In 2006, Michael Nifong had been a year in his job as Durham County District Attorney, appointed by Democratic Gov. Mike Easley of North Carolina with the promise he would not run for that position in the next election. However, after Nifong and his wife saw he could earn an extra $15,000 a year on his pension if he served four more years as a D.A., he decided to run for office in the upcoming Democratic primary in April 2006.
In March 2006, however, his electoral chances were poor. He trailed another candidate—a former prosecutor whom he had fired the year before—and his fund-raising efforts were falling short. Desperate for cash, he lent his campaign $30,000 with money borrowed from his pension. Nifong needed an election miracle—and he soon would receive it by pursuing false charges of white athletes raping a local black woman.
As explained in an earlier article, a black stripper named Crystal Mangum on the night of March 13, 2006, accused Duke lacrosse players of beating and raping her at a party. Three days later, Durham police came to the house where the alleged rape occurred and spoke to the three team captains that lived there. (The players had a cake in the kitchen, and one of the officers helped himself to a piece).
Durham Police Falsely Accuse the Team of Coverup
The officers not only interviewed the players but also took photos of the house and especially the bathroom where the rape allegedly occurred. Significantly, the bathroom had not been cleaned up since the party three nights earlier despite police insistence that the team captains knew about the rape and were trying to cover it up. In fact, the captains offered to give DNA samples and also take lie detector tests, both of which the police turned down.
Shortly after that, a Durham County judge handed down a non-testimonial order (NTO) demanding that all 46 white Duke lacrosse players give DNA samples to the police in order to determine Mangum’s alleged attackers. The NTO was clearly unconstitutional, but all of the players unanimously agreed to allow DNA swabs to demonstrate their innocence.
This fact is very important because the Durham police and the district attorney were trying to put out the false story that the players had set up a “blue wall of silence,” something picked up by Selena Roberts, a columnist for the New York Times, along with columnist Ruth Sheehan of the Raleigh News & Observer, who wrote an explosive piece entitled, “We Know What You Know,” and repeated the false accusation that the lacrosse players were actively covering up a rape.
With the police lying and their lies being broadcast by the media, the case exploded, forcing most of the players off campus, as death threats piled up against them. Shortly thereafter, Duke University canceled the lacrosse season and the president of Duke, Richard Brodhead, had the lacrosse coach, Mike Pressler, fired.
Despite the claims by some that the police “botched” the investigation, in reality, there was no real investigation, but rather an attempt by the police and the D.A.’s office to spin the evidence—all of it exculpatory—into a false rape case. Corporal David Addison of the DPD sent out a county-wide statement to the local Crime Stoppers claiming that the lacrosse players had “raped, sodomized, assaulted, and robbed” Mangum, adding that it “sent shock waves” across the community. Addison also told local reporters that there was “really, really strong physical evidence” of guilt—when, in reality, they had no evidence at all.
On March 27, Officer Ben Himan—who was investigating the case—told Nifong that they had no DNA evidence because the state crime laboratory that day informed police that there were no DNA matches of any of the lacrosse players to Mangum. Given what Mangum claimed—that she was raped vaginally, orally, and anally, and that her attackers were nude and didn’t wear condoms—the lack of a DNA match would have been impossible, especially given that the alleged “crime scene,” the bathroom, had not been cleaned since the party.
Himan also added that Mangum was telling shifting stories and clearly was not reliable. “We have nothing,” he told Nifong, who replied, “We’re f*cked.” He then told Himan to dig up anything he could find because he was staying with the case. Nifong then made a fateful decision, one that would help end his career and make him an international poster child for prosecutorial misconduct: he went to the press beginning that day and gave more than 50 interviews over the next couple weeks, claiming he had evidence that the lacrosse players had raped Mangum.
By going public and making outlandish statements to the media—which, of course, treated every word as gospel truth—Nifong broke the rules of conduct for prosecutors given by the North Carolina State Bar, specifically Section (f) which declared prosecutors should only make,
…statements that are necessary to inform the public of the nature and extent of the prosecutor’s action and that serve a legitimate law enforcement purpose, refrain from making extrajudicial comments that have a substantial likelihood of heightening public condemnation of the accused and exercise reasonable care to prevent investigators, law enforcement personnel, employees or other persons assisting or associated with the prosecutor in a criminal case from making an extrajudicial statement that the prosecutor would be prohibited from making under Rule 3.6 or this Rule.
Instead, Nifong quickly made the case go national, inflaming the local electorate, not to mention the rest of the country, and making it impossible for there to be fair hearings for the accused. Both defense attorneys and others in the legal system warned him that he was breaking legal rules of conduct, but he continued, egged on by the media, local Democratic Party activists, and the faculty and administration at Duke University.
On April 12, after the attorneys representing the team received notice of the DNA results, Nifong spoke at a rally held at North Carolina Central University—an HBCU in Durham where Mangum was taking classes online. Nifong first told the supportive audience that a rape definitely occurred, and that the DNA results showed only that the alleged rapists “left nothing behind,” and that this case was not going away, a statement the audience enthusiastically applauded. Although Nifong earlier had claimed that the DNA evidence would show who was guilty and who was innocent, he backed down from those words after getting the DNA test results and then started to claim that, before DNA evidence was available, men had been convicted of rape, and that was what he would do here. Susannah Meadows and Evan Thomas of Newsweek wrote:
Across town, at NCCU, the mostly black college where the alleged victim is enrolled, students seemed bitterly resigned to the players’ beating the rap. “This is a race issue,” said Candice Shaw, 20. “People at Duke have a lot of money on their side.” Chan Hall, 22, said, “It’s the same old story. Duke up, Central down.” Hall said he wanted to see the Duke students prosecuted “whether it happened or not. It would be justice for things that happened in the past.”
