Morality and the Law

MORALITY AND THE LAW  XCI

By Stephen Ellis

THE MORALITY OF NORTH CAROLINA’S RAPE CASE.

There are, and there have been, a lot of good District Attorneys.  Even great ones like Thomas E. Dewey There have also been some very bad ones: John Ashcroft, John Mitchell and Georgia’s Attorney General, Thurbert Baker (he’s the one who’s appealing a judge’s order to release Genarlow Wilson; a 17 year old boy sentenced to 10 years in prison for having consensual sex with a 15 year old girl), just to name a few.  But nowhere in the history of the United States can I find a District Attorney as prurient or completely evil as Mike Nifong.  He’s the D.A. from Durham, North Carolina who indicted three lacrosse players from Duke University (Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans) on rape charges based on the unsubstantiated testimony of a black stripper.

If the situation, created by and promulgated by Nifong wasn’t so sad, it would actually be funny.  What kind of a chief law-enforcement officer of the Court accepts the statement of a girl with a police record that three boys kidnapped, drugged and raped her…without any witnesses, without any forensic evidence to back her up…just her unsupported statement?  Every D.A. with whom I have spoken would love to send criminals guilty of a crime like that to jail…but would never even think about moving a case like that forward without substantiation of some sort.

Not Mike Nifong!  He had all the elements of a national publicity case on his desk and the thought that he might even get elevated to a higher political office was irresistible.  So what if his “victim” had a police record and had twice charged other men with the same crime starting at age 14.  Nifong didn’t care what happened to the three boys.  He had an election coming up in a heavily black-populated city and he was going to win that election no matter who he sacrificed!  Nifong announced to the press that he had a “mountain of evidence” and he was going to see that the three boys from Duke University went to jail for their crime against a poor black girl. He hinted to USA Today that he had a number of actual witnesses and photos of the criminal acts by the boys from Duke.  Of course, none of what he said was true, but his rhetoric got racial bigot, Al Sharpton, to say on TV that this was a brutal crime against blacks.

So evil was this man, Nifong, that, when the DNA evidence came back clearing the boys of any involvement and proving his “victim” to be a liar, Nifong attempted to conceal the DNA results.  When the power of national publicity caused the DNA evidence to be revealed, Nifong dropped the rape charges, but made a highly publicized statement that he was not dropping the kidnapping and sexual assault charges due to his “mountain of evidence”.

The DNA evidence that Nifong had concealed was that three different sperm DNAs were fund in the “victim’s” rectum, two other sperm DNAs were found in her vagina, and seven other male sperm DNA’s were found in her panties.  Every member of the Duke lacrosse team (including the three accused boys) was tested for DNA and none of the lacrosse team’s DNA matched any of the DNA from the “victim”.

Wouldn’t you think that this, alone, should have exonerated the accused boys?  But Nifong publicly stated that a lot of rape victims don’t even have DNA traces on their body, so the non-matching of DNA was “unimportant”.  Nifong neglected to mention that the reason for the absence of DNA in most cases is because the rape victims shower and clean themselves before they go to the hospital.  This “victim” however, went straight to the hospital.

Now let’s look at some of the harm Nifong did:  All three accused boys were immediately suspended by Duke University and jailed: their futures, at best, made uncertain because there will always be a percentage of the people who will believe they committed the crime.

Each boy had bail set at $400,000.  That means, no matter what…innocent or guilty, the 10% bail bondsman’s fee of $40,000 was lost forever.

Do you have any idea what a good criminal defense lawyer charges?  Especially in nationally publicized cases, it is not uncommon for the legal fee to be between $250,000 and $1,000,000.  Even more when the accused is a celebrity.  Fortunately for the accused boys, their families were somewhat affluent and got some fine lawyers to represent their sons, but even families with wealth do not normally carry around $250,000 to $500,000 in cash to pay lawyers (who demand to be paid in cash).  So, how do they get the money?  They sell their assets, they mortgage their homes, they sell their businesses…

In other words, not only were the boys given a life-threatening blow by Nifong, the parents of the boys were, likewise, punished to an irreparable extent.  How about the stress, the possible heart attacks, the people with whom the parents did business choosing not to do business with parents of the accused?  How about the stress the boys went through?  How about the “smear” on Duke University’s reputation because Duke stood firmly behind Nifong?

The duty of a District Attorney is not to see that someone is convicted of a crime.  It is to see that justice is done.  Too many people are in our prisons today because of over-zealous District Attorneys who have forgotten this creed.  Numerous prisoners are now being released because DNA evidence has proven them innocent despite ardent, obsessive, prosecution by a D.A. who measures his/her success by the number of convictions obtained.

Nifong, who resigned as District Attorney and lost his license to practice law has tritely admitted that he may have been a little too fervent and overstepped his bounds.  He has meekly asked the court to forgive him.

I hope they forgive him by sentencing him to ten years in prison.  He deserves it.