How else could you explain managing to pick the three richest guys on the team?
Were they the three richest? I know they were rich and one was the richest. I wish the full transcript of her IDing were online. I just got the sense that when she made the final IDs (she had several sessions) she knew who she wanted.
Which was actually a very dumb move on her and her "peoples" part, and probably reflected them looking ahead to a civil trial and a huge payoff there. However, by picking the rich kids, they picked the ones who could best lawyer up and shred the criminal "case" right in front of the DBM. If they'd picked the poor kids on the team, they'd have been stuck with lesser legal talent, if not public defenders, and those kids might well be having to cop pleas.
OTOH, Nifong's abuses of power were so blatant and extreme that it's possible that even a public defender in his first year out of law school could have gotten these players cleared.