As one can see, Nifong’s rhetoric, as well as lies from the Durham police, had convinced most people in Durham that the players, indeed, were guilty of rape and that anything less than a conviction would be, as Newsweek put it, “beating the rap.” Chan Hall also spoke for many in Durham when he declared it didn’t matter if there was a rape or not: the white players from Duke needed to pay.
Again, it is important to note that no one tried to clean up the bathroom after the alleged assaults took place, which almost certainly would have been the case had a rape occurred there. The people who did it would have emptied the trash and scrubbed every inch of the bathroom with bleach or something else to eliminate any DNA evidence. That no one did that speaks to the point that nothing that Mangum, Nifong, and the Durham police were alleging happened. Guilty people would certainly have cleaned the bathroom; innocent people would have no reason to do so.
Nifong Wins the Primary
Durham—which is almost 50 percent black and where Duke University is the county’s largest employer—is a solid Democratic Party stronghold, so whoever wins the Democratic primary in an election will automatically win the general election in the fall. By pursuing the case and claiming that it was a racially motivated “hate crime,” Nifong was able to win enough votes to take the primary on May 2. However, he also was holding a tiger by the tail, as he was promoting a case with no evidence and hoping that the lies he and the Durham police were telling would be enough to push the case to trial, where an inflamed jury of Democrats would automatically vote to convict the accused young men.
To be able to make arrests, Nifong and the police set up a clearly flawed system for Mangum to identify her alleged attackers, having her watch an electronic photo array of only the white lacrosse players. As one of the attorneys told me later, Mangum Googled the zip codes of each player and picked the ones from those districts with the highest average incomes. Using that flawed “evidence,” Nifong got a Durham County grand jury to indict Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans. Finnerty and Seligmann were underclassmen who were arrested April 18, while Evans was arrested about a month later after his graduation from Duke.
Nifong also had what he claimed was inculpatory DNA evidence. After the state lab failed to find any DNA matches, he sent the rape kit sample to a private lab run by Brian Meehan, along with some false fingernails that Mangum had thrown into the bathroom waste basket when she and Kim Roberts had locked themselves in there during the party. Meehan’s lab found a “DNA transfer” between the discarded fake fingernails and more than 10 other members of the lacrosse team, including David Evans. Because team members had used that bathroom and discarded things into the waste can, one should not be surprised that the fake nails would have some slight DNA transfer, which is exactly what happened.
However, Nifong and the media called this the “smoking gun,” and made the dishonest claim that “David Evans’ flesh was found under Mangum’s fingernails.” Eight years later, Vanity Fair writer William Cohan would declare the same lie in his thoroughly fraudulent book on the lacrosse case, The Price of Silence. (While I will go into more detail on Cohan when I write of the media coverage of the case, I mention the book because Cohan bases a lot of his conclusions—that David Evans probably sexually assaulted Crystal—on the fake fingernail account).
Seligmann’s Alibi and the Arrest of Cab Driver Moez Elmostafa
After Seligmann was arrested and smeared in the media as a rapist, his attorney, the late Kirk Osborn, attempted to show Nifong a strong alibi that showed Seligmann was not near the Buchanan Street house when the rape allegedly occurred. Nifong told Osborn, “I’m not interested in reading fiction,” and refused to accept it. (On another occasion with the defense attorneys, Nifong put his hands to his ears and declared, “I can’t hear you”).
Nifong’s actions here clearly violated Rule 3.8, Comment 2 of the North Carolina State Bar Rules for Prosecutors, which states:
…a prosecutor should not intentionally avoid pursuit of evidence merely because he or she believes it will damage the prosecutor’s case or aid the accused.
Seligmann decided to leave early, calling a cab driven by African immigrant Moez Elmostafa, who had a green card and was undergoing the process to gain American citizenship. After picking up Seligmann, Elmostafa drove him to a bank where he withdrew money from an automatic teller (which provided a time-stamped photo of Seligmann), then to a restaurant drive-through where he bought food. Elmostafa then drove Seligmann to his dorm, where he entered using a time-stamped key card.
After Osborn gave this information to the media, the Durham Dishonesty Machine went to work. Durham police approached Elmostafa after CNN and ABC News interviewed him and he had signed a sworn statement about Seligmann’s whereabouts and told him he needed to change his story. When Elmostafa refused to lie, he was arrested on a trumped-up charge of shoplifting.
It would have been safer for Elmostafa to lie, since Durham police would not have arrested him for lying, and, if convicted of shoplifting, he faced deportation. However, he decided to tell the truth and Nifong retaliated by trying to have him thrown into jail. Elmostafa did face a trial before a judge but was acquitted, even though Durham police officers Ben Himan and R.D. Clayton (the officer who helped himself to the cake when police came to the Buchanan house March 16) were there to intimidate Elmostafa and his attorney.
The Elmostafa case showed just how low the Durham police and Nifong would go to protect the case that knowingly was built around lies. Furthermore, not one member of the Duke administration or faculty, nor any activist in Durham, white or black, stood up for Elmostafa—a black man who was willing to sacrifice his own freedom and future citizenship to tell the truth. Unfortunately, the North Carolina branch of the NAACP also was silent about Nifong’s attempt to unjustly convict him.
In a future posting, I will explain how the case finally blew up, resulting in Nifong’s disbarment and the dropping of all charges—and how the Durham Police Department gaslighted the public and got away with it.
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