CheesyMuslim
01-13-2007, 04:50 PM
Sorry bout that,
1. But GD Nifong wants out!
2. Now that he sees he can't possibly win a case for this tramp.
3. And knows that this mess he's made is getting all over himself, he wants to run away from it.
4. I say no, make this a$$wipe finish what he started.
5. Make him do the dirty deed.
6. If he passes this off, we are sure to see it dropped, like a hot potato.
7. I want this moron to crash and burn in the case that he started, breathed life into for his own political gain, and watch this sack of crap crash and burn!
8. There's noway he should be allowed off the hook on this one!
"
SNATCHED FROM: THE NEW YORK TIMES:
"January 13, 2007
Prosecutor Asks to Exit Duke Case
By DUFF WILSON and DAVID BARSTOW
DURHAM, N.C., Jan. 12 — The district attorney in the Duke lacrosse sexual assault case asked the state attorney general on Friday to take over the troubled prosecution, saying he faced a conflict of interest because of ethics charges filed against him by the state bar, officials involved in the case said.
The decision by the district attorney, Michael B. Nifong, throws new doubt on the future of a prosecution that has already suffered several sharp setbacks.
A spokeswoman for Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s attorney general, confirmed that the office had received Mr. Nifong’s request and said it would be discussed on Saturday. If Mr. Cooper agrees to review the case, it will remove a prosecutor who has become a lightning rod for fierce and unrelenting criticism.
Defense lawyers were jubilant, openly predicting that no prosecutor in the state would continue with a case that hangs almost entirely on the shifting accounts of the alleged victim, a stripper who claims she was assaulted after performing at a team party in March. The woman, who was consulted before Friday’s recusal, remained firm in her desire for the case to go forward against the three former lacrosse players, an official involved in the case said.
The players face charges of kidnapping and sexual offense that could put them in prison for decades.
Speaking of the recusal, Joseph B. Cheshire, the lawyer for David Evans, one of the defendants, said: “We’re very heartened by it. He should have done it weeks or months ago. For the first time, someone who is honest and objective and doesn’t have an agenda will look at this case. We feel confident that when they do, these young men will be exonerated and this case will be dismissed.”
Mr. Cheshire added that the attorney general should also look at possible obstruction of justice and manipulation of evidence by Mr. Nifong.
Friday’s action marked a stinging professional defeat for Mr. Nifong, who has faced accusations of incompetence, prosecutorial misconduct and ethical violations for his handling of the case. In his letter to Mr. Cooper, Mr. Nifong said the accusations of ethical wrongdoing, which were brought last month by the state bar, presented him with a conflict of interest between defending his own conduct and prosecuting this case.
“He feels very disappointed that he can’t go on for her,” said David B. Freedman, Mr. Nifong’s lawyer in the ethics case. “Mike at this point, as a result of the bar complaint, doesn’t want to be a distraction to the case or take away from the prosecution of the case, which the witness still feels very strongly about.”
According to friends, Mr. Nifong’s resolve had begun to falter even before the ethics charges were brought against him.
At a court hearing on Dec. 15, a DNA laboratory director admitted that he and Mr. Nifong had deliberately withheld exculpatory information from a report. Mr. Nifong prided himself on integrity, having been a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, yet the laboratory director’s testimony and his acknowledgment of the error undercut his reputation.
Things only worsened from there.
Some fellow district attorneys advised Mr. Nifong privately in Raleigh on Dec. 19 to take himself off the case. Mr. Nifong felt stunned and subdued, friends say, yet still could not bring himself to exit. In an interview with The New York Times two days later, he described such a step as tantamount to letting defendants handpick their own prosecutors.
But then the North Carolina State Bar filed an ethics complaint on Dec. 28, taking him to task for his early public comments about the case. It was an unprecedented rebuke for a prosecutor in the middle of a legal brawl. The next day, the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys issued a news release asking him to recuse himself immediately.
Mr. Nifong’s friends told him he had two choices: dismiss the case or ask the attorney general to take it over. It was a bitter decision, friends said. His reputation hung in the balance. Mr. Nifong decided he had to do something he had left to his investigators over the 10 months since the alleged assault: talk about it directly with the woman he called “my victim.”
In a two-hour meeting at his office on Thursday, Mr. Nifong and an aide talked about the choices, an official involved in the case said. He told the accuser that a trial would be brutal, but that he had already talked with the attorney general’s special prosecutions unit and trusted that office to give the case a fair review. He asked what she wanted to do.
She was concerned about the effect of the case on Mr. Nifong’s career, the official recalled. She wanted to sleep on the decision. She continued to insist she had been sexually assaulted.
On Friday, she and Mr. Nifong spoke by telephone. She again said she wanted to go forward. Although she was not happy about Mr. Nifong’s giving up of the case, the official said, she said she understood his reasoning and pledged to cooperate with any new team.
In Durham, Mr. Nifong’s exit was greeted with relief on all sides.
Irving Joyner, a law professor who has been monitoring the case for the N.A.A.C.P, expressed hope that the attorney general would bring new energy to the case. John F. Burness, senior vice president for public affairs at Duke, said the university hoped “this change will lead to a fair and speedy resolution of this case.”
Over 10 turbulent months, all the protagonists in the racially charged case have undergone sharp transformations in the pitiless glare of national publicity.
The defendants, who are white, were initially portrayed as boys gone wild. But in time, with the fraying of the evidence and careful maneuvering by their legal team, they emerged in news accounts as victims of a kind of reverse discrimination, promising young men whose lives were being destroyed by concocted accusations.
The accuser, who is black, was at first embraced at candlelight vigils. Investigators depicted her as the victim of a brutal assault. But her shifting and inconsistent accounts of what happened, combined with the absence of incriminating DNA evidence, have resulted in her being branded a false accuser.
But no one was more fully transformed in this case than Mr. Nifong. Once an obscure but respected career prosecutor, he is now routinely portrayed as having recklessly and stubbornly pursued a weak case for political gain.
Mr. Nifong compounded his troubles with seemingly avoidable blunders, most in the earliest weeks, before anyone was indicted. He ordered a lineup that violated standard police procedures. He spoke misleadingly in public about evidence in the case and disparaged the Duke lacrosse team as “hooligans” whose “daddies” would “buy them big-time lawyers.” He refused to hear out defense lawyers who proffered photographs and phone records intended to prove their clients’ innocence. Most significantly, he mishandled the DNA test results by failing to turn them over to defense lawyers for seven months.
After the indictments, he was repeatedly outgunned and outmaneuvered in the courts and in the news media by some of the best defense lawyers in North Carolina.
Never was the mismatch clearer than on Dec. 15, when defense lawyers pounced on his handling of the DNA test results. In court that day, with family and friends of the defendants in the audience, Mr. Nifong seemed almost disengaged, slumping in his seat, asking few questions as the defense team delivered body blows to his case.
Even before the DNA hearing, dozens of people had filed complaints against Mr. Nifong with the state bar. Mr. Nifong initially responded by saying he welcomed a review of all the lawyers — once the case was over.
He misjudged the bar.
A special section of the bar’s ethics code applies to public comments by prosecutors — but not private lawyers — and the bar had opened an investigation on March 30, just three days after Mr. Nifong began his media blitz.
The investigation culminated in last month’s formal complaint, which accused Mr. Nifong of making improper, inflammatory and misleading comments about the case. Mr. Nifong is to appear before a bar disciplinary committee on May 11.
Tom Lunsford, executive director of the state bar, said the complaint started with a grievance filed by a private lawyer.
Was it a lawyer from the defense team? “Can’t say,” he replied.
Nevertheless, no one can remember the North Carolina bar ever filing a complaint against a prosecutor for prejudicial publicity, much less in the middle of a case.
Not only did Mr. Nifong misjudge the bar, he misjudged the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys. Back in September, the conference had sent Mr. Nifong a letter offering help with the case, including support staff, a shadow jury and advice on responding to defense leaks.
“We try to take care of our own,” Thomas J. Keith, one of four district attorneys who signed the letter, said in an interview this month. Mr. Keith recalled Mr. Nifong’s response: “Tom, thanks for the letter, but I don’t need any help right now.”
As the public criticism of Mr. Nifong escalated, his fellow district attorneys began to hear rumblings that some state legislators were threatening to seek new oversight laws for all district attorneys. The DNA revelations on Dec. 15 only heightened their alarm.
On Dec. 19, several district attorneys met with Mr. Nifong and advised him to hand the case to a special prosecutor.
He had hoped they would stand together; instead they wanted him to pull out. Mr. Nifong was stunned.
Any hope he had of regaining their support probably ended three days later, on Dec. 22, when Mr. Nifong dropped rape charges against all three defendants, though he continued to press other sex offense charges. Mr. Nifong said he had acted after the woman told his investigator she could not be certain she had been penetrated by a penis. Although he did not say so at the time, the woman also changed several other major aspects of her story during that interview, including that just two, not three, lacrosse players had taken part in the attack. The third, she said, had only stood by.
Among his peers, the questions were obvious: Why had he not closely questioned his victim months earlier? How could he pursue a case with such divergent accounts from the key witness? Where was the proof?
The state bar filed its complaint on Dec. 28. Better than anyone, the district attorneys understood its rarity and potential political significance.
“That is what pushed us into action,” Mr. Keith said.
Two weeks later, Mr. Nifong asked the state attorney general to take over the case. "
Regards,
SirJamesofTexas
1. But GD Nifong wants out!
2. Now that he sees he can't possibly win a case for this tramp.
3. And knows that this mess he's made is getting all over himself, he wants to run away from it.
4. I say no, make this a$$wipe finish what he started.
5. Make him do the dirty deed.
6. If he passes this off, we are sure to see it dropped, like a hot potato.
7. I want this moron to crash and burn in the case that he started, breathed life into for his own political gain, and watch this sack of crap crash and burn!
8. There's noway he should be allowed off the hook on this one!
"
SNATCHED FROM: THE NEW YORK TIMES:
"January 13, 2007
Prosecutor Asks to Exit Duke Case
By DUFF WILSON and DAVID BARSTOW
DURHAM, N.C., Jan. 12 — The district attorney in the Duke lacrosse sexual assault case asked the state attorney general on Friday to take over the troubled prosecution, saying he faced a conflict of interest because of ethics charges filed against him by the state bar, officials involved in the case said.
The decision by the district attorney, Michael B. Nifong, throws new doubt on the future of a prosecution that has already suffered several sharp setbacks.
A spokeswoman for Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s attorney general, confirmed that the office had received Mr. Nifong’s request and said it would be discussed on Saturday. If Mr. Cooper agrees to review the case, it will remove a prosecutor who has become a lightning rod for fierce and unrelenting criticism.
Defense lawyers were jubilant, openly predicting that no prosecutor in the state would continue with a case that hangs almost entirely on the shifting accounts of the alleged victim, a stripper who claims she was assaulted after performing at a team party in March. The woman, who was consulted before Friday’s recusal, remained firm in her desire for the case to go forward against the three former lacrosse players, an official involved in the case said.
The players face charges of kidnapping and sexual offense that could put them in prison for decades.
Speaking of the recusal, Joseph B. Cheshire, the lawyer for David Evans, one of the defendants, said: “We’re very heartened by it. He should have done it weeks or months ago. For the first time, someone who is honest and objective and doesn’t have an agenda will look at this case. We feel confident that when they do, these young men will be exonerated and this case will be dismissed.”
Mr. Cheshire added that the attorney general should also look at possible obstruction of justice and manipulation of evidence by Mr. Nifong.
Friday’s action marked a stinging professional defeat for Mr. Nifong, who has faced accusations of incompetence, prosecutorial misconduct and ethical violations for his handling of the case. In his letter to Mr. Cooper, Mr. Nifong said the accusations of ethical wrongdoing, which were brought last month by the state bar, presented him with a conflict of interest between defending his own conduct and prosecuting this case.
“He feels very disappointed that he can’t go on for her,” said David B. Freedman, Mr. Nifong’s lawyer in the ethics case. “Mike at this point, as a result of the bar complaint, doesn’t want to be a distraction to the case or take away from the prosecution of the case, which the witness still feels very strongly about.”
According to friends, Mr. Nifong’s resolve had begun to falter even before the ethics charges were brought against him.
At a court hearing on Dec. 15, a DNA laboratory director admitted that he and Mr. Nifong had deliberately withheld exculpatory information from a report. Mr. Nifong prided himself on integrity, having been a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, yet the laboratory director’s testimony and his acknowledgment of the error undercut his reputation.
Things only worsened from there.
Some fellow district attorneys advised Mr. Nifong privately in Raleigh on Dec. 19 to take himself off the case. Mr. Nifong felt stunned and subdued, friends say, yet still could not bring himself to exit. In an interview with The New York Times two days later, he described such a step as tantamount to letting defendants handpick their own prosecutors.
But then the North Carolina State Bar filed an ethics complaint on Dec. 28, taking him to task for his early public comments about the case. It was an unprecedented rebuke for a prosecutor in the middle of a legal brawl. The next day, the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys issued a news release asking him to recuse himself immediately.
Mr. Nifong’s friends told him he had two choices: dismiss the case or ask the attorney general to take it over. It was a bitter decision, friends said. His reputation hung in the balance. Mr. Nifong decided he had to do something he had left to his investigators over the 10 months since the alleged assault: talk about it directly with the woman he called “my victim.”
In a two-hour meeting at his office on Thursday, Mr. Nifong and an aide talked about the choices, an official involved in the case said. He told the accuser that a trial would be brutal, but that he had already talked with the attorney general’s special prosecutions unit and trusted that office to give the case a fair review. He asked what she wanted to do.
She was concerned about the effect of the case on Mr. Nifong’s career, the official recalled. She wanted to sleep on the decision. She continued to insist she had been sexually assaulted.
On Friday, she and Mr. Nifong spoke by telephone. She again said she wanted to go forward. Although she was not happy about Mr. Nifong’s giving up of the case, the official said, she said she understood his reasoning and pledged to cooperate with any new team.
In Durham, Mr. Nifong’s exit was greeted with relief on all sides.
Irving Joyner, a law professor who has been monitoring the case for the N.A.A.C.P, expressed hope that the attorney general would bring new energy to the case. John F. Burness, senior vice president for public affairs at Duke, said the university hoped “this change will lead to a fair and speedy resolution of this case.”
Over 10 turbulent months, all the protagonists in the racially charged case have undergone sharp transformations in the pitiless glare of national publicity.
The defendants, who are white, were initially portrayed as boys gone wild. But in time, with the fraying of the evidence and careful maneuvering by their legal team, they emerged in news accounts as victims of a kind of reverse discrimination, promising young men whose lives were being destroyed by concocted accusations.
The accuser, who is black, was at first embraced at candlelight vigils. Investigators depicted her as the victim of a brutal assault. But her shifting and inconsistent accounts of what happened, combined with the absence of incriminating DNA evidence, have resulted in her being branded a false accuser.
But no one was more fully transformed in this case than Mr. Nifong. Once an obscure but respected career prosecutor, he is now routinely portrayed as having recklessly and stubbornly pursued a weak case for political gain.
Mr. Nifong compounded his troubles with seemingly avoidable blunders, most in the earliest weeks, before anyone was indicted. He ordered a lineup that violated standard police procedures. He spoke misleadingly in public about evidence in the case and disparaged the Duke lacrosse team as “hooligans” whose “daddies” would “buy them big-time lawyers.” He refused to hear out defense lawyers who proffered photographs and phone records intended to prove their clients’ innocence. Most significantly, he mishandled the DNA test results by failing to turn them over to defense lawyers for seven months.
After the indictments, he was repeatedly outgunned and outmaneuvered in the courts and in the news media by some of the best defense lawyers in North Carolina.
Never was the mismatch clearer than on Dec. 15, when defense lawyers pounced on his handling of the DNA test results. In court that day, with family and friends of the defendants in the audience, Mr. Nifong seemed almost disengaged, slumping in his seat, asking few questions as the defense team delivered body blows to his case.
Even before the DNA hearing, dozens of people had filed complaints against Mr. Nifong with the state bar. Mr. Nifong initially responded by saying he welcomed a review of all the lawyers — once the case was over.
He misjudged the bar.
A special section of the bar’s ethics code applies to public comments by prosecutors — but not private lawyers — and the bar had opened an investigation on March 30, just three days after Mr. Nifong began his media blitz.
The investigation culminated in last month’s formal complaint, which accused Mr. Nifong of making improper, inflammatory and misleading comments about the case. Mr. Nifong is to appear before a bar disciplinary committee on May 11.
Tom Lunsford, executive director of the state bar, said the complaint started with a grievance filed by a private lawyer.
Was it a lawyer from the defense team? “Can’t say,” he replied.
Nevertheless, no one can remember the North Carolina bar ever filing a complaint against a prosecutor for prejudicial publicity, much less in the middle of a case.
Not only did Mr. Nifong misjudge the bar, he misjudged the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys. Back in September, the conference had sent Mr. Nifong a letter offering help with the case, including support staff, a shadow jury and advice on responding to defense leaks.
“We try to take care of our own,” Thomas J. Keith, one of four district attorneys who signed the letter, said in an interview this month. Mr. Keith recalled Mr. Nifong’s response: “Tom, thanks for the letter, but I don’t need any help right now.”
As the public criticism of Mr. Nifong escalated, his fellow district attorneys began to hear rumblings that some state legislators were threatening to seek new oversight laws for all district attorneys. The DNA revelations on Dec. 15 only heightened their alarm.
On Dec. 19, several district attorneys met with Mr. Nifong and advised him to hand the case to a special prosecutor.
He had hoped they would stand together; instead they wanted him to pull out. Mr. Nifong was stunned.
Any hope he had of regaining their support probably ended three days later, on Dec. 22, when Mr. Nifong dropped rape charges against all three defendants, though he continued to press other sex offense charges. Mr. Nifong said he had acted after the woman told his investigator she could not be certain she had been penetrated by a penis. Although he did not say so at the time, the woman also changed several other major aspects of her story during that interview, including that just two, not three, lacrosse players had taken part in the attack. The third, she said, had only stood by.
Among his peers, the questions were obvious: Why had he not closely questioned his victim months earlier? How could he pursue a case with such divergent accounts from the key witness? Where was the proof?
The state bar filed its complaint on Dec. 28. Better than anyone, the district attorneys understood its rarity and potential political significance.
“That is what pushed us into action,” Mr. Keith said.
Two weeks later, Mr. Nifong asked the state attorney general to take over the case. "
Regards,
SirJamesofTexas