Ethics complaint added to Nifong charges in bar case

AP/MSNBC:

The state bar has added ethics charges to a complaint filed against the prosecutor who brought sexual assault charges against three Duke lacrosse players, accusing him of withholding DNA evidence and misleading the court.

The new charges by the North Carolina State Bar against Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong were announced Wednesday and could lead to his removal from the state bar, according to a copy of the updated complaint.

Nifong’s office arranged for a private lab to conduct DNA testing as part of the investigation into allegations three men raped a 28-year-old woman hired to perform as a stripper at a party thrown by the lacrosse team last March.

Those tests uncovered genetic material from several men on the woman’s underwear and body, but none from any lacrosse player. The bar complaint alleges those results weren’t released to defense lawyers in a timely fashion and that Nifong repeatedly said in court he had turned over all evidence that would potentially benefit the defense.

Nifong’s actions constitute a “systematic abuse of prosecutorial discretion ... prejudicial to the administration of justice,” the complaint read.

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At a hearing Dec. 15, the director of the DNA Security Inc. testified that he and Nifong agreed to include only DNA matches — and not the results finding no matches between the accuser and the tested players — in the report on his testing results. During the hearing, Nifong said he wasn’t aware the test results were excluded from the report.

“The first I heard of this particular situation was when I was served with these reports — this motion on Wednesday of this week,” Nifong said, according to the bar complaint.

Outside of court, the bar complaint said, Nifong gave a different version of events to a reporter. “We ... were trying to avoid dragging any names through the mud,” Nifong said.

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While it is possible Nifong can rationalize the two statements, it will take a lot of explaining. His statements to the court also appear to be inconsistent with the statements of the DNA expert on why the material evidence was withheld from the defendants. The charge that Nifong engaged in a “systematic abuse of prosecutorial discretion ... prejudicial to the administration of justice,” seems consistent with the evidence that is now on the public record. What he has to say about those charges will have to wait for his own trial which will be around May or June of this year.