Make it three steps not one

Mike Nifong, the DA in Durham NC asked the State Attorney General to clean up his mess yesterday and asked the Attorney General to appoint a prosecutor to finish what he started. According to the papers, the defense team welcomed the move. Since the initial accusation, which came at a time when Nifong was running for re-election, his alleged victim has recanted parts of her story a couple of times. The Washington Post calls this a "troubled prosecution" - that is kind; incompetent and malicious are more apt. The case is a prime example of prosecutorial misbehavior. From the initial review of the evidence through all of the process that has played out since then, Nifong has bumbled evidence, ignored fundamental principles of law and generally tried to whip up the crowd in a way that is grossly inappropriate. In one point of evidence a director of a DNA laboratory admitted that he an Nifong deliberately withheld exculpatory evidence. Yesterday in the WSJ Dorothy Rabinowitz compared his actions to the kinds of excesses evidenced in some of the child endangerment prosecutions that DAs in Florida, California and Massachusetts engaged in a couple of decades ago. An African American Law Professor described Nifong's care with the case thusly, he "prejudged the case and injected inflammatory opinions that it was racially motivated... but he had not done the investigation, so he had no idea what happened." So bad was his conduct in this case that within three days of its initial development the North Carolina Bar opened an investigation of his conduct.

A bar complaint has been filed against Nifong which says in part that Nifong engaged in "dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation" and that as an officer of the court in his pretrial activity he attempted "public condemnation of the accused."

The best thing for this sorry affair is to move the remaining "case" to the AG, where it is simply likely to be dropped. But then NIfong should be disbarred and if there is any justice in North Carolina, the Duke students should go after whatever financial assets he has in a civil action, where they will undoubtedly win. That is strong stuff but Nifong deserves all the humiliation that society can muster, at least equal to what he put these students through.