Friday, December 29 : Closed to commenting, but resume discussion of this case at Haunt Me In My Dreams…
Thursday, December 28 @ 6:13 p.m.: The North Carolina State Bar has filed ethic charges against Mike Nifong.
Thursday, December 28: KC Johnson, “Duke blogger” and history professor, penned an article for Inside Higher Ed chastising 88 members of Duke’s faculty for their hypocrisy to date.
KC included a statement I also included in a column I wrote last week, which is unpublished because it needs to be updated (emphasis added):
Over the last nine months, Mike Nifong has coupled demagogic appeals to prejudices based on class and race with a habit of making public charges unsubstantiated by material in his own files. Meanwhile, he overrode standard procedures (ordering police to show the accuser a lineup confined to suspects; refusing to meet with defense attorneys to consider exculpatory evidence; concealing DNA test results) and mocked due process. In one of his most outrageous lines, he mused, “One would wonder why one needs an attorney if one was not charged and had not done anything wrong.”
A prosecutor about to charge men with forcible rape wonders why such men need an attorney even if they didn’t nothing wrong? For a reminder of Nifong’s other boneheaded statements, see Scottsboro, NYT, and Hauntings, and keep scrolling.
In other news, 400 complaints have been filed against Nifong…
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The next hearing in the Duke case is scheduled for February 5, 2007, and I plan to be there to witness what likely will be rogue Durham County district attorney Mike Nifong’s last stand.
I predict that at the hearing, he’ll drop the remaining charges — kidnapping and sexual offense — against Collin Finnerty, Reade Seligmann, and David Evans.
Last Friday, Nifong dropped the first-degree forcible rape charge against the men not because the stripper-accuser said she wasn’t sure if she was penetrated by a male “sex organ” but because Brian Meehan, disgraced DNA “expert,” testified that he found no DNA matches between the men and the stripper-accuser. Nifong had no choice but to drop the rape charge.
I also predict that given Nifong’s and Meehan’s conspiracy to hide exculpatory evidence from the defense, Nifong’s career prosecuting cases will end in early 2007.
In the event Nifong does try to bring this case to trial in the spring, I suspect he won’t get very far because the illegal and unconstitutional photo line-up identification will be thrown out.
Mainstream media reporters and bloggers have written numerous Duke case-related articles since last Friday, and The Johnsville News is the place to go for a daily round-up of links.
One story stands out. When left-leaning, left-coasters at the Los Angeles Times (free reg. req.) tell a white prosecutor — who’s going after “privileged” lacrosse-playing, private university-attending white men for violating and brutalizing an “oppressed” black woman stripping to feed her kids — that “maybe” it’s time to drop all charges against them, you know Nifong is doomed.
The Duke case will go down in the history books as one of the most egregious examples of prosecutorial misconduct of the century, notwithstanding the attendant historic (and exaggerated) white-masters-raping-black-slaves meme and the “hateful” stereotype of black women as “hypersexual beings.” (See Lynne Duke on Duke)
Crow meat is not particularly tasty, or so I’ve heard, so I thought I’d pass along to Nifong a recipe for crow stew to make it easier to swallow.
Duke bloggers: Crystal Mess, LieStoppers, John in Carolina, Durham-in-Wonderland, Right Angles, Friends of Duke…
Other links: Earl Ofari Hutchinson – “Durham, North Carolina District Attorney Mike Nifong should do the right thing, cut his losses and drop the remaining charges of kidnapping and sexual assault against the three Duke University lacrosse players.”
Must-read article by Stuart Taylor and blogger KC Johnson (Wall Street Journal): “Black leaders–including Durham Mayor Bill Bell, the appallingly demagogic North Carolina NAACP and others–should know better. So should the powerful, identity-politics-obsessed hard left of Duke’s own faculty, 88 of whom issued a statement in April saying “thank you” to protesters who had branded the players rapists. And so should the media, most of which gleefully joined the clamor last spring.”
Sidebar — I’m quoted in “Duke rape case unravels.”
