State Bar Files Complaint Against Mike Nifong

"I'd be careful what I wished for on this one. LOL."

Why? Any judge that has a bunch of strippers cavorting around his courtroom will throw them and the whole case right out of there. That's where this one is going.

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2006/1228062bar1.html

Link to The Smoking Gun...has the entire 18 page complaint in pdf. I agree, Nifong has real problems here, and rightfully so. As an attorney I haven't followed this closely, but his actions exceed any I have seen in practice. It seemed to be a re-election scheme. It looks like it maybe ending being alot more. It's prosecutors like this that reflex adversely on us all. Let justice be served and then let the law suits began, Nifong and Duke included!

:> No! Just the opposite!

Yes, some states allow lawyers to apply for reinstatement after five years of disbarment, but their success after reinstatement, which isn't always granted, usually isn't successful unless they were quite successful prior to disbarment. Nifong isn't. If Nifong were to get convicted of a felony, he wouldn't be reinstated anyway. I don't think even NC would admit a convicted felon to the bar (but I could be wrong - if any state would do it, it'd be NC, LA, or NJ).

The question will be was he acting officially when he did certain things.

In NC, the DA is not required to present exculpatory evidence to a GJ.

If you're saying that's what the defense wants, I disagree.

I also don't think the case would be handed to an ADA in Nifong's office. Somebody from outside would be brought in.

Nifong may not have informed Gottlieb and Himan of the DNA results as of the time of the first GJ indictments.

Nifong's a demonrat. They never back down. They have no shame. It's more important to them to win than it is to have a good name.

It's not an inordinate amount of time, at least compared to my experience. In CA, bar complaints take 3-4 years to process.

Yes, they do. They receive official notice within fifteen days. That would explain what shut Nifong up in the first place, and probably why the NAACP came to his aid pushing for a gag order. They wanted to shut the defense up because Nifong couldn't respond publicly with more lies. It also explains why he didn't file written responses to all the motions the defense filed. He knew he was lying and, rather than repeat those lies in writing in order to refute the representations in the motions, he stood quiet.

One of the stories about the state bar filing that I read today mentioned that Nifong's office windows are covered with paper.

Gosh, maybe this is why.

I wonder if he enjoys living in a rabbit warren day and night, shades drawn, phone unplugged, etc.. Kind of like Saddam was living when we yanked his sorry butt out of that spider hole.

I wonder if Nifong has taken to wearing a disguise in public?

Odd that the wouldn't take him up on lying to the judge and conspiring to keep exculpatory evidence from the defence.

Perhaps that would set a precedent that would require complaints against half their membership?

HS Letters

Where is the state bar?

Mike Nifong is holding on tightly to the lesser charges only to save face and in the hopes that a gerrymandered jury will give him a conviction to justify his irresponsibility and criminality. Back in the 1990's, United States District Judge Stanley Sporkin, having heard a series of savings and loan fraud cases, lamented, rhetorically and in hope, "Where were the lawyers?" It was his belief that lawyers for the fraudsters should have inserted themselves more aggressively into the process in an effort to mitigate the financial damage that was being wrought.

It is similarly fair now to ask "Where is the North Carolina State Bar Ethics Committee?" If a lawyer who happens to be a public official obstructs justice in violation of North Carolina law and in derogation of his oath of office, does that official have absolute immunity from ethical challenge -- or is the North Carolina State Bar just another political player and race pimp? Such are the government structure of Durham County and the Duke administration, which was politically constrained to sacrifice a few white kids' lives to mollify Rev. Al Sharpton and the other gods and demigods of racial intimidation.

JEFFREY MEYER
Clearwater, Fla.
December 29, 2006

Again, the left tries to define media coverage

W. Russell Robinson [Letters, Dec. 23] must be sleeping in class. As an "instructor of mass communications," he must be asking a rhetorical question. "What is so newsworthy about this story?" I can't believe he has to ask. Then again, the idea of mass communications, that is propaganda, is the extreme left's definition of the news media. As an instructor, does he promote the manipulation of news by the media to, as he writes "effectively [change] the relations along the divides of race, gender and class ..."? Is that a news media purpose?

