Nifong Faces the Music

Mike Nifong, the Durham, North Carolina prosecutor who wrongly accused three Duke lacrosse players of committing rape and sexual assault among other charges, is himself facing charges stemming from his prosecutorial misconduct in the case.

The North Carolina State Bar charged the Durham County district attorney with several violations of the state's rules of professional conduct, all tied to his handling of the lacrosse case.

His trial is expected to run for five days, and as it started Tuesday, the hearing commission chairman promised a quick verdict. If convicted, Nifong could be disbarred.

Well before the start of the hearing, reporters and observers — including the mothers of David Evans and Collin Finnerty, two of the once-charged and now cleared lacrosse players — packed the state Court of Appeals courtroom to watch. Finnerty and the third player, Reade Seligmann, were expected to attend the trial at some point, as were their attorneys.

Nifong won indictments against the three last year after a woman hired to perform as a stripper for a lacrosse team party in March 2006 said she was raped there. He aggressively pursued the case, at one point calling the lacrosse team "a bunch of hooligans" in a newspaper interview.

That interview, along with several others made in the case's early days, formed the basis of the bar's initial complaint against Nifong, which said he made misleading and inflammatory comments to the media about the athletes.

The bar later added allegations that Nifong withheld evidence from defense attorneys and that he lied to both to the court and bar investigators.

Worried the pending ethics charges might result in an unfair trial, Nifong asked the North Carolina Attorney General's office to take over the lacrosse prosecution in January. By then, most experts and legal observers had long since concluded the case could not be won.

Actually, it's far worse than the AP report indicates. Nifong's withholding of exculpatory evidence shows that there was no rape, and he did not interview the accuser for months, and when he finally did, she could not produce a single coherent version of events that synched up with prior versions or the evidence. She invented the entire story, and the DA never bothered to question her version, even at the outset.

KC Johnson is liveblogging the case. As always, he's the go-to guy on the Duke case. Keep scrolling to see how Nifong decided to pursue a case despite red flags going up at every step along the way - including the fact that there was absolutely no evidence tying Reade Seligmann to the incident at all - the investigators couldn't even place him at the scene, and yet Nifong pursued him along with Colin Finnerty and David Evans.

KC Johnson also relates that in one of the many books coming out on the Duke case, Nifong is accused of seeking to arrest Finnerty and Seligmann while they were in class, so as to maximize the press coverage, but the judge did not go for it:

The Beydoun book recounts several heretofore unrevealed conversations between Sgt. Mark Gottlieb and Covington. (Covington, by the way, comes across as clueless—he still was telling the non-captains on March 24 that they didn’t need lawyers.)

Gottlieb complained that he was being pressured by D.A.’s office to get the players in sooner rather than later. He also told Covington that the Nifong’s office had told him he had to get order.

This portrayal of events, of course, flies in the face of Nifong’s apparent strategy to blame his ethics difficulties on the DPD.

In the Beydoun book, Bob Ekstrand also states that Nifong, incredibly, wanted to arrange the arrests of Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty while they were in class—so the entire affair could be covered by the national press. This gambit was too much even for Judge Ron Stephens, who blocked it.

The trial is only going to get worse for Nifong. You can be sure that the Defense bar in Durham is taking a close look at the many cases prosecuted by the office to see whether prosecutorial misconduct took place as well. Nifong's actions in the instant case appears to have undermined the criminal justice system in Durham.