Posted on 03/02/2007 3:19:00 AM PST by ricks_place
Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong and the lead investigators in the Duke lacrosse case have different recollections of the first time they huddled at the Burlington laboratory that provided DNA testing for the prosecution.
Durham police Sgt. Mark Gottlieb and Investigator Benjamin Himan each listed in their case notes that they were at DNA Security on April 10, a week before any indictments in the case.
And Himan noted that Nifong was present at the meeting with Brian Meehan, head of the private lab.
But in a letter to the N.C. State Bar released this week, Nifong said he could not recall the event, although he acknowledged that a meeting occurred.
"I can only report that I have no recollection of that meeting and that I have no documentation or other evidence that I ever attended such a meeting," Nifong said in the Jan. 16 letter.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsobserver.com ...
Pinging the DukeLax list.
This guy is absolutely unbelievable.
L
"But in a letter to the N.C. State Bar released this week, Nifong said he could not recall the event, although he acknowledged that a meeting occurred."
You know? If he cannot recall an event as important as this, perhaps he shouldn't be doing something as important as being a prosecutor.
I understand there are a shortage of fry cooks at Mickey D's and all he will have to remember "ding fries are done."
The Hillary strategy.
What an imbecile. There is something seriously wrong with this guy.
(Maybe he's angling for an insanity defense.)
"I know nothing about anything".
> He (Nifong) said he had never before encountered such determined pretrial resistance. "A well-connected and well-financed (but not, I would suggest, well-intentioned) group of individuals -- most of whom are neither in nor from North Carolina, have taken it upon themselves to ensure that this case never reaches trial."
Yep, its a vast right-wing conspiracy.
I have never heard innocence expressed in quite those terms. What a crooked lying.....expeletive.
When, perchance, did wanting to see innocent young men exonerated become "not . . . well-intentioned?"
Cogent comments :
http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson172.html
"Mike Nifong and the Sociopathic State"
By William Anderson, Phd. Frostburg State Univ., MD
"First, and most important, the indictments against Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans do not have Michael B. Nifong vs. these defendants, but rather The State of North Carolina vs. the defendants. Because the charges that Nifong originally filed still remain on the books, the State of North Carolina is de facto endorsing Nifong’s conduct.
"To put it another way, the state "justice" system of North Carolina is endorsing sociopathic behavior by one of its own. Yes, the state bar has filed ethics charges against him, but the kidnapping and sexual assault charges against Seligmann, Finnerty, and Evans still remain, despite the fact that they are transparently false. In fact, the special prosecutors have not indicated that they are prepared to drop the charges, and the NAACP and others still are demanding that it go to trial.
"As one who has written about criminal justice issues for many years, I have run into case after case in which prosecutors and the police have lied and conducted entire cases built upon webs of lies."
Help end the railroading of the real three victims in the lacrosse case :
Petition for Justice in the Duke Lacrosse Case :
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/208340697
Now more than ever the voice of the public has to be heard.
P.S. I hope you have other employable skills other than those of falsely accusing others.
"They neither suggested that no assault took place nor that the assault was committed by someone else," Nifong said.
How did this idiot graduate from high school, let alone law school?
He was saying so much to so many media outlets, that I doubt he can get away with this tactic, there's got to be footage or printed material that will trip him up.
If he managed to avoid doing anything to compromise such a defense, than he is more conniving and venal than we ever imagined. And I would expect the defense teams will really unleash on him personally.
Was he laying all those traps, seeding all of that racial hatred knowing where all the legal lines were, and carefully avoiding crossing them, in case the whole mess imploded just like it is doing now????
The Hillary defence.
Having no short term memory is a dodge of a criminal prosecution. In a civil disbarment proceeding it could be taken as a confession as to his unsuitability to practice law.
His then-wife put him through law school and probably did his homework for him.
Then he ran off with somebody else - probably his tutor for the bar exam.
* The lacrosse case arose "during the last few weeks of a hotly-contested Democratic Party primary in which I was seeking to retain my office," he said. "I was not always able to give the case my full attention."
Typical, the election of a democrat takes priority over the rights of the citizenry.
Considering that he was appointed by the governor to fill out a term with the agreement he WOULD NOT SEEK ELECTION to the office, Mr. Nifong is a lying backstabbing political hack
Doesn't recall? Gee, Mr Nifong wouldn't lie, now would he?
I am not convinced that our system has anything to do with justice.
But I do believe that this is a battle. I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this—they have popped up in other settings. This is—the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband me since the day he announced for presidentI indicted the lacrosse hooligans."