Most of us in the uneducated multitudes somehow still think a "newspaper" does not have the responsibility or right to "effectively [govern] the daily course of our lives."

Try reading the coverage in The Herald-Sun once without your myopic view -- if only the poor were rich there would be no injustice. It takes me half a month to earn what the accuser gets paid for an hour of her "services." You do the math.

The events have happened to real people, their lives are changed forever, rich or poor, righteous or evil, true or false.

J. MICHAEL BONHAM
Timberlake
December 29, 2006

http://www.heraldsun.com/opinion/hsletters/

http://www.newsobserver.com/100/story/526471.html

Published: Dec 29, 2006 12:30 AM
Modified: Dec 29, 2006 03:14 AM

Nifong broke rules, Bar alleges
Media interviews were likely to prejudice justice in the Duke lacrosse case, State Bar complaint says

Matt Dees, Staff Writer
DURHAM - The N.C. State Bar on Thursday accused Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong of violating ethics rules during numerous media interviews he gave shortly after a woman accused Duke lacrosse players of raping her at a team party in March.

Nifong has been lacerated in several quarters for his handling of the case, but the Bar's complaint of pretrial prejudice is the first concrete action that could accomplish what his critics have sought for months -- removal from the case. Moreover, he could lose his license to practice law.

Former Duke lacrosse players David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann are charged with first-degree kidnapping and first-degree sexual assault after an escort-service dancer said they took her in a bathroom and committed sex acts on her. The accuser until last week had said they raped her, but rape charges were dropped when she told prosecutors she could no longer testify that she had been penetrated with a penis, one of the defining factors of rape in North Carolina law.

The Bar's accusations mention nothing about recent criticism that Nifong withheld evidence from the defense, another charge that could lead to his removal from the case or from office. A DNA expert hired by the state has testified that he and Nifong agreed to leave out of a report test results that excluded the entire Duke University lacrosse team from DNA samples taken from the accuser's body and underwear.

Nifong could not be reached for comment Thursday and largely has avoided the media since a flurry of interviews this spring. He did grant a three-hour interview with The New York Times last week after the rape charges were dropped, the paper reported.

Lisa Williams, a former Durham prosecutor turned defense attorney who has known Nifong for 12 years, said she thinks the Bar's accusations create a conflict of interest for Nifong, which state law says is grounds to have him removed from the case, if not from office.

"I feel like this is the first shoe," she said Thursday night. "And the second shoe is coming."

Conflicts of interest

Joseph Kennedy, an associate professor at the UNC School of Law, said he thinks this only "heightens the conflict of interest I think already existed."

Because Nifong made statements implying guilt, he might now be tempted to drive forward with the case no matter what, Kennedy and Williams said.

"A prosecutor who's not being accused of misconduct in the case is more likely to be able to impartially consider evidence that might suggest innocence," Kennedy said.

If the defendants are guilty, on the other hand, Nifong still has a conflict because the charges make him less credible in the eyes of a jury, Kennedy said.

He said Nifong should recuse himself from the case. Duke University President Richard Brodhead also again called for Nifong to step aside.

Nifong could be disbarred or lose his law license for up to five years if a Bar review board finds him guilty. A three-person panel of the Bar's Disciplinary Hearing Commission will decide Nifong's fate after a hearing that is not yet scheduled.

The case will be prosecuted by the Bar's chief counsel, Katherine Jean, and Douglas J. Brocker, a Raleigh lawyer and former deputy counsel to the Bar. Nifong can hire an attorney of his own.

The Bar charged Nifong with violating four ethical rules multiple times during his interviews. The Bar complained of "dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation," conduct "prejudicial to the administration of justice," and comments likely to both taint a court proceeding and heighten "public condemnation of the accused."

It is virtually unprecedented for the Bar to so publicly accuse a prosecutor midtrial, many lawyers said.

Veteran Raleigh lawyer Burley Mitchell, a former chief justice of the state Supreme Court and a prosecutor before that, said the Bar's action was "truly extraordinary."

"From the time I was Wake County's elected district attorney until I was chief justice, I can't recall the Bar filing a complaint against a district attorney for pretrial publicity," he said.

The Bar has been investigating Nifong since March 30, just three days after his first public interview about the case, according to a State Bar statement.

