Posted on 10/30/2006 3:04:46 AM PST by abb
Comment from: John [Visitor] ·
http://www.johnincarolina.com
10/31/06 at 15:18
Dear Melanie,
You ask commenter “"El jefe:" -- "why not identify yourself?"
I wonder if El jefe and others who comment anonymously here are concerned you'll treat them the way you've treated the Duke lacrosse players.
You published the "vigilante poster" knowing it would endanger the players. They'd done you no harm and made no criticisms of The N&O.
LMAO
It is interesting that Sill calls for people to use their real names. She does not seem to understand the ethic of the internet.
In some ways it makes sense as she is a leftist. She is naturally unhappy since when I use my signon, JLS, she can not tell if I am black or white, rich or poor, educated or not etc. She does not know whether she should be for or against me. She has to deal with my ideas. Ideas are the great enemy of the left.
My understanding is that after law school when he could not get a job at a law firm, he went to work in the SOcial Welfare office. Please let me know if my recollection is faulty - and unlike John Kerry - I will be glad to issue a retraction and apology.
Duke coming up on Greta.
Duke coming up on Greta.
Ted still wants a trial
Greta bringing up no interview
Ted saying not unusual "that a prosecutor don't speak...."
(His grammar,not mine.)
Bernie said something about AV not having a leg to stand on. Didn't hear the rest,all I could do is ROTFL thinking "But she has 2 legs to dance on."
They have rich daddies. At least that's what I heard somewhere.
And John Kerry is as dumb as a box of rocks--you're nothing like John Kerry!
Man gets 80-year term in slayings [Nifong rape/murder case from 1995] {spooky Halloween reading)
Author: JALEH HAGIGH; The News & Observer, April 1, 1995,
DURHAM -- A Durham man was sentenced to 80 years in prison Friday after a jury convicted him of strangling a woman and her teenage daughter in 1991 and then torching their Few Gardens apartment to hide evidence of the crime.
"I didn't do it," sobbed Darryl Anthony Howard after the jury found him guilty of two counts of second-degree murder and one count of first-degree arson.
The jury of seven women and five men deliberated less than two hours Friday before returning the verdict. Howard, dressed in a striped rugby shirt and jeans, buried his head in his hands when the decision was announced.
"I didn't kill those girls, I can't believe it," he said, leaning forward and pounding the defense table with his fist.
Prosecutor Mike Nifong argued that on Nov. 27, 1991, Howard strangled Doris Washington, 29, and her daughter, Nishonda, 13, stripped them and left them lying on a bed. Howard also struck Doris Washington so hard in the abdomen, that he lacerated her liver, testimony showed.
Then Howard started a fire in a closet to hide evidence of the killings, Nifong said.
Testimony during the weeklong trial showed that Doris Washington sold crack out of her apartment in the public housing complex and was killed over a drug debt.
One witness testified that on the day before the murders, she saw Howard threaten to kill Washington if she didn't pay her debt. Three witnesses said they saw Howard coming out of Washington's apartment shortly before the fire started that night.
The defense argued that there was no physical evidence linking Howard to the killings and that the state's witnesses weren't credible because they had criminal records and gave conflicting testimony.
Defense lawyer Woody Vann argued that Nishonda Washington was sexually assaulted and that whoever committed the assault killed the women. DNA tests showed that Howard didn't commit the sexual assault.*
The maximum sentence for each murder charge is life in prison with a presumptive or usual sentence of 15 years.
In closing arguments earlier in the day, Nifong said the state's witnesses who put Howard at the scene feared him, yet told the truth anyway.
"Nobody wants to cross this defendant because they're scared, and why shouldn't they be?" Nifong said. "They're scared because they know he's a killer."
Earlier in the day, Superior Court Judge James Spencer was forced to dismiss a female juror after she told him she couldn't render an impartial verdict.
The woman, a bus driver for the school system, said she felt uncomfortable after some of her co-workers told her Friday morning that she had "better come back with a not guilty verdict" in the case.
She said that they didn't know for sure if she was a juror in the Howard case but that she felt pressured nonetheless. The judge had dismissed another juror Thursday after he was seen talking with Howard's relatives. Both jurors were replaced by alternates.
* A Nifong oldie but goodie. Who to believe. Woody and Mike go way back. DNA didn't help Howard here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/us/01duke.html?_r=2&ref=us&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Duff on the DA race in Durham.
“He’s a good person, he’s a good lawyer, but he’s in a situation he has never been in before,” said Ronald L. Stephens, a local judge who was district attorney before Mr. Nifong.
Well, well, well....
Rape conviction is upheld
BY JOHN STEVENSON : The Herald-Sun, Oct 31, 2006 : 7:07 pm ET
DURHAM -- Addressing a witness-credibility issue that echoes the Duke lacrosse rape case, the state Court of Appeals has upheld rape and sex-offense convictions against Anthony Michele Lofton of Durham.
Among other things, Lofton's unsuccessful appeal contended that a trial judge should have dismissed the charges because -- as in the Duke case -- the accuser allegedly gave inconsistent accounts of what happened.
A defense attorney said the various accounts were "all over the place" and could not be reconciled.
"Her story is not believable," an appellate brief said of Lofton's victim. "And then, which story?"
But the appeals court saw things differently.
It wrote in a unanimous opinion that, "Contradictions and discrepancies in the testimony or evidence are for the jury to resolve and cannot warrant dismissal."
Durham lawyer Woody Vann, who represented Lofton, said Tuesday he agreed with that conclusion.
"An accuser can give five different stories, but if all of them indicate she was raped, it's got to go to a jury," said Vann.
Reasonable doubt?
Still, a large number of inconsistencies easily could create reasonable doubt and sway jurors toward acquittal in any given case, Vann added.
"Contradictions are very relevant, amazingly relevant, as they apply to a jury's evaluation of the evidence," he said.
But Assistant District Attorney Tracey Cline, who prosecuted Lofton, said Tuesday that inconsistencies in a victim's story should come as no surprise to anyone.
"When you see criminal activity, whether as a victim or a witness, you are shaken up and traumatized," Cline said. "Little inconsistencies are to be expected. The question is, do they matter? If there are no inconsistencies and every detail is always the same down to the last iota, you begin to think the person's story was rehearsed."
The victim testified that Lofton entered her bedroom, lay down beside her, began massaging her shoulders and restrained her when she tried to leave. She said he then engaged in various forms of sexual activity with her.
Subsequent tests showed that semen on the victim's shirt conclusively matched Lofton's DNA, and that semen stains on her panties and genital area might have come from him.
Lofton, 37 at the time of the crimes, was sentenced to between six and nine years in prison after being convicted in Durham County Superior Court last year of second-degree rape, second-degree sexual offense, sexual offense by one in a parental role and incest.
As in the Lofton case, defense lawyers have made much of apparent inconsistencies and contradictions by the accuser in the Duke lacrosse case, in which three players are charged with raping and sodomizing an exotic dancer during an off-campus lacrosse party at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. in mid-March.
"She's made so many different statements that anything she says is exculpatory, simply because it's inconsistent with everything else she said," defense lawyer Joe Cheshire said recently of the accuser.
http://www.heraldsun.com/durham/4-783667.html
* The Herald-Sun's Ashley desperately needs a trial to sell newspapers- latest audited figures show a 7.3% decline in circulation.
http://www.newsobserver.com/104/story/504664.html
Yep Stephens has some nerve after his sorry performance on the bench.
The New York Times
November 1, 2006
Duke Rape Case Shadows an Unusual Campaign
By DUFF WILSON
DURHAM, N.C., Oct. 31 — The Democratic candidate is the prosecutor who brought the rape case against three Duke University lacrosse players.
His opponent on the ballot is a county commissioner who filed as an independent but refuses to campaign and says that if elected, he will not serve.
The third candidate is a Republican lawyer who is mounting a write-in campaign and promising to review the rape case, but is being pressured by the prosecutor’s opponents to drop out in favor of the independent.
A week before Election Day, the race for Durham County district attorney is as odd a political campaign as anyone here can recall. The controversial lacrosse case looms over the incumbent, Michael B. Nifong. The opposition, under the banner of Anyone but Nifong, is fractured.
“The whole thing is very strange,” said Joseph H. Collie, a retired businessman and supporter of the write-in Republican, Steve Monks.
Mr. Nifong’s campaign director, Julie Linehan, remarked: “We have a saying here — O.I.D. Only in Durham.”
After all the accusations and commentary that the case has generated around the country, there is mostly silence at the heart of the campaign: little advertising, no debates and no platform by the leading opponent except that if he should win, the governor will pick somebody else. Still, to the extent there is any campaign at all, it is because of Mr. Nifong’s handling of the case against the three players, all white, accused of rape by a black woman hired to strip at a team party in March.
In a normal year in this heavily Democratic city, the Democrat would be a shoo-in. But this is not a normal year. Although Mr. Nifong by all appearances is the clear front-runner, a recent survey of 600 likely voters by WRAL-TV and The News & Observer of Raleigh found that 28 percent favored Lewis A. Cheek, the candidate who says he will not serve if elected. Forty-six percent favored Mr. Nifong, but 24 percent were undecided. (Mr. Monks got only 2 percent.)
An Oct. 5 fund-raising letter from the Cheek campaign, signed by a retired sheriff, Roland W. Leary, and the campaign manager, Beth Brewer, said, “We deserve honesty, integrity, good judgment and a sense of fair play.”