1. I don't recall a meeting.
2. I was distracted and couldn't give my full attention to the case.
3. Other people who were helping me weren't reading the material, they were just copying it. It's their fault, not mine! Oh, I know I was the lead investigator, but why do I have to do everything?
4. Never, and I mean NEVER, did I expect such a spirited response pre-trial. It's simply not fair to the prosecution when people have the means and the will to fight for their freedom.
5. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that the test results didn't implicate any of the defendants. However, in my professional opinion as a prosecutor, that doesn't mean it was favorable to the defense, so I didn't think it was necessary to let them know about it.
That pic of Nifong reminds me of BJC and his "I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinski" rant.
Nifong: "I did not have a meeting on April 10th with that man, Mr. Meehan, I never did".
Didn't he TAKE OVER this case from the police? And now he's trying to say he didn't give it his full attention?
Weasel words.
Good summary.
All that's missing is the steel balls.
I just showed that quote to my husband; after his head stopped spinning, he said, "Well, maybe THEY don't remember the party, so let's drop this whole thing."
That's just a ridiculous statement on his part; notice he is flat out denying the CRIMINAL charges.
And yet we get:
But Nifong said he did not see the test results as necessarily favorable to the defense. "They neither suggested that no assault took place nor that the assault was committed by someone else," Nifong said.
And most preposterous of all:
In one of the letters, Nifong said he feared the bar was "looking for a prosecutor" to punish for the misdeeds of other prosecutors whose misconduct has recently come to light and who have gone largely unpunished.
That isn't going to exactly make them happy, you think?
He said he had never before encountered such determined pretrial resistance. "A well-connected and well-financed (but not, I would suggest, well-intentioned) group of individuals -- most of whom are neither in nor from North Carolina, have taken it upon themselves to ensure that this case never reaches trial."
I bet the mothers LOVE that remark. How dare them try to defend themselves.
As has been said before, if I had had a case in front of him, I'd be combing through my case.
Oooh, I LIKE that! Your honor, my clients remember that there may have been a party, but they don't recall being there. Can we just drop the case?
Tell your husband to join the defense team, because in that one sentence he cut through months of nonsense by the FONG!
Has Nifong started complaining about the lack of strawberries yet?
I think the bar is going to love that remark. Y'all just pickin' on me because of something someone else did. Oh yeah FONG, that's really using your head! LOL
Thank you.
http://www.newsobserver.com/1185/story/548945.html
Published: Mar 02, 2007 02:04 PM
Modified: Mar 02, 2007 01:58 PM
In TV interview, Easley again criticizes Nifong
From Staff Reports
Gov. Mike Easley talked politics this week with PBS talk show host Charlie Rose, a North Carolina native. Easley, a former prosecutor, was asked about one of North Carolina’s most talked about prosecutors over the past year — Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong.
In January, Easley told a New York University crowd that picking Nifong to be Durham’s district attorney was the worst appointment of his career.
On The Charlie Rose Show that aired Wednesday, Feb. 28, he elaborated on that appointment.
A portion of the script from that show follows:
CHARLIE ROSE: Speaking of legal issues, the lacrosse team. Some of the players who were first accused of rape, and there was a prosecutor over there, Nifong I think his name was.
MICHAEL EASLEY: That’s right.
CHARLIE ROSE: He was appointed by you?
MICHAEL EASLEY: He was appointed acting DA by me. The district attorney, a very good district attorney, I appointed judge, and I wanted someone who wasn’t going to run, that was a long-term prosecutor, just to hold the office together until somebody was elected. And our staff interviewed him. He said he wasn’t going to run, and we didn’t think he would. And then he got out and started running.
There’s a totally different standard you set for somebody who is going to be the elected district attorney and get into politics, and then there’s somebody who you want just to run the office. Because when you get out there and start making political comments, it requires a whole lot of different talent, a whole lot of different skills that obviously he didn’t have. And he would not have been appointed had we known he was going to run.
That case is now with the attorney general’s office. He turned it over to the attorney general. It’s with a good team there.
CHARLIE ROSE: He was forced to turn it over to the attorney general, wasn’t he?
MICHAEL EASLEY: No, he ...
CHARLIE ROSE: He volunteered to do that.
MICHAEL EASLEY: Well, he was under a lot of pressure, though. You’re correct about that. He voluntarily did it, but -- volunteered to do it, but ...
CHARLIE ROSE: He handed over the prosecution to someone else. And the rape charges have been ...
MICHAEL EASLEY: They’re under investigation.
CHARLIE ROSE: Under investigation.
