrosse case probably stands without equal in modern legal history.

Not since the Scottsboro Boys frame-up in the early 1930s has prosecutorial misconduct been so brazenly evident as it is in District Attorney Mike Nifong's attempt to convict three Duke University students, first of rape, and when those charges evaporated, of sexual assault and kidnapping.

Now the case is in the hands of the North Carolina attorney general's office, and if justice lives in this state, there it will die.

But Nifong's record of malfeasance will not die. On Tuesday, more evidence pointing to his misconduct surfaced in a defense motion stating that the players' lawyers still hadn't received results of 11 of 22 DNA samples taken almost a year ago from the false accuser, Crystal Gail Mangum.

This latest news comes just weeks after the NC State Bar’s Ethics Committee accused Nifong of teaming with Brian Meehan, director of DNA Security in Burlington, to withhold exculpatory DNA evidence from the defense.

Now we learn there’s even more to the story of Nifong's failure to provide critical evidence, as he was required to by state law.

It is virtually certain that more exculpatory evidence lies in those 11 DNA tests. There's every reason to believe that's true because not one chromosome has ever linked the accused Duke players - David Evans, Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty – or any other Duke lacrosse player to DNA found in or on the false accuser's body.

What did show up during Meehan’s testing was DNA from a multitude of other men.

Why didn't Nifong give the results of those 11 tests to the defense? He knows. We know he knows: exculpability.

Nifong's recusal shouldn't save his hide from this latest revelation of hide and seek. His credibility as a prosecutor is in tatters. His willful, perhaps criminal, abuse of the law has brought ridicule upon Durham County, indeed all of North Carolina. As Joseph Welch famously asked Sen. Joe McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

If Mike Nifong has any decency left, he will write his resignation, turn out the lights in his office and walk into the twilight.

Nifong must go! Now!