Duke Lacrosse Prosecutor Mike Nifong Only Getting 24 Hours In Jail Is The Most Preposterous Thing I've Heard In Legal System History

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FOX (2007) – A judge has sentenced disgraced prosecutor Mike Nifong to one day in jail for lying to a judge while pursuing the Duke lacrosse rape case.

Nifong was held in criminal contempt of court Friday for lying to a judge when pursuing rape charges against three falsely accused Duke University lacrosