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Durham County, North Carolina district attorney Mike Nifong has been disbarred for misconduct as a prosecutor in the notorious Duke University lacrosse players' case, in which he pursued rape charges against three lacrosse players although he knew of evidence indicating their innocence. The players' attorneys are now asking a judge to also hold Nifong in criminal contempt for lying to two judges several times during the course of the case.

Exculpatory Evidence Ignored

Nifong was disbarred on June 16 after a five-day ethics trial before a disciplinary committee, a day after he announced that he planned to resign as D.A. He had been aware that DNA evidence did not place the men — Dave Evans, Reade Seligmann, and Collin Finnerty — at the scene of the alleged rape, and that police were not able to place one of the players at the scene. Nevertheless, he sought and won indictments against the players. The case was based on the allegations of a woman hired to be a stripper at the lacrosse team's party in March 2006.

Lies to the Court

The disciplinary committee ruled that Nifong also lied on several occasions to Superior Court Judge W. Osmond Smith III and another judge involved in the case when he told them that he knew of no exculpatory information that would be helpful to the defense that he had not already turned over to the defense attorneys, as is a prosecutor's duty. This would form the basis of the criminal contempt charges that defense attorneys Joseph Cheshire and Jim Cooney are seeking.

A Precedent-Setting Case

Cheshire, the attorney for lacrosse team captain Dave Evans, noted that "Some people will take that as being mean-spirited and kicking somebody when they're down…but we believe that this issue is enormously important and it carries significant precedent and (the judge) ought to be the one to make that decision because it happened in his court."

(Source: abclocal.go.com)

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