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JLS, you say:

"Yeah, I believe:

"1. Nifong was told to get rid of this rape case after Meehan's testimony. Like the tin earred idiot he is he dropped just the rape charge.

"2. So the NC Bar filed its charges publically.

"3. Then Nifong did not act today and drop the charges or get out of this case

"4. So the NC DAs made their letter calling for him to recuse himself public. . . ."

Your timing is off.

The way the process works is that someone filed a grievance against Nifong several months ago. In October, well before the hiding favorable evidence from the defense came to light, the grievance committee of the N.C. State Bar voted to file a complaint against Nifong before the North Carolina Disciplinary Hearing Commission, the body that tries lawyers accused of misdeeds. It took a number of weeks to get the complaint prepared, and it was filed earlier this week.

The grievance committee of the State Bar meets quarterly. It will meet again in January. It may have a grievance before it on the hiding evidence stuff then. More probably the Bar's staff will need additional time to investigate the hidden evidence issue. If that is the case, the grievance committee will have Nifong before it again in April. I expect to see a second complaint coming from to the Disciplinary Hearing Commission dealing with the evidence issue in the summer.

Until something is filed before the Disciplinary Hearing Commission, it is almost never public information. I don't know whether the timing of this complaint was purely coincidental, but the die was cast in October when the State Bar Grievance Committee voted to file a complaint. Consequently, the information that came to light in December about additional wrongdoing could not have been the cause of this complaint being filed.

Your timing is off.

You understanding is off. The way this works in NC has been discussed ad naseum around here.

There is nothing that required the NC Bar to file its complaint NOW and if for their own reasons they were filing now, they did not need to file publically.

Similarly nothing required the NC DAs to make any move now. And they too could have as they apparently did in the fall act in private.

So while this all may be a coincidenece, it sure looks like a squeeze play is on against Nifong. Why might a squeeze play be one against Nifong? Occum's razor says that Nifong's behavior is viewed as becoming too costly to the DAs and maybe attorneys in general. Why is this case too costly in their minds? The hearing of the 15th made NC look even worse with Nifong caught in open court testimony conspiring to hire exculpatory evidence.

Now maybe my conjecture about why this is happenning now is wrong. Maybe the squeeze play is happenning now because the NC Bar and the NC DAs gave the voters of Durham a chance to cure this problem and the voters of Durham failed. Maybe it is just all a coincidence. But the "timing" is not the issue. There is no timing that required these things to come out now. In fact the NC bar previously said it would not investigate Nifong until after the case in question was over.

Consequently, the information that came to light in December about additional wrongdoing could not have been the cause of this complaint being filed.

Certainly the complaint could not have been filed because of events that happened later after the filing. On the other hand, I don't think the filing of the complaint committed the Bar to its public disclosure.

I would guess that the Bar hoped things could be dealt with discretely, but since then it has become clear to everyone that Nifong's malfeasance went far beyond bad judgement and involved actions he had to know were illegal. The Bar couldn't immediately publicise complaints about those illegal actions, but could immediately publicise those complaints which had already been filed. And from what I can tell, that's what it did.