Duke lacrosse prosecutor disbarred - CNN.com
RALEIGH, North Carolina (CNN) — The prosecutor in the Duke University lacrosse team rape case was disbarred Saturday for unethical conduct, and the chairman of the disciplinary committee blamed “political ambition” for his downfall.
Those of you who are on my e-mail loop know that I have been following this case from the get-go. Living in the Carolinas, this has been in the news for the past year and a half, and I have faithfully kept up with this case. Mostly because it seemed so fishy right from the start.
From the beginning, people here have wondered why this case was being so zealously pursued with evidence that seemed scanty at best, non-existent at worst. There was no DNA evidence. There was no eyewitness evidence. The victim couldn’t identify her attackers. Inevitably, questions and conspiracy theories arose.
This happened in an election year, and the race was apparently pretty close. There were rumblings that this was all political, a way for Mike Nifong to ensure that he got the black vote. After all, what better way to ensure the goodwill of his voters than by making sure that justice for a less-than-privileged single mom was served, especially if that single mom was young and black and those accused of attacking her were privileged white boys?
Yet, there was still that matter of no evidence. There were still the niggling little doubts when the accuser couldn’t identify even one of her attackers. The only witness, aside from the accuser, had changed her story more than most people change their underwear. Just what in the Sam Hill was going on here?
But we all kept saying that there had to be more to the story than we were being told. Our faith in our justice system wouldn’t allow us to believe that a prosecutor’s fervor to be re-elected could possibly cloud his judgment this badly.
Tragically, for those three boys, we were all so very, very wrong. Mike Nifong’s political ambition wiped out his sense of justice and fairplay. It wiped out his sense of duty as an officer of the court. But worse than that, Mike Nifong’s political ambition ate the lives of three promising young men for over a year.
The three young men in question haven’t just lost that year and a half of their lives, either. They’ve lost their reputations, their good names, their standings within their communities. I’m sure they could speak more eloquently than I ever will as to what exactly the last year of their lives has been like, and I’d imagine none of the adjectives they’d use would be synonymous with “good.”
Oh sure, they were acquitted. Better still, the NC Attorney General said there’d been no basis for these charges in the first place and declared them innocent. But that doesn’t change the fact that they will be “the three Duke lacrosse players accused of rape” for quite some time to come. It doesn’t change the fact that, regardless of what the NC AG said, there will be people who still don’t quite believe that these young men did nothing wrong.
Mike Nifong was disbarred today, but was justice really served? Will this erase what these young men have gone through and what they’re still going to face? Will this magically restore them to their former lives?
I know that it won’t, but I do hope that it helps these young men and their families to find some peace.
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