ping
"McCullough also suggested that Washington may be innocent."
Clearly not important to the courts as long as the proper formalities are in place.
That would have been under Hardin right? Looks like that entire place has been a mess for a long time. If the guy is innocent I wish him all the best.
I had my own interesting brush with the Durham County judicial system a couple months ago when I got called for jury duty. I wound up as the foreman on the jury for a case of felony drug possession with intent to distribute (crack) against a young man. The case seemed pretty open-and-shut at first—they found a baggie of crack in this guy’s sock drawer when they searched the apartment he shared with another guy who’d already been arrested as a drug kingpin. They had a signed confession from the guy.
But the defense lawyer (a local legend named Butch Williams, who was very critical of The Fong during the whole Duke lacrosse ordeal) tore the DA’s case apart. The confession wasn’t written by the defendant, it was simply a transcription written by a police officer. The confession wasn’t audio or video recorded because there was an FBI agent present and “it’s procedure not to tape-record interviews where the FBI is involved” (huh?). The defense tore down a lot of the timeline upon which the DA’s case rested because of sloppy recordkeeping at the DPD. Without a recording of the confession, there was a distinct possibility that the DPD and the FBI agent threatened the guy with 10 to life in a Federal pen (even though there were no Federal charges involved) to try and get him to roll over on his roommate. In the end, it only took us an hour to find the defendant not guilty.
Yep, they took a case with physical evidence and a signed confession AND LOST because of sloppiness all around. That’s our Durham County tax dollars at work!
}:-)4
Yep, Nifong is a criminal was a huge part of the problem in the Duke hoax, BUT NC needs to reform it law concerning:
1. DA’s controlling judges
2. The lack of a speedy trial law.
My son is a senior this year living in Trinity Park. I will be very happy and relieved when he is done with this year and can move out of Durham.