MICHAEL EASLEY: Right now. What’s happened is the prosecution team at the attorney general’s office who I know is very, very competent. They’re looking at it, giving a whole fresh look, and they’ll make a determination. And if it is a good case, they’ll try it; if it is not, they’ll dismiss it and be done with it. But I can tell you, the crowd that has it now is going to do the right thing.
CHARLIE ROSE: The prosecutorial team.
MICHAEL EASLEY: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes. Because they’ve got some very good defense attorneys there, too.
MICHAEL EASLEY: They do.
CHARLIE ROSE: From the North Carolina Bar.
MICHAEL EASLEY: And what’s unfortunate about it is, once a prosecutor says the wrong thing or says something that they shouldn’t say, then it’s on. I mean, the fight’s on. The defense attorneys don’t have a lot of choice but to defend their clients. So then the whole thing is getting tried in the press, and everybody loses on that. It looks bad for the team. It looks bad for Duke. It looks bad for the state. It looks bad for the judicial system. And that’s why you want somebody who understands the media ...
CHARLIE ROSE: Fair to say you would not have appointed him if you had it to do over?
MICHAEL EASLEY: That’s correct. I would voluntarily not appoint him, just as he voluntarily turned the case over to the attorney general.
"I cannot recall"
Worked for the clintons every time!
Did he dump his first wife for the present one?
Absolutely bizarre.
Yes, we know. He was more concerned about his reelection than getting to the bottom of the case.
Uh, its not up to you Mr. Nifong to suggest what, if any, is the significance of the evidence.
That is absolutely correct, as Nifong should (but evidently does not) know. In United States v. Smith, 77 F.3d 511, 514 (D.C. Cir. 1996), the D.C. Circuit noted that in Kyles v. Whitley, 514 U.S. 419 (1995), the U.S. Supreme Court "stress[ed] that a reviewing court must focus on the fairness of the trial the defendant actually received rather than on whether a different result would have occurred had the undisclosed evidence been revealed." As explained by the Court in Kyles, 514 U.S. at 439-40:
"This means, naturally, that a prosecutor anxious about tacking too close to the wind will disclose a favorable piece of evidence. See United States v. Agurs, 427 U.S. 97, 108 (1976) ('The prudent prosecutor will resolve doubtful questions in favor of disclosure.') This is as it should be. Such disclosure will serve to justify trust in the prosecutor as 'the representative . . . of a sovereignty . . . whose interest . . . in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.' Berger v. United States, 295 U.S. 78, 88 (1935). And it will tend to preserve the criminal trial, as distinct from the prosecutor's private deliberations, as the chosen forum for ascertaining the truth about criminal accusations."
In other words, it is for the jury, not the prosecutor, to decide whether favorable Brady information is credible; otherwise "prosecutors might, on a claim that they thought it unreliable, refuse to produce any matter whatever helpful to the defense, thus setting Brady at nought." Lindsey v. King, 769 F.2d 1034, 1040 (5th Cir. 1985).
His first wife supported him while he went through school. Once he was finished he didn't need her any more. He took off with someone else and left his wife and little daughter. He is *not* a nice guy.
OK, so what DNA evidence would have refuted it? Perhaps finding DNA of multiple different men in each of her orifices, none of which matched any of the men that she identified?
I'm having a hard time thinking of any way that DNA evidence could have refuted the identification any more definitively than that.
You.. can be a millionaire.. and never pay taxes! You can be a millionaire.. and never pay taxes! You say.. "Steve.. how can I be a millionaire.. and never pay taxes?" First.. get a million dollars.
Now.. you say, "Steve.. what do I say to the tax man when he comes to my door and says, 'You.. have never paid taxes'?" Two simple words. Two simple words in the English language: "I forgot!"
How many times do we let ourselves get into terrible situations because we don't say "I forgot"? Let's say you're on trial for armed robbery. You say to the judge, "I forgot armed robbery was illegal."
Let's suppose he says back to you, "You have committed a foul crime. you have stolen hundreds and thousands of dollars from people at random, and you say, 'I forgot'?" Two simple words: Excuuuuuse me!!"
I think Nifong goes down before the bar. He can't make these
bizzare denials make up for the fact he did not give the defense exculpatory evidence. This is the fatal shoe to drop.
Didn't Reagan used it in Iran-Contra.
Point 5 should be expanned as Nifong also claims he knew the defendants would get the underlying data, although Nifong argued against them getting it in court accusing the defense attorneys of a witch hunt, and thus he did not need to disclose those results to the defense in a report. Basically Nifong is saying that you get discloture only if you are rich enough to pay for your own expert to examine the data.
Disbarment is too lenient a punishment for this scumbag. He deserves hard time. You can bet that his behavior in the Lax case is not isolated. There could be dozens more people railroaded by Nifong.
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