Posted on 05/01/2006 7:51:52 AM PDT by don'tbedenied
Accused Duke lacrosse player Reade Seligmann's attorneys want Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong thrown off the case.
Today, they filed a legal motion specifically asking for it.
"DA Mike Nifong neglected his duty as a prosecutor to seek the truth and a fair prosecution," the defense's motion reads.
The motions were filed just 24 hours before Nifong's Tuesday election in which he's fighting to keep his seat. Nifong is being challenged by former prosecutor Freda Black and private lawyer Keith Bishop
That's a very good possibility.
But the guys said Roberts arrived around 25 minutes before Mangum. If that's true then, in order for Roberts to be there 25 minutes before Mangum, and then for them to leave for 20-25 minutes and still be back at 11:50, that would mean Roberts arrived at 11:05 - 11:10. Would she really show up almost an hour early for a gig and sit in her car on a lonely street by herself?
I, too, take Bissey's initial account as accurate as to the time, but I think the target time was 11:30 and Roberts was on time or a couple minutes early.
The guys knew Roberts was there and waiting. If it's true the women didn't know each other before, surely their pimps gave them each other's numbers so they could coordinate, so I still think there must be cell phone records showing roughly when Mangum dropped her landing gear at the Buchanan house.
The defendants have a right to a speedy trial. Unless they waive that, this case is coming to trial a whole lot sooner than next spring.
I think you're right on target. The pimps running these operations do not keep records in the classical sense and, even if they did, they're going to manufacture whatever is most expedient to their own purposes, which would probably be shaking Mangum down for a cut of any cash she might get in a lawsuit. So they're going to say whatever best feathers their own nests, just like Roberts made clear as to herself.
You make good points, but Nifong is trying to move the timeline back to 11:30pm. I think this helps him on a number of fronts. However, he's going to have to overcome the inital on-camera detailed statement of Bissey.
One thing he'll try to do is to spin the "evidence" from the defense against them. He'll contend that Reade Seligmann was making 6 phone calls in a flurry to leave the location of the crime. One talking head (and sometimes they get leaks) has already said that Seligmann was desperate to leave the location and he kept reciepts in order to provide an alibi.
Some hurdles for the prosecution... early on with Nifong's Media tour he, along with other people involved in the investigation, said the woman was brutally attacked. It was "appalling" he said. He also said she was kicked, beaten, sodomized, and gang-raped. He portrayed it as the woman was strangled and she fought back hard barely escaping the premises with her life. If he moves the timeline up to 11:30 and moves the rape to an earlier time, then Crystal stayed around for quite some time after this most brutal, appalling attack. He's going to try to "argue" that this woman after being the subject of savage attack and beating, stayed for 40 minutes and stopped to smile in a picture when she was departing.
I know he wants to, for his puproses, make her drugged and totally out of it, however, he's going to have to balance that. How can she be so out of it that she can't tell Kim, or yell to get Kim's attention, or use a phone to call 911, yet she can with 100% accuracy identify her attackers and describe the event in great detail.
So you can see how, Wendy Murphy, Nancy Grace, Jim Hammer, Ted Williams, Susan Filan, and Nifong himself are misleading the public when they make it seem like a simple shift in the timeling makes everything fall into place.
FILAN: And also, Dan, in that photograph you can see the scratches and the blood on her legs and the defense is saying that she fell on the back porch and she was injured as she was getting back into the car.
GOOD Catch!
If an accusation has been previously lodged against a defendent, it can and will be brought up in any future cases brought against the defendant.
I do not like rape shield laws. GRRR.
mark
To be fair, Nifong formerly prosecuted high-profile cases like this but hasn't done so since 1994. This was his ticket to upward mobility and he's successfully used it. If he can drag it out and stay in the spotlight, that's all that matters to him.
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Are you sure he has tried cases with this kind of media attention before, because that is what I meant by 'high profile.'
I know he has tried rape and murder cases in the past.
No chance of this case remaining in Durham.
Regarding the timeline, I think the various possibilities that can be argued will become much reduced once the defense has the call log for the AV's cellphone for that evening.
In one of the earliest interviews given by the AV's father, he said the AV had called him to ask for directions to Buchanan and that she told him "nevermind" when they pulled up to the house.
I think it is highly likely such a phone call did take place, because IMO it is not the kind of thing the father would have made up out of whole cloth, as, taking into account the time and the manner in which he related it, it would seem to me to be a fact that in the mind of the father probably was not something that he would think either helps or hurts the AV's story.
So once the defense subpoenas the cellphone records of the AV and identifies the time of the call to the father, then the time of AV's arrival at the house will, I expect, become somewhat fixed and any timeline speculations by the prosecution will have to work around this fact.
Wouldn't the police detectives and Nifong already have in hand the cellphone log of the AV some time ago? Maybe not, if there was not a phone call that in their view was directly corroborative of the AV's story. If the AV claimed, for example, that she tried to dial 911 as she was being raped, then yes, I would expect the police detectives and Nifong to have already gotten the call log. Otherwise, they may not have sought this information, as it is clear the police and Nifong have basically taken the AV's story at face value and have not sought to collect evidence which might conflict with that.
The phone call to the father will fix the time she arrived at the house but not the time she entered the house.
The neighbor said saw the two girls 'arrive' together. Maybe what he saw was them getting out of the car together after they had sat there for a while before going into the house.
Yes of course, that is quite possible, I would probably say even likely, and that would account (roughly) for what Bissey says he saw.
However, if the call to the father ended at, say, 11:52 as opposed to, say, 11:27, then that will prove quite problematic to any prosecution theory that tries to push the timeline farther back in time.
The father has repeatedly changed his stories to match the emerging defense evidence. When he said in a tv interview his daughter had called for directions and sounded fine, it was just after the defense announced they had photos showing the accuser arrived at the party "seriously imipaired". He told the phone call story to refute the idea she arrived drunk. I don't believe anything he says.
The fathers job is to muddy the waters and taint the jury pool.
We shall see.
I think you are overestimating the father's intelligence, in that it would occur to him to slip into the course of an interview a completely fabricated phone call for the sole purpose of refuting a defense theory, and in fact no phone call at all occurred.
IMO it is more likely that such a phone call did occur, and if the father is lying about something, it is whether the AV sounded intoxicated during the conversation.
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