A Dishonest Rewrite of the Duke Lacrosse Case

On an author's publicity tour, he's even more explicit in trying to taint the students who were falsely accused.

Excerpt: Among Mr. Nifong's violations of acceptable standards—no small assortment—none was more consequential than his contriving, with his lab director, to leave out the results of the lab report showing that DNA from four men who were not the students was found on the accuser—indicating that she had had sexual relations with them before the alleged attack. That no Duke player's DNA was found on her was all the more probative of innocence.

Of this long withholding of crucial evidence, in violation of state law, Mr. Cohan argues in his book that the district attorney had "cogent" reasons. In a radio interview on NPR's "The Diane Rehm Show" last month, Mr. Cohan asserted that Mr. Nifong had certainly not withheld the test results—he had delivered them. In his characteristically sympathetic grasp of Mr. Nifong's thinking, the author explained that the district attorney just "didn't make it easy for them. He didn't put a nice bow around it. He made them dig through it and find out there was DNA evidence from other men."

Mr. Cohan failed to mention that what the district attorney sent for the defense attorneys to dig through was nearly 2,000 pages of raw DNA files. In 2007 the North Carolina State Bar, the agency regulating law practice in the state, found Mr. Nifong guilty of 27 of the 32 ethical charges lodged against him in the case. He would lose his license to practice law. He was found guilty, at a separate contempt hearing, of having lied about the DNA evidence to the presiding judge in the criminal case.

In Mr. Cohan's claims of justice gone wrong in the Duke case—claims louder and more explicit on his publicity tour than in his book, though they are clear enough there—Mr. Nifong is Exhibit A: "an honorable man" who tried his best to "get to the bottom of the case."

An odd way to describe Mr. Nifong's methods. Few facts would be as startling, after the case unraveled, as the revelation that the district attorney had never himself interviewed the alleged victim, Crystal Mangum, about the charges. Clearly the district attorney didn't relish questioning this problem witness—not the first prosecutor to have concluded that ignorance is bliss. He had no need to talk to her, Mr. Nifong tells Mr. Cohan, because the important thing was that he found her story credible. Mangum is today serving 18 years for the murder of her boyfriend in 2011.

Full article here.