The Duke Witch Hunt Has Ended

Today at 2:30, Attorney General Roy Cooper of North Carolina will announce that all charges are being dropped against the three Duke Lacrosse players. It might be unfair to the Salem witch hunters to call Mike Nifong's travesty a witch hunt. Now Nifong is under indictment by the state bar for a long rapsheet, including withholding excupatory DNA evidence from the defense and lying to both the court and the bar. He will stand trial in June and face disbarment, after which time I hope the three students sue him for defamation for every penny he has. I don't know what the law says about suing frivolous prosecutors, so I do not know whether they can do that. I would love to see false arrest charges brought against the accuser, but Attorney General Roy Cooper has announced that he will not bring charges against her, Crystal Gail Mangum, because she may have believed the stories she was telling. I wish his brand of justice had been applied to Scooter Libby. At Foxnews.com, her family chose to remind all of us that they are poor and black. I suppose it was poverty that influenced Mangum's attempt to run over a policeman with a car in 2003.
Nifong never had a case to begin with. If we need to rehash it, here are the small problems he faced from the first moment of the investigation: 1) the accuser, Crystal Gail Mangum, described her attackers as heavy-set, 270-280 pounds, which is 100 pounds heavier than any Lacrosse player. 2) Mangum repeatedly failed to pick out Lacrosse players from the lineups that policemen furnished 3) one indicted player had an airtight alibi supported by a taxi driver and ATM recoeds 4) Mangum changed her story more times and in bigger degrees than Britney Spears has changed her hairstyle, 5) the other stripper said that the accuser was never alone with anyone, and 6) Crystal Mangum had DNA from several men on her, but none matched a Lacrosse player. Other than that, it was a good case. From Day 1, Nifong did not have a single piece of evidence other than the word of the accuser, who had made similar frivolous accusations before. I hope the bar throws the book at Nifong. This case has thus far resulted in the resurgence of the New Black Panther Party, the reelection of Mike Nifong, and the defamation of three students, who were unwise to hire strippers but completely innocent of rape and kidnapping.
Also, those 80+ professors at Duke who signed a document condemning the players need to apologize, but that probably is not going to happen this side of eternity either.