The tables turn on Mike Nifong
By Ari Kaufman (01/20/07)
Question: What is the inherent difference between Durham District Attorney, Mike Nifong and the Duke Lacrosse players he sought to charge with rape? Answer: Nifong is a law-breaking criminal and they are not.
The feckless DA, once in litigators’ heaven with concocted charges, is now finally facing justice. He asked to be recused from the case last week, and even the AP is now calling him "embattled." Thirty-seven editorials, in every paper imaginable (including the NY Times' left-leaning editorialist, Nick Kristof, who admitted that "too many rushed to make the Duke case part of the 300-year-old narrative of white men brutalizing black women") have now been run opposing his case.
On January 12, Nifong, pusillanimous as ever, sent a letter to North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper asking his office to assume responsibility of the case. This came just days after the (pregnant) accuser changed her story yet again, now claiming that Reade Seligman, the first player she identified when the fraudulent lineup of solely lacrosse players was shown to her, was not involved in the alleged attack. A 17-page document now accuses Nifong of violating four rules of professional conduct.
The prosecutor's personality and credibility are apparently not aiding his cause either.
Widely regarded as having a reputation for relishing power and foul language, a courthouse co-worker complained, "He would curse you, scream at you, call you names over nothing".
Kathleen Parker, an Orlando Sentinel columnist, has coined a neologism using his name: "Now we can 'Nifong' someone when we want to trump up criminal charges based on flimsy evidence allegedly for political purposes. In short, when we want to screw up someone's life."
But in the March days after the alleged rape in Durham, North Carolina occurred, Nifong was in control. There he sat, weeks from a city election, in a town unmatched by many in terms of racial and socio-economic division, surrounded by a university of unquestioned elitism and political correctness, with a potential bombshell of a case on his desk.
Even better, the claim involved not only cocky student-athletes, but white lacrosse players, many hailing from the north. While other accusations and scandals involving university athletic programs are quickly quelled by coaches and administrators, Nifong, who later won that Democratic primary election, jumped on this rare political opportunity.
He was the lone white man on the ballot, and he needed both media attention and black votes to win. After the case broke, Nifong received twice as many black votes as his closest opponent, giving him the electoral win.
With 45 white players summoned for DNA tests, Nifong, with the aid of the media and the vague recollection of this mid-20s exotic dancer with a less the innocuous past (she has a criminal record, and in the past has accused three men of gang-raping her), quickly plucked two, wealthy northerners (Garden City, NY and Essex Falls, NJ) as his targets for the salivating Durham community. Weeks later, another lacrosse player (from well-to-do Bethesda, MD) was also indicted.
That the three suspects were affluent northerners surely assisted Nifong in his quest to make this case as divisive and convincing as possible to the citizens of Durham and America's sensitive culture. While in Durham last May as the summer and the case simultaneously heated up, local white men with whom I spoke in a diner mockingly called the accused "Yankees." Nifong had their ilk on his side too, it appeared.
With, not surprisingly, the aid of the "racially sensitive" faculty who condemned the school, the lacrosse coach and the players faster than Jesse Jackson's jet touched down, Nifong was on his way to committing the crime of the century. Duke Professor Houston Baker resigned, demanding that the university dismiss the coaches and players as a response to ''abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed among us.''
Apparently, Baker was unaware, as David Brooks noted in another NY Times op-ed from the spring that the team has a 100 percent graduation rate, and twice as many Duke lacrosse players made the ACC honor roll as any other team in the conference. According to the faculty report written by the law professor James E. Coleman, ''The lacrosse team's academic performance generally is one of the best among all Duke athletic teams.''
But why let facts get in the way of a "shakedown"?
Instead, since this case will hopefully set some sort of legal "precedent" and be studied for years to come, how did Nifong fail so miserably?
Nifong had the perfect victim (a black girl "wronged"), hand-picked the perfect athletes ("privileged" white lacrosse players) and the appropriate southern town. But rich kids can hire good lawyers, and prosecutorial misconduct, aided by 60 Minutes (showing, among much else, that Nifong's original lineup only had lax players), can be outed easily.
And when the second "exotic dancer" at the infamous party on March 13, aided the defense with new and previously omitted evidence, the noose tightened, Jackson departed, and the faculty retreated to their ivory towers.
Among much else, dancer Kim Roberts, deemed the entire case a "crock." And contrary to the accuser's claim of not having ingested alcohol prior to the alleged rape, the "victim" told doctors the next morning she "was drunk and had a lot of alcohol that night."
Mike Nifong attended the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, eight miles from Duke, and their rival in all ways. On the more innocuous side, this will just make the animosity stronger along Tobacco Road, especially when lacrosse season begins again this spring.
Tickets are going fast. Maybe someone will buy Mike one out of town, and hopefully, just like Kofi Annan and Jimmy Carter--two others who have fallen from grace the past year--he'll just go away and never be heard from again. That's his best option.
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