In an interview, Ms. Brewer was blunter, saying Mr. Nifong “twisted evidence he may or may not have to indict what I think are some pretty demonstrably innocent young men.”
Out-of-state money from Duke supporters has also entered the campaign. Parents of two unindicted lacrosse players donated $5,000 to establish a group called Duke Students for an Ethical Durham, aimed at registering Duke students to vote against Mr. Nifong. The group’s treasurer, Stefanie Anne Sparks, a paralegal in a law firm that has represented unindicted players, said the group had registered more than 1,000 new voters.
Mr. Nifong has been under attack for months by the defense and supporters of the lacrosse players for aggressively pursuing a case based almost entirely on the account of the accuser, which he acknowledges he has heard only from police reports and written statements, and not directly by speaking to her.
The flaws and gaps in the evidence have mounted. No DNA from the defendants was found on the dancer. At least one of the accused appears to have a strong alibi. A second woman hired to strip at the party has said she saw no evidence of an attack. And the array of photographs that led to the identification of the three defendants was not presented according to federal, state and local police guidelines for lineups.
The accusation against the players, by a student at predominantly black North Carolina Central University here, broke last March in the midst of a tough Democratic primary campaign for district attorney, and Mr. Nifong, who ultimately won that election, has been accused of seizing on the case to win black support. At the time, he asserted that he had “no doubt” a rape had occurred, and called the lacrosse players “a bunch of hooligans” whose “daddies could buy them expensive lawyers” whenever they got into trouble.
“I’m not going to allow Durham’s view in the minds of the world to be a bunch of lacrosse players at Duke raping a black girl from Durham,” he told a local television station.
In a recent interview, Mr. Nifong was defiant about pursuing the case in the face of defense attacks and questions about the strength of the evidence.
“They’ve come out really strong with the idea they would either scare me or the victim away,” he said. “That’s never worked for me, which they should know by now, and it didn’t work for her, either. And so here we are.”
Even if Mr. Nifong loses, it is unclear how the case will be affected. Mr. Cheek said that he tried twice this year to get Mr. Nifong to hand off the case to the state attorney general, and that he allowed the anti-Nifong campaign to put him up as a candidate when the district attorney refused. But because he has decided that he does not want to leave private practice, a victory by Mr. Cheek would mean that Gov. Michael F. Easley would have to pick a successor to Mr. Nifong. The governor, a Democrat, has not made his views on the case known publicly.
Mr. Monks, the Republican candidate, who is running on the slogan “It’s Your Choice. Not the Governor’s,” said that if elected he would review the evidence carefully to make his own determination, but that “this case might very well have to go to trial.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Nifong’s supporters are trying to cast him as an experienced prosecutor and a neophyte politician. He has been a prosecutor for 28 years and says he has handled about 300 felony cases, but he is engaged in his first political race, having been appointed acting district attorney in April 2005.
“He’s a good person, he’s a good lawyer, but he’s in a situation he has never been in before,” said Ronald L. Stephens, a local judge who was district attorney before Mr. Nifong.
Last month Mr. Nifong won the endorsement of the city’s most influential political group, the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People. His supporters are predicting that whatever controversy the case has generated will not determine the outcome at the polls.
“People who are upset about the lacrosse case, they will be vocal but I don’t think significant,” said Frank Hyman, a former city councilman and longtime political observer, who backs Mr. Nifong. “I think most people are going to recognize this needs to be settled in court and not in the press.”
Legal technicality doesn't mean they're fit
The Herald-Sun
October 31, 2006 5:53 pm
When Police Chief Steve Chalmers announced the firings of two police officers charged with assaulting a man during a brawl outside of a Raleigh bar in July, he fortunately didn't link their terminations to a conviction in a court of law. We say fortunate because the assault case was thrown out of court on a legal technicality Monday, which might have opened the door for Gary Lee and Scott Tanner to get their jobs back. And that would have been troubling given that a Durham Police Department internal investigation found the conduct of both men "embarrassing" and that Chalmers deemed them unfit to serve as police officers in the Bull City. On Monday, two Durham officers -- James Griffin and Richard Clayton -- corroborated the story of the victim, Rene Dennis Thomas, a former cook at the sports bar. Both officers said they saw Lee take a swing at the cook and Tanner kicking or trying to kick him in the head or face after he ducked Lee's punch. As it stands now, neither man's standing with the Durham Police Department improved as a result of District Judge Debra Sasser's decision to drop the charges against Lee and Tanner after Assistant District Attorney Matt Godwin fumbled the case by failing to establish that the scene of the incident -- Blinco's Sports Restaurant and Bar -- is located in Wake County. That hardly seems fair, but we suspect most first-year law students know that it's important to establish the location of a crime when prosecuting a case. And we also imagine there are more than a few people sitting in jail wondering why such a lucky break had to fall into the laps of two former police officers accused of assaulting a citizen. No doubt Lee and Tanner are grateful for their good fortune, and we hope they have learned something from this foul incident. Whether either man works as a law enforcement officer again will be decided by some police chief or sheriff in some other town. We think Chalmers was right when he declared both men unfit for Durham based on the Police Department's findings. Such conduct is simply unacceptable because it erodes the public's confidence in the department. Police officers simply must be held to higher standards than ordinary citizens.
