Way Past About Damn Time in Durham

Thank God for these young men and their families. Via MSNBC, this is some long overdue great news. North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper officially dismissed all remaining charges against the 3 Duke lacrosse players once accused of beating and raping a stripper at a party in 2006. Of special note is the scathing language used by General Cooper regarding disgraced Durham D.A. Mike Nifong and his overreaching zeal to prosecute these young men. Were justice a more concrete concept, in addition to Nifong being disbarred, these men and their families would be able to sue him and the accuser personally in civil court to recover damages for bail money paid and infliction of emotional distress to them and their families, among other things. That said, dismissal of the criminal charges is a fine place to start.

RALEIGH, N.C. - "Prosecutors dropped all charges Wednesday against the three Duke lacrosse players accused of sexually assaulting a stripper at a party, saying the athletes were innocent victims of a “tragic rush to accuse” by an overreaching district attorney.

“There were many points in the case where caution would have served justice better than bravado,” North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper said in a damning assessment of Durham County District Mike Nifong’s handling of the sensational case.

Cooper, who took over the case in January after Nifong was charged with ethics violations that could get him disbarred, said his own investigation concluded not only that the evidence against the young men was insufficient, but that no attack took place.

Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty and David Evans were indicted last spring on charges of rape, kidnapping and sexual offense after the woman told police she was assaulted in the bathroom at an off-campus house during a team party where she had been hired to perform.

But the attorney general said the eyewitness identification procedures were unreliable, no DNA supported the woman’s story, no other witness corroborated it, and the woman contradicted herself.

“Based on the significant inconsistencies between the evidence and the various accounts given by the accusing witness, we believe these three individuals are innocent of these charges,” Cooper said.

He said the charges resulted from a “tragic rush to accuse and a failure to verify serious allegations.”

Cooper called for the passage of a state law that would allow the North Carolina Supreme Court to remove a prosecutor “who needs to step away from a case where justice demands.”

“This case shows the enormous consequences of overreaching by a prosecutor,” he said.

The sensational case was troubled almost from the start. DNA samples found no link to any of the Duke lacrosse players, and a critical change to the accuser’s story forced the dismissal of rape charges in December. It drew so much attention that the attorney general planned to hold his news conference Wednesday Raleigh’s hockey arena.

The allegations at first outraged the city of Durham, a faded tobacco capital with a long history of tension between its large working-class black population and Duke, an elite private school where most of the students are white and many come from privilege. The woman is black and attended nearby North Carolina Central University; all three Duke players are white.

But that anger largely shifted to Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong as his evidence against the three fell apart and questions surfaced about the accuser.

Nifong, who was away from his office Wednesday, has been charged by the state bar with ethics violations connected to his handling of the case and could face disbarment.

“We just hope this traumatic experience for all involved ends with the minimum amount of damage,” said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose Chicago-based Rainbow/Push Coalition had offered to help the accuser pay for college but wasn’t able to contact her.

The 28-year-old woman initially said she was gang-raped and beaten by three white men at the March 13, 2006, party thrown by Duke’s highly ranked lacrosse team.

The three players who were indicted insisted the accusations were “fantastic lies,” and another dancer who had been with the woman also questioned if she had been raped and said the woman seemed drunk when she tried to drive her home that night.

In the end, it appeared the case was based only on the testimony of the accuser, whom defense attorneys said had told wildly different versions of the alleged assault.

That shifting story led Nifong to drop the rape charges in December, but the other charges remained.

Nifong’s recusal in January put the players’ fate in the hands of North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, who promised “a fresh and thorough review of the facts.”

The North Carolina State Bar charged Nifong with making misleading and inflammatory comments about the athletes under suspicion. It later added more serious offenses of withholding evidence from defense attorneys and lying to the court and bar investigators. He stands trial on those charges in June.

Nifong had accused the team of refusing to cooperate, calling them “a bunch of hooligans,” and promised DNA evidence would finger the guilty.

His case started to erode, though, when no DNA evidence tying any player to the accuser. The second dancer at the party called the allegations “a crock.” And Seligmann produced ATM receipts, cell phone records and other evidence suggesting he was somewhere else at the time.

Defense attorneys also attacked a key photo lineup that used only pictures of lacrosse players, and they noted the accuser had claimed a decade earlier that she had been gang-raped but it never led to an arrest. A series of tests Nifong ordered from a private lab found genetic material from several men on the accuser’s underwear and body, but none from any member of the Duke lacrosse team, they said."