Posted on 04/14/2007 2:49:16 AM PDT by abb
Quest to convict hid a lack of evidence The district attorney moved quickly to take over the lacrosse inquiry. An N&O review shows that once he accepted the accuser's story, little else mattered
Joseph Neff, Staff Writer DURHAM - Mike Nifong found out about the case that now threatens his career March 23, 2006, when he stopped by the office copier and found a court order demanding DNA samples from 46 Duke lacrosse players. An escort service dancer told police that three men at a team party had dragged her into a bathroom and raped her anally, vaginally and orally for 30 minutes, according to the order. The Durham district attorney's reaction, he later told lawyer Jim Cooney: "Holy crap, what is going on?"
The next day, Nifong told Durham police he was taking over. At 9 a.m. March 24, a police captain told the senior investigator, Sgt. Mark Gottlieb, that "Nifong was going to be running and prosecuting this case. ... Go through Mr. Nifong for any directions as to how to conduct matters in this case."
It was an unusual move for a prosecutor, but there's no evidence that the police challenged him. The case, however, was already in trouble.
The 27-year-old complainant, Crystal Gail Mangum, couldn't identify her alleged attackers. She had given at least six conflicting accounts. And the first officer who encountered her didn't believe her story.
Nifong forged ahead in what became a single-minded quest to support the accuser's account, not a mission to discover the truth. His pursuit ended in January when the district attorney, facing charges from the State Bar, removed himself from the case.
The final collapse came Wednesday, when Attorney General Roy Cooper dropped all charges and declared Dave Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann innocent.
A News & Observer examination of Nifong's handling of the case, based on documents and dozens of interviews, adds new insights about the investigation's focus on shoring up Mangum's claims. Nifong ignored contrary facts, withheld evidence favorable to the accused and refused to discuss the case with defense lawyers.
His lead investigator, Linwood Wilson, pressured witnesses and produced different timelines and accounts to support Mangum's shifting statements.
There is no evidence that Nifong or any investigator challenged Mangum to explain the contradictions in her versions of what happened at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. Nor did they speak with the doctor who conducted the pelvic examination hours after Mangum said she had been raped.
Baffling those who knew him along with the millions of people around the world who came to know his name, Nifong stuck with Mangum's stories. As he fought to win the Democratic nomination for district attorney, he made a series of decisions and inflammatory statements that propelled the case into an international scandal. It turned three college students into criminal suspects and brought scorn on Durham, Duke and almost every other institution involved.
Nifong, who has made few public statements since last spring, declined to be interviewed for this report.
Not well known
In March of last year, few people outside the Durham courthouse had heard of Mike Nifong.
He was a career civil servant; prosecuting had been his only job since graduating from law school in 1978. A conscientious objector in the Vietnam War, he had boasted about a career of high ethics.
Nifong had a reputation as a sharp lawyer but was also known as abrasive, vindictive and prone to volcanic tantrums. He hadn't tried a serious felony case since 1999, when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. A new district attorney, he had never dealt with the swarms of reporters who descend on a major story.
By the time Nifong took the documents off the copier March 23, Durham police were having trouble with the case.
Mangum, a mother of two, worked for several escort agencies and danced at a Hillsborough strip club. She said three men had pulled her into a small, tiled bathroom and assaulted her.
Sgt. John Shelton, the first officer who saw Mangum after the party, doubted her story. After talking with her in the Duke Hospital emergency room, he loudly announced, "I think she is lying."
Later, police showed Mangum photographs of 36 lacrosse players. She looked at more than three-quarters of the team but couldn't identify any players as her assailants.
If Mangum couldn't make an identification, forensic science could. Mangum said that her attackers did not wear condoms and that one and perhaps all three had ejaculated. A crime lab could identify attackers from the DNA in any semen, blood or hair left during a 30-minute attack.
On March 27, a Durham police investigator, Angela Ashby, drove to the State Bureau of Investigation laboratory in Raleigh and hand-delivered the DNA evidence, which can provide a direct, unchallenged link to a suspect. She handed over swabs that an emergency room doctor took from Mangum's body March 14, a few hours after the party.
Lab technicians would scrutinize the samples for semen, blood and saliva, and then see whether the DNA matched any of the swabs taken from the mouths of the 46 players. Nifong asked the lab to move the samples to the front of the line.
On the same day, Nifong started a media offensive. The News & Observer had broken the story of the team giving DNA samples and then published an interview with Mangum. Activists and neighborhood residents had responded with two protests outside the house where three lacrosse captains lived: a candlelight vigil and a raucous affair where protesters banged pots and held signs that read "Castrate" and "Get a Conscience, Not a Lawyer."
Nifong gave scores of interviews to television and newspaper reporters who called or showed up at his office. The coverage worried Bob Ekstrand, a Durham lawyer who represented dozens of team members. Ekstrand set up an appointment with Nifong on March 27.
The meeting started cordially. Ekstrand said he asked Nifong how he would make decisions. He urged the prosecutor not to do anything until the DNA test results came back.
Nifong ended the meeting abruptly. Ekstrand recalled Nifong's parting words: "If you've come here to ask me questions instead of telling me what you know about who did it, then we don't have anything to talk about. You're wasting my time. You tell all of your clients I will remember their lack of cooperation at sentencing. I hope you know if they didn't do it, they are all aiders and abettors, and that carries the same punishment as rape."
As he left, Ekstrand noticed several reporters milling in the hall outside Nifong's office.
A vacation surprise
Jackie Brown was at her vacation home on North Topsail Beach in late March when Nifong called, she said in an interview. Brown, a political insider who worked many election campaigns in Durham, had agreed to run his campaign.
Nifong told Brown he was going to be on the news, something with Duke lacrosse.
Brown was surprised: "I said, 'Hold it, do you have any idea what this could do to your campaign, good or bad?' He said no."
Brown told Nifong to keep quiet until they figured out how it would affect the election. She hung up the phone and turned on the television. As Brown channel surfed that evening, she saw her candidate on local news. She watched him on Fox News, her favorite network, and another national show. Brown tried calling Nifong on his cell phone and at his office, but he wasn't answering.
At dawn the next morning, Brown and her miniature dachshund, Daffany, headed back to Durham. She wanted to talk with her candidate.
This campaign had been unusual from the start. In April 2005, Nifong had been appointed by Gov. Mike Easley to fill Jim Hardin's unexpired term. Easley has said Nifong promised not to run for election. But he did, and he had strong opposition from former Assistant District Attorney Freda Black in the May primary.
When Nifong called Brown in the fall of 2005, looking for a campaign manager, Brown had never heard of the prosecutor. This was unusual for an insider who's well-connected with Durham's political organizations.
Brown agreed to meet him for lunch Jan. 2, 2006, at the downtown Marriott near the courthouse. Nifong showed up with his wife, Cy Gurney. As the women ate Caesar salads and Nifong tended to a steak sandwich, Gurney did most of the talking. Brown was struck by the first words out of Nifong's mouth.
"He said, 'I really don't want this job; I was the last one on the list. I just need three years and seven months for retirement. You won't have to worry about running another campaign for me.' "
Brown was taken aback: Did Nifong, then 55, really want to go through the hassle of a campaign? "He said, 'I know nothing about politics. That's why I need you to be campaign manager.' "
Four more years would make a big difference for Nifong's retirement. If he served five years as a district attorney, his 29 years as a regular state employee would apply to the more lucrative retirement plan for a district attorney; overnight, in April 2010, his annual pension would increase by at least $15,000 a year.
Brown signed on, with no idea that the political neophyte would become one of the nation's most famous prosecutors.
Grist for media mill
When Brown drove back from the beach, she found satellite trucks crowding the courthouse parking lot. Reporters and camera crews roamed the sixth-floor hallway outside Nifong's office, looking for an interview.
Nifong obliged, declaring that the rape was racially motivated. He ripped into the lacrosse players in an interview with The N&O: "I would like to think that somebody who was not in the bathroom has the human decency to call up and say, 'What am I doing covering up for a bunch of hooligans?' "
Seeing the crowd, Brown retreated to a corner and called Nifong several times on his cell phone, she said. No answer.
