Les Jones

True Crime > Press Questioning DA in Duke Rape Case

Big media outlets are expressing doubts about Durham County DA Michael Nifong's case, as well as his conduct in the alleged Duke Lacrosse rape.

The New York Times:

DNA samples from the woman and 46 players, which Mr. Nifong had said would identify the suspects, turned up no matches. Other DNA evidence proved inconclusive. Defense lawyers provided time-stamped photographs from the party to rebut the woman's assertion of a 30-minute rape.

Just this week, defense lawyers introduced records of interviews of a dancer hired to perform with the woman; the second dancer said they had been together at the party for all but five minutes and that any claim of rape was nonsense. [The second dancer has more recently said she is not so sure, and her lawyer, Mark Simeon, said on Saturday that her earlier comments were an off-the-cuff reaction to a question from the police.]

Newsweek:

Nifong is described by some lawyers as an adversary who gets dug in—and won't budge. But Nifong's motives may have been political as well. He was six weeks away from an election when the Duke case came up. Durham voters are almost evenly divided between black and white. One of Nifong's opponents was black and the other was white, but the white lawyer was much better known in the community, thanks to winning a high-profile murder case. (That opponent, former assistant D.A. Freda Black, became a bitter enemy of Nifong's after, she claims, Nifong fired her.) Nifong promised black voters that he would not let the Duke case drop. He indicted two of the players two weeks before the election. He won narrowly, taking a larger share of the black vote than the other white candidate.