A 17-page document released Thursday lists nearly 50 quotations in local and national media outlets that Bar officials allege could prejudice the public.

Charges jibe

The charges jibe perfectly with a point defense attorneys have driven home for months, that Nifong used the media to convince Durham the rape occurred as the accuser described.

Attorneys for two of the players said Thursday that it would be inappropriate to comment on the Bar's action.

Beginning in March, Nifong publicly accused the lacrosse team of erecting a "stone wall of silence" and refusing to cooperate with investigators. He expressed confidence that the accuser had been raped. In some interviews he added details, describing how the accuser said she struggled to breathe as she was assaulted.

"[T]he circumstances of the rape indicated a deep racial motivation for some of the things that were done," he told NBC-17 News, according to the Bar complaint.

The accuser, who was enrolled at N.C. Central University in Durham, is black. The lacrosse players, indicted in April and May, are white. The initial reports also accused some players of using racial epithets during the party.

Nifong's early media comments are just what the Bar's rules are intended to discourage, Mitchell said. But the Duke lacrosse case deviated from normal practices, Mitchell noted, with the prosecutor and defense lawyers often making damaging public statements.

The accused players have maintained their innocence. No trial date has been set, but the case has been in the news for months as defense lawyers used a new state discovery law to expose weaknesses in the prosecution's case, including the lack of any DNA evidence linking the players to the woman and contradictions in her statements.

A Durham judge set a Feb. 5 date to hear defense motions.

(Staff writers Matthew Eisley, Andrea Weigl and Lisa Hoppenjans, and researcher Lamara Williams-Hackett contributed to this report.)
Staff writer Matt Dees can be reached at 956-2433 or matt.dees@newsobserver.com.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ideas_opin...9p-407363c.html
New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
The Duke Three should go free

Friday, December 29th, 2006

It has become plainly obvious that a gross miscarriage of justice has been perpetrated against the three Duke University lacrosse players who were charged last spring with raping a stripper at a raucous house party.

Enough evidence has unfolded to conclude that Collin Finnerty of Garden City, L.I., Reade Seligmann of Essex Fells, N.J., and David Evans of Bethesda, Md., are the targets of an irresponsible prosecution by a race-baiting, politically craven district attorney.

Durham, N.C., DA Michael Nifong played the race card early and often in branding Finnerty, Seligmann and Evans, who are white, as having gang-raped a black woman. He called them "racists," and "hooligans" whose "daddies could buy them expensive lawyers."

"I'm not going to allow Durham's view in the minds of the world to be a bunch of lacrosse players at Duke raping a black girl," he said on his way to winning reelection with solid black support.

But last week, Nifong dropped the rape charges after defense lawyers proved he hadn't turned over exculpatory DNA evidence, probably deliberately. Even so, Nifong outrageously let stand sex abuse and kidnapping charges that any jury would dismiss out of hand.

- snip -

http://www.venturacountystar.com/vcs/opini...5242775,00.html
Assault case at Duke smells of an overreaching DA

By Dan K. Thomasson
December 29, 2006

The sensational rape allegations surrounding three Duke University lacrosse players present an almost perfect testimonial to growing concerns about the violence being done to the nation's justice system by ambitious, unbridled prosecutors who apparently have been reared on "ripped from the headlines" television like "Law and Order" in which self-righteous, unyielding district attorneys never lose.

With the case that won him re-election as the prosecutor in Durham, N.C., about to come down around his ears, Michael Nifong seems to be running for shelter as fast as his legs will carry him, eliminating the key charge of rape and telling a national newspaper that the other allegations of sexual assault and kidnapping also might be dropped if the exotic dancer who brought them shows any more doubt.

In case you have been living in a vacuum, the woman, who is working her way through a state college, charged that three members of the Duke lacrosse team she and another stripper had been hired to entertain at a private team party dragged her into the bathroom and raped her.

It was a natural for Nifong, who was in a tough re-election campaign. It pitted a black woman against white men and privilege against poverty. He jumped into the case with the alacrity of an alligator smelling lunch. His entire case now seems to have been based almost solely on the woman's word; it has been obvious for some time that the evidence doesn't support him.