URL for this article: http://www.heraldsun.com/opinion/hsedits/56-783584.html
http://www.newsobserver.com/100/story/505027.html
Nifong defends interview policy
The prosecutor in the Duke lacrosse rape case says he lets others interview the witnesses in cases
Nifong said in court he hadn't heard accuser's account.
Benjamin Niolet, Staff Writer
DURHAM - District Attorney Mike Nifong said Tuesday that the Duke lacrosse case is the first time he has been criticized for his policy of not interviewing witnesses.
"For 27 years, no one has thought it was odd that I had other people do the interviewing," Nifong said in an interview. "For people who have never prosecuted cases to suggest they just can't believe I would do that seems kind of self-serving."
Nifong said in court last week that he had never heard the accuser give her account of the March lacrosse team party where she said she was raped by three Duke lacrosse players. As weaknesses in the prosecutor's case have emerged, the woman's in-court testimony, presumably in which she will name the three defendants, has become a key part of Nifong's case.
But Nifong said hearing the woman tell her story is not the only way to determine whether she is credible. That determination comes from other, general conversations, he said.
"That's how you determine whether or not somebody's trustworthy, I think," Nifong said. "You weren't there when the crime took place, so you cannot know if the person is telling you the truth about the crime or not just based on the account."
After a flurry of media interviews early in the investigation, Nifong has stopped discussing the facts of the case with reporters. But in comments to The News & Observer on Tuesday and to The Associated Press on Monday, Nifong has said more to the media about how he is perceived than he has in months. The statements come a week before Nifong faces an election challenge.
Nifong said that he talked to the accuser Tuesday but that they did not discuss the facts of the case. He said that a prosecutor who hears what a witness has to say risks being called to the witness stand if any inconsistent statements arise.
Durham police investigators have spoken with the woman about the assaults she says happened at a lacrosse team party in March. Nifong has read their reports of her account.
When asked for a response to Nifong's comments, lawyer Joseph B. Cheshire V, an attorney for defendant Dave Evans, said the lacrosse case is different from every other case Nifong has handled. Cheshire said it differs because of Nifong's prominent role in the investigation and his numerous statements to the news media in which he was adamant that a rape occurred, a position Nifong maintains. Attorneys for all three lacrosse players say the woman's story is a lie and no rape or assault happened at the party.
"People need to understand he is the lead investigator and prosecutor, which makes it different than his cases in 27 years. If you're an investigator, it is your duty to talk to witnesses," Cheshire said.
Pressure stepped up
In March the woman, an escort service dancer hired for the off-campus team party, told police she was raped. Nifong ultimately obtained indictments against Evans, 23 of Bethesda, Md.; Collin Finnerty, 20, of Garden City, N.Y.; and Reade Seligmann, 20, of Essex Fells, N.J. Each was charged with rape, kidnapping and a sexual offense. As thousands of pages of evidence have been turned over to the defense, the lawyers have increasingly stepped up the pressure on Nifong as they challenged his early assertions about the case and proclaimed that the evidence does not support -- and in fact refutes -- the woman's story.
Cheshire said the timing of Nifong's comments are related to the Nov. 7 election in which Nifong faces a challenge from a write-in candidate and another candidate who has said he will not serve if elected.
"He is the one who went out and made this case a cause celebre. He did it. No one else did it, and yet he won't even talk to his own witness," Cheshire said. "Now he is trying to justify that right before his own election, which is just what he did right before the primary. Who is suffering? His community and especially these three young men."
Same advice
Nifong said he has heard about statements made on ABC's "Good Morning America" by Kim Roberts, the second dancer hired for the lacrosse party. Roberts said on the program that the accuser said she wanted marks on her body after the two left the party. Nifong would not comment on her statements, but he said he gives all witnesses in his prosecutions the same advice.
"If they want to talk to somebody, they have every right to do that. If you do choose to talk to somebody, make sure you tell the truth because you're going to hear it again," he said.
Staff writer Benjamin Niolet can be reached at (919) 956-2404 or bniolet@newsobserver.com.
"If they want to talk to somebody, they have every right to do that. If you do choose to talk to somebody, make sure you tell the truth because you're going to hear it again," he said."
So, to be credible, Kim has to tell the same story all the time while Crystal can tell any number of stories and still be credible? I hope the defense is taking notes.
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