When Nifong left his office to go to the men's room, Brown maneuvered him into a corner so her back was to the cameras.
"What are you doing? Why don't you answer my calls?"
The television reporters had asked that he turn off the cell phone so it wouldn't ring during interviews, Nifong said.
"I said, 'You don't have any idea what the impact is going to be on your campaign.' He said, 'I'm getting a million dollars of free advertisements.'
"I left and didn't say another word."
Staff writer Joseph Neff can be reached at 829-4516 or joseph.neff@newsobserver.com.
Awesome summary. Thanks for posting, and thanks for everything y’all did to keep the FR community informed on this case over the last year.
She stole Dave’s shaving kit? Whatever for?
>>In light of the “innocent” statement by the A.G., Nancy Grace’s statements are now hysterically funny.
They were hysterically funny to anyone halfway informed, back then. Now, they should be career-ending, but unfortunately probably won’t be.
If you haven’t seen Jon Stewart savage Nancy Grace, you really need to watch this. It’s just *BRUTAL*. Out raping puppies, indeed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXizCq6ODTg
Because 5-finger discounts come naturally to a low-life whore like that? Just guessing, but it seems reasonable.
The police investigate and gather evidence. They do not decide whether to press charges or what charges to bring. I haven't seen serious police misconduct in this case, though they may have been to quick to go public.
I put the blame squarely on Nifong's shoulders, trickling down to the race hustlers who flocked to the case, the pundits who took up the cause (most notably Nancy Grace, who has never in her life seen an innocent suspect), and let's not spare the 88 Duke professors who were hasty to jump on the bandwagon.
The school administration itself, I'm not sure about. Criminal charges aside, the lacrosse team had a wild party with underage drinking and strippers on school property, one that landed the school on the front page of the paper. If it had been a fraternity rather than a sports team that had done that, they would likely have been kicked off campus for the rest of the year. Suspending students during a pending criminal investigation also doesn't strike me as particularly outrageous.
Prolly because she was so drunk/tranked she didn't know the difference between her purse and the shaving kit...
You don't know what you're talking about. The DPD was helped gin up the hoax.
I deliberately didn’t say that there wasn’t police misconduct — i said I hadn’t seen any. Got a link?
Off the top of my head, how about when they arrested Moezeldin Almostafa (Seligman’s cab driver) and tried to intimidate him into changing his story.
You really shouldn’t wander into the DukeLax threads unless you know what you’re doing...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18110003/site/newsweek/
What Really Happened That Night at Duke
They spent a year accused of kidnapping, assault and rape. Now, though, the three Duke lacrosse players were told they were ‘innocent.’ The inside story of the infamous evening.
By Susannah Meadows and Evan Thomas
Newsweek
April 23, 2007 issue - The room went dead silent as the North Carolina attorney general, Roy Cooper, began to speak. The three Duke lacrosse players and their families were gathered in front of a TV at the Raleigh Sheraton Hotel to learn how the state would proceed in a criminal investigation that had appalled and titillated the nation for more than a year. Reade Seligmann was praying, and so was Collin Finnerty, heads bent down, bobbing slightly as the attorney general spoke slowly. The families were pretty sure, based on signals from the attorney general’s office, that the case would be dropped. But when the families heard the word “innocent,” they erupted. “I was hysterically crying,” recalls Seligmann, a strapping 21-year-old. “Everybody was hysterically crying. People were swarmed. It was like a pile-on.”
The elation could not erase some bitter memories. Finnerty could recall the dread he felt as he peered over his father’s shoulder that day in April 2006. His dad, Kevin Finnerty, was writing down what the family’s lawyer was telling him on the phone, that Collin—Duke sophomore, gifted student-athlete, seemingly destined for good things in life—had just been charged with rape. Collin wept—his stunned girlfriend, Jessica Hannan, had never seen him cry before—overwhelmed with the realization that he could go to prison for 30 years for a crime he did not commit.