None of the DNA taken from the woman's underwear or her body matched anyone on the team. The DNA, however, did come from several other unidentified men, a fact Nifong and the lab director colluded to withhold from the defense team for some time.

The woman's identification of her alleged assailants was flawed as well, and appears to have been manipulated by the police. One of those identified has evidence he wasn't even at the party during the claimed incident.

After telling nurses and doctors and anyone who would listen that she was raped, she now says that she can't be certain there was penile penetration, resulting in the dropped rape charge.

It's shades of Tawana Brawley, the young black woman who claimed she had been kidnapped and raped by unknown white assailants only to finally admit she had made the whole thing up to escape her parents' wrath for being delinquent.

Nifong has begun to realize the fragility of his case and is looking for a way out, noting that he will follow the evidence wherever it takes him. And since it takes him nowhere, one would expect him to drop the matter.

He now faces the possibility of an ethics investigation by the North Carolina bar association and at least one congressman has asked U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez to investigate. Going to trial and letting a jury find the accused men innocent might be his only way to save any face.

Increasingly, this entire affair looks like a disgraceful travesty. The tragedy is not just that it is another incident of abused legal authority, but that it has disrupted the lives of young men who now will always reside under a shadow; damaged the reputation of a great university that has seen its admissions applications decline precipitously; and caused the parents of the accused endless hours of pain and huge amounts of money.

In some ways, the university's officials are no better than Nifong, having overreacted in a classic example of destructive political correctness by firing the lacrosse coach and canceling the season of one of the best lacrosse teams in the nation.

But none of this, of course, needed to happen. A prudent prosecutor would have not let his own re-election problems or the specter of racial politics drive him into making hasty decisions based on nothing more than the word, disputed early on by her fellow stripper, of a woman who had no evidence to back her up.

In some ways, the woman herself, whatever her motives, has been a victim of this prosecutor, who may have used her far more violently than what she has alleged.

— Dan K. Thomasson is former editor of the Scripps Howard News Service.

http://www.newsobserver.com/567/story/526212.html
Rick Martinez:
Published: Dec 29, 2006 12:30 AM
Modified: Dec 29, 2006 03:10 AM

Will Duke take a look at itself?

Rick Martinez, Correspondent
The New Year is often a fresh start. Some Duke University faculty members and administrators should take advantage of the opportunity to reflect on their actions of the past year and to reclaim their reputations.

As the criminal case against David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann crumbles, the university must muster the intellectual courage to ask a critical question: Did Duke contribute to a rush to judgment by fanning an atmosphere of presumed racism and privilege by the lacrosse team?

I think it did. If Duke chooses not to probe its institutional actions and statements, it will sweep under the rug a lot of damning evidence.

President Richard Brodhead cancelled the lacrosse team's season and accepted the resignation of Coach Mike Pressler even before the first meeting of the committee charged to investigate the team's reported bad behavior, alcohol abuse and racial attitudes.

In an April 5 letter announcing five committees created in the wake of the rape allegations, Brodhead liberally cited systemic racism, fear of sexual coercion and assault and a societal privilege that preserves inequality as a basis for his actions.

A day later, a full-page ad entitled "What Does Social Disaster Sound Like?" ran in the Duke Chronicle, the student newspaper. The ad included a sophomoric collection of race-baiting quotes attributed to unnamed students. The ad was supported by 88 Duke faculty members.

Among them was Karla FC Holloway, William R. Kenan professor of English. In the Summer 2006 edition of "The Scholar and Feminist Online," a Web publication of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, Holloway wrote:

"At Duke University this past spring, the bodies left to the trauma of a campus brought to its knees by members of Duke University's Lacrosse team were African American and women. I use the kneeling metaphor with deliberate intent. It was precisely this demeanor towards women and girls that mattered here. The Lacrosse team's notion of who was in service of whom and the presumption of privilege that their elite sports' performance had earned seemed their entitlement as well to behaving badly and without concern for consequence."

Yet, on May 1, the faculty-dominated committee investigating the lacrosse team found no evidence of racism, sexism or privilege. It found the team to be academically and athletically responsible. The report hammered the team on alcohol abuse, and said last year's team had a higher number of alcohol-related infractions than previous teams. However, it cautioned that the increase might be the result of more diligent monitoring, rather than rowdier behavior.

