Nifong faces real evidence this time

NY Times:

Two months after the North Carolina attorney general dismissed sexual assault charges against three former Duke University lacrosse players, the prosecutor who brought the case found himself in a crowded courtroom Tuesday, facing charges that could lead to his own disbarment.

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The ethics charges were filed by the North Carolina State Bar, a state agency, asserting that Mr. Nifong hid and lied about DNA evidence and that his pretrial comments inflamed the community and prejudiced the defendants.

While the ethics charges are limited to certain areas, the witness list shows it will be putting the whole case on trial, at least to try to show Mr. Nifong knew some of his public comments were false. For instance, he repeatedly said he was certain a rape had occurred.

Benjamin W. Himan, the Durham detective who was lead investigator on the case, said in testimony for the ethics prosecutors on Tuesday that Mr. Nifong had acknowledged to him that the case was weak and relied on the word of a woman hired to strip at a lacrosse team party.

Mr. Himan said he had responded with disbelief when he learned that after a month of inconclusive investigation, Mr. Nifong planned to indict two students. “With what?” Mr. Himan said he responded. At that point, he said, the police did not even know whether one suspect had been at the lacrosse team party. (It turned out he was there but left before any rape could have possibly happened.)

Mr. Himan also said he was “shocked” and “upset” that an investigator for the district attorney later interviewed the accuser by himself, not inviting him as the police investigator. When he read the results of that interview, Mr. Himan said, “It didn’t make any sense to what she had previously told us.”

Joseph B. Cheshire, a defense lawyer involved with the case, said in an interview later that Mr. Himan’s testimony was “chilling” and showed the potentially unchecked power of the state to destroy peoples’ lives even if the evidence did not exist.

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In coming weeks, Mr. Nifong is also facing two separate reviews by Superior Court judges, one on whether to remove him as district attorney, the other on whether he lied in court describing DNA evidence.

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Victoria Peterson, a black activist from Durham, was ejected from the courtroom and courthouse Tuesday after she accosted one mother during the lunch break and said people still thought her son did something wrong and should have stood trial.

Is Peterson trying for the Al Sharpton roll in this case? Her offensive, racial motivated attack on one of the mothers of the wrongly accused players goes beyond bad taste. She is exactly the kind of person that Nifong was pandering to with his wildly inaccurate charges against the Lacrosse players. The police officer's testimony is also chilling. It certainly paints the District Attorney and his staff as interested in something besides the facts in the case.