Finnerty, Seligmann and the third duke player charged in the rape case, David Evans, were vindicated last week. The attorney general did not just find “insufficient evidence,” as prosecutors usually do when they drop a criminal charge. Cooper declared that the three players were innocent, that no rape had taken place, that a “rogue prosecutor” had overreached and that, “in the rush to condemn, a community and a state lost the ability to see clearly.”
For the players, listening to Cooper’s announcement was like stepping through a looking glass. For many months, they had lived in an alternate universe. There was the “reality” that endlessly replayed on cable TV: that some loutish, vicious, pampered jocks had raped an exotic dancer. Then there was the tawdry but mundane truth: that some foolish and crude college boys had hired two strippers and reaped nothing but shame. For young men accustomed to success, the feeling of helplessness, of powerlessness, was lonely and isolating. It was also maturing.
After the A.G.’s announcement, Finnerty and Seligmann, as well as their parents, some siblings and Finnerty’s girlfriend, spoke to NEWSWEEK about the experience. The magazine also obtained the handwritten statements given by Evans and the other two team captains, Daniel Flannery and Matthew Zash, to the Durham police two days after the alleged rape. The statements, never before made public, and interviews with defense attorneys familiar with the evidence, tell the real story of what happened that night.
snip
If there's a valid warrant, and the DA says "pick him up," the misconduct is on the part of the DA, not the cops.
You really shouldn’t wander into the DukeLax threads unless you know what you’re doing...
So I guess that means you don't have a link.
It was after reviewing that skit by Stewart that I posted it. And even after viewing it, it was hard to believe at times that it was not someone on SNL imitating her.
Thankfully, not many, lately: </i>He hadn’t tried a serious felony case since 1999...</i>
The bogus line-up, for one thing
And I saw one article referencing a certain cop that had it out for Duke, in general.
>>I deliberately didn’t say that there wasn’t police misconduct — i said I hadn’t seen any.
Then pay attention for a while. I fully expecct the DukeLAX defense team did, and that misconduct will be a part of their lawsuit against the city, before it’s over.
Oh, and I’d take abb’s advice, were I you.
Police misconduct in the Duke Lacrosse case:
1. Erasing the tape of police communication the night of the incident. That tape was controlled by DPD and thus DPD is responsible for it.
2. Duke lacrosse investigators going to serve the misdemeanor warrant on the cab driver arrested alibi witness and asking him if he had anything more to say about the Duke lacrosse case. There was a long standing possibly expired warrant on him they chose at the direction of the DA to execute at that time. You can take the Nazi way out and say they were just following orders, but you can not excuse the misconduct of sending two detectives to serve a misdeamenor warrant and them asking about an unrelated case. It was witness intimidation pure and simple.
3. Allowing the DA to order them to run photo arrays in violation of DPD policy and state standards. That DPD allowed the DA to usurp their role certainly was misconduct on the part of the DPD.
4. An Gottlieb months laters typing up something like 20 pages of a report from 4 pages of notes with the descriptions of assailants much different than the other officer whose note were much closer to contemporaneous. The new different descriptions just happened to match those of the defendants. That is more than misconduct that is a crime.
5. Attending meetings with Nifong and the lab director and failing to immediately report their conspiracy to object justice by withholding the fact that Mangum had DNA of five or six other males on her. This is more than misconduct too, this is another federal crime, at the least misprison of a felony.
6. Going to the Duke dorm and attempting to interview suspects who had attorneys with their attorneys not present. This too is misconduct against DPD policy.
The link to all this information is freerepublic.com. Search Duke lacrosse and you can find thread after thread where this police misconduct is discussed. And I only hit on the major ones, there are probably many minor exampels in this case.
BTW, as you go into your research, keep in mind I am one who thinks the DPD is not that culpable in this situation, that it was basically Nifong. But Nifong could not have done it alone. This case has been going on a good while. People here know alot about it. If you don’t, you should ask question as you did, but you probably shouldn’t call people on their view unless you are informed. Enjoy your reading.
Don’t know a single person who ever thought for a moment that these boys were guilty of ANY crime at all.
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