The report also discovered that despite a perception that the team was a primary nuisance in the neighborhoods adjoining Duke's East Campus, in fact, none of the houses rented by lacrosse players was among the top 10 that neighbors complained about.

Even that pales next to last week's revelation that the alleged victim cannot say with certainty that a rape actually occurred. If this case is dropped, and many a legal expert says it will be, Evans, Finnerty and Seligmann are owed a huge public apology, especially by those Duke faculty members who used ugly allegations against the young men to attack a culture of racism and sexism that exists in their cloistered minds but rarely exists in the real world.

Normally, the predictable laments of racial and gender injustice from professors and feminists who attend women's center seminars are more comical than consequential. But at Duke this self-generated culture of pseudo-oppression helped send the three players, their teammates and Pressler down the river for an alleged crime that is supported by scant evidence.

Now, instead of issuing bandwagon press releases calling for Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong to step aside from the case, and embarking on a 12-city tour to deflect the unfavorable -- and at times, unfair -- media spotlight, Brodhead should stay home and deepen Duke's look in the mirror.

This time, the university should examine whether an obsession with attacking racism, sexism and privilege only contributed to it. It's an examination Duke sorely needs, and one the rest of higher education should pay close attention to.
Contributing columnist Rick Martinez can be reached at rickjmartinez2@verizon.net

http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson161.html
An Open Letter to Michael Nifong

by William L. Anderson
by William L. Anderson

DIGG THIS

Hello, Mike. Had I written this open letter last summer, I doubt you would have heard of me, but my sources in Durham (and they are good sources, Mike) tell me that I pretty much am on your enemies list. I’m glad I could accomplish that feat, but from what I can tell, that list is getting longer while we speak.

However, in this letter, I come to you in peace. I’m offering you advice, good advice, I might add, and if I were you, I would take it. Don’t get me wrong. I really hope that you not only lose your law license and your job, but since you were trying to take away the lives of three young men who had committed no crimes, I do hope that you have the opportunity to do a stretch in prison, or at least have to face that horrifying prospect. After all, there are people in this country who belong behind bars, and you are one of them.

But even though I want you to go to prison, I am going to offer you advice that I think very well not only could keep you out of what Lew Rockwell calls the crowbar motel, but also could save your career. Think about that, Mike. I am trying to help you keep your law license, your freedom, and maybe even your job, so you need to listen to me.

The first and most important thing is that you need to drop the kidnapping and sexual assault charges against Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans. I mean drop the charges the way that Duke University receivers drop passes at crucial times during a close football game. Those charges need to disappear, and fast, for if you insist on pushing them forward, it only will get worse for you.

As I give you this advice, let me caution you not to listen to people like Wendy Murphy. She has been on television championing your cause, and wrote this abomination of an op-ed for USA Today that declared your dropping the rape charges, but keeping the others, to be a "brilliant move." Trust me, Mike; you don’t want Murphy being your only cheerleader, for I can give you a list of law-abiding and respectable people who would refuse to spit on her grave only because they hate standing in long lines.

No, listen to me. Dropping those charges leads to my second point. For the past nine months, you have been telling the world you had a great case. Last spring, while reading something by your political allies, I saw where you had a "mountain of physical evidence" that pointed toward those three men having committed what the black journalist Cash Michaels called a "brutal rape."

As you know, that mountain never was on your side; it was on the other side. My guess is that you had that figured out the minute you spoke to Brian Meehan of the DNA lab last April (before you secured the indictments against Reade and Collin), as he gave you the bad news that the only thing DNA was going to do would be to further discredit Crystal and, by definition, your case.

That is when you made your biggest mistake. You lied, and then tried to cover the lie, and when you were caught, you gave a litany of excuses that rivals anything John Belushi would have given in one of his movies. Despite Murphy’s contention that you simply were trying to protect the "privacy" of the unindicted lacrosse players, reason tells the rest of us that you were not too worried about protecting people whom you publicly had labeled "hooligans" and "rapists."

Mike, I can assure you that Judge W. Osmond Smith III was not taken in by your various excuses that range from "I didn’t know" to "the dog ate my homework" to "no harm, no foul." Maybe another judge might have looked the other way before this case became The Story nationally. When the Los Angeles Times is writing editorials calling for your head on a platter, you have to understand that this no longer is a Durham case. It is a national case, and you cannot stuff that thing back into your little jurisdiction.

Thus, literally everything you bring into that courtroom on February 5 is going to undergo scrutiny from every news outlet and every legal analyst in the country, not to mention overseas. Believe me, that is not something you want to happen, as the outright dishonesty of your "evidence" is going to be hung out for the world to see. It is one thing for that to happen in the current arena dominated by writers and talking heads, where nothing official has happened.

However, once you put this dreck before a judge, and the court gets to see exactly what your "evidence" really is, you are going to be in much more trouble than you are now. At this moment, you still are guilty only of "bad judgment." If you walk into that courtroom with your witness in tow, your "investigators," and your "medical evidence" (or, better put, your medical non-evidence), at that point you are going to be seen as the D.A. who has perpetrated a fraud. At that point, Mike, you will have openly committed a crime for which will make you vulnerable to spending time in the crowbar motel. That is fraud, Mike, and I am using that term in the legal sense.

There is a way out. You can go to the courthouse today – right now, I urge you – and make the following declaration:

I am announcing today that I have dropped all charges against Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans. There will be no further charges, and no more investigations of the alleged events that occurred on March 13 and 14, 2006.

At the time the accuser made the charges, my conversations with police officers led me to believe there had been a rape and sexual assault of the woman in question. As a prosecutor, I was duty-bound to investigate and the information that police gave me was of the type that required me to pursue this case and seek the indictments.

However, after further examination of the charges, I no longer can conclude that they are credible, and if I am not sure myself of the credibility of the accusations, by law I cannot further pursue this matter in a court of law. From the start, I have made it clear that this office takes rape allegations seriously, and we will investigate those allegations.

I do regret any actions I took which might have appeared to be overzealous, but at no time did I act against the letter or spirit of the law. While I take responsibility for mistakes that I might have made during this episode, let me assure all of you that those mistakes were made in the pursuit of what I thought was a just course of action.

Granted, about everything I have written for you is a lie, but since you already have lied repeatedly as an officer of the court, one more lie won’t hurt you, especially since it will have been told in the course of your ending this legal fraud. After all, you did not make the initial rape allegations; it was a woman with a history of drug abuse, prostitution, and mental problems (she was hospitalized in 2005 for those). She was trying to keep from being involuntarily committed to a mental institution when she made the charges, and that hardly was your fault.

But if you drop the charges with the above declaration, you have something you can bring to the representatives of the North Carolina Bar Association, who already have summoned you to appear before an investigative body. You can claim you were trying to make sure that a possible rape victim who is black and poor would receive justice. You can claim you were overzealous, but sincere in your actions.

(You might even try to repeat some of the acting talent you showed when you demonstrated on national television the alleged choke hold that the accused put on the woman. You sure were convincing when the cameras were on you.)

If the members of the legal cartel – I mean, your fellow attorneys of this august body – act within their usual scope of things, you might just get off with a reprimand, provided you have not tried to bring a lying accuser, lying police officers, and anyone else who would be torn apart by defense attorney, into a court of law. If you go that far, you can bet that the authorities will have no choice but to throw you to the wolves.

Remember, there are prosecutors in North Carolina who tried to get someone executed, even though they had exculpatory evidence in their possession (which they failed to give to the defense of Alan Gell). They got off with bare reprimands, and both of them are gainfully employed in the law. You might want to speak to David Hoke and Debra Graves about how to grovel in front of the Bar Association investigative committee, so that you, too, can get your free get-out-of-jail card.

Above all, Mike the key is dropping these charges now. Take my advice, please. I may not like you, but I believe that it would be best for everyone involved if you were to punt, including you. If you refuse to take my advice and continue this fraud, then people who have some authority over you are going to dismiss the charges, and then they will deal with you. Mike, you have an opportunity to see that this humiliating experience does not happen, and I recommend that you take the proper course of action today.
December 29, 2006

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute

Ping to Post #14