Through a campaign of lying—aided by the police, the media, and Duke University’s administration and faculty leadership—Durham County District Attorney Michael Nifong was able to ram through false charges of rape, kidnapping, and sexual assault against three Duke University members of the lacrosse team. By June 2006, things looked bleak for the accused, as it became evident that Nifong might well succeed in getting the case to a jury, and then convincing those jurors to convict.
Although a year later, the charges would be dismissed and Nifong would be disbarred, such outcomes seemed impossibly far off in the summer of 2006, as the prosecution racked up one victory over another. Acquiescing to demands from the North Carolina NAACP and Nifong, a judge imposed a gag order on all parties, something that obviously benefited Nifong, since he had already made a number of irresponsible statements to the media which ignited negative press coverage of the lacrosse players and inflamed the local population.
On August 25, 2006, the New York Times published a lengthy front-page article featuring a 33-page report from Durham Sgt. Mark Gottlieb, who claimed to have written the entire document from memory. Gottlieb—who had pushed the case from the beginning—wrote an obvious fabrication that claimed that accuser Crystal Mangum had not changed her stories (when original police reports said otherwise), and that she had accurately described her alleged assailants (when police reports said otherwise). In any other case, the NYT would certainly have recognized the report to be fraudulent, but because the paper was hellbent on driving this case regardless of the evidence.
Stuart Taylor—who later co-authored the definitive book on the crisis with KC Johnson—dismissed the Times’ article as fatally-flawed, writing in Slate:
…the piece cultivates a meretricious appearance of balance. But its flaws are so glaring that it was shredded by bloggers within hours after it hit my doorstep. They were led by a Durham group called Liestoppers and by KC Johnson, an obscure but brilliant New York City history professor of centrist political views. Johnson alone has produced more insightful (if sometimes one-sided) analysis and commentary on the Duke case—about 60,000 words—than all the nation’s newspapers combined.
The Wilson-Glater piece highlights every superficially incriminating piece of evidence in the case, selectively omits important exculpatory evidence, and reports hotly disputed statements by not-very-credible police officers and the mentally unstable accuser as if they were established facts. With comical credulity, it features as its centerpiece a leaked, transparently contrived, 33-page police sergeant’s memo that seeks to paper over some of the most obvious holes in the prosecution’s evidence.
Whatever advantage the Durham police hoped would be gained by submitting the obviously-fabricated report to the “Newspaper of Record” was quickly lost, as bloggers and other experts took it apart. Taylor’s incisive analysis quickly put to rest the notion that the police and prosecutors had the “ace” up their sleeves.
The case against the lacrosse players took a huge blow in October 2006, when the late Ed Bradley of “60 Minutes” blew up the case so badly that no reasonable person could conclude the charges were anything but fraudulent. It was Bradley’s last broadcast before he died of cancer, and when he was done, so was Nifong’s case, even though Durham County’s voters elected him a few weeks later in the general election.
But the worst was to come for Nifong on December 15, 2006, at a hearing in a Durham courtroom, when the defense got DNA expert Brian Meehan to admit under oath that he and Nifong had agreed to withhold exculpatory DNA results from the defendants. If there was, as KC Johnson called it, the “Perry Mason Moment,” it was then. Wrote Johnson:
Seligmann attorney Jim Cooney: “Was the exclusion of material the result of a specific agreement between you and representatives of the state of North Carolina?”
DNA Security director Brian Meehan: Yes.
One could say that the defense sprung a trap for Nifong and he stepped into it, an action that would define his entire career and personify the police and prosecutorial misconduct that ultimately would make Nifong a pariah and result in his disbarment. About a week before the hearing, Nifong dumped the raw data of the DNA results on the defense with no interpretation or anything to explain what they had before them.
While Nifong believed he had “technically” turned over the DNA evidence, it was up to the defense to figure out what all those papers with DNA markers printed on them meant. Instead of hiring experts, the defense team had one of their own attorneys, Brad Bannon, learn to recognize and read DNA data, and it was Bannon who discovered that not only did the DNA results show that no lacrosse player had any DNA anywhere on Mangum’s body, but that she had DNA of other unidentified men that demonstrated she had been having sex with them. Wrote KC Johnson:
Under questioning from Brad Bannon, Brian Meehan was asked about the standards for reports at DNA Security. Item #4 states, “Reports shall include results for each DNA test.”
Bannon read his own lab’s protocols to Meehan. His response, “By the letter of the standard, it diverges from the letter of that standard.”
Meehan added: “I don’t have a legal justification or a reason—I was just trying to do the right thing.”
He conceded that his handling of the lacrosse case violated his own lab’s protocol—but, he stressed, “not just because the district attorney told me to.” (emphasis added)
While the results of the hearing signaled the beginning of the end for Nifong’s case, he demonstrated his continued contempt for the law by one more outrageous move. Shortly after the disastrous hearing, Nifong sent his investigator, Linwood Wilson, to do something his office had not yet done: interview Mangum. During the alleged interview, Wilson “happened” to have pictures of Selgimann, Finnerty, and Evans “fall” from his briefcase, and Mangum then claimed those three were her so-called attackers.
After the so-called interview, Nifong then dropped the rape charges, but kept the ones on kidnapping and sexual assault, with Mangum changing her timelines and then claimed she didn’t know if she had been raped at all. It was a last desperate move, one that Wendy Murphy would call a “masterstroke” in a USA Today op-ed, but that other entities, like the Los Angeles Times, saw through in calling for all charges to be dismissed.
That was Nifong’s last hurrah. The North Carolina State Bar soon filed misconduct charges against him for his prejudicial statements made during media interviews early in the case, and then soon amended those charges to include withholding of evidence. He begged off the case and handed it off to North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper.
Cooper hired two experienced North Carolina prosecutors, Mary Winstead and the late James Coman, to investigate the case, examine the evidence, and decide if the case should be dismissed or proceed to trial. Not surprisingly, after a thorough examination of the evidence and after numerous interviews with the accused, Mangum, and other witnesses, they recommended that the charges be dismissed, but they also urged Cooper to do what prosecutors rarely do: declare the accused students to be “innocent.”
Two months later, the North Carolina State Bar stripped Nifong of his law license, telling him he could reapply for it in five years. He never did. Later that summer, a judge convicted Nifong of criminal contempt for lying in court and had him spend a day in jail. Nifong lost his job as district attorney along with the extra $15,000 a year he hoped to gain for his pension.
The authorities, however, didn’t stop lying. In May, 2007, Durham City Manager Patrick Baker released a report which whitewashed the entire police operation and accused the defense of hiding evidence. Declared Baker:
I need to state that I am deeply troubled by the repeated allegations that the Durham Police Department investigators were not interested in discovering the truth in the matter or as the Raleigh News and Observer put it, “did not pursue basic evidentiary trails to learn what happened at the lacrosse party.” The investigative file is replete with numerous attempts by our investigators to contact witnesses and their attorneys seeking exculpatory statements and evidence.
The only part of that statement that was not a lie consisted of the words in quotations. Throughout the case, the Durham police used lie after lie in an attempt to frame three young men who clearly had committed no crime and who had not even touched Mangum, much less raped and assaulted her. Indeed, the report was just one more dishonest effort by the Durham authorities to legitimize actions that bordered on criminality. Wrote KC Johnson:
…only two explanations exist for Baker’s May 2007 statement: (1) in the highest-profile case in the city’s history, he allowed police to mislead him, causing him to mislead the public—in turn calling into question his competence; or (2) he willfully misled the public—in turn calling into question his ethics.
Like Mike Nifong, the Durham police had no intention of being truthful during the entire investigation. After Nifong had committed his office to filing charges and getting convictions of people who clearly were innocent, the Durham police engaged in dishonest behavior that should call into question any investigation that this department might undertake.
When it came to the City of Durham and Durham County, there were no honest people in any of the government agencies involved in this case. Police told nothing but lies just as did Nifong and his staff. The courts made sure that all of their actions were protected by legal immunity, thus denying justice for those falsely accused. KC Johnson best described the state of law enforcement in Durham with this statement:
In many ways, Durham’s legal system has reverted to a mirror image of what existed in the South 50 years ago, when defendants were halfway to conviction based on the color of their skin. Indeed, the closest historical parallel to Nifong’s behavior over the past five months comes from the 1950s and early 1960s, when district attorneys in the Deep South routinely filed specious charges against civil rights activists. Facts were irrelevant; everyone knew the accused were innocent. These cases politically aided the prosecutors, who, like Nifong, blatantly violated procedures just to get to court. Then, however, the national legal community, academics, and the media rallied against the injustices. Now, it seems, all three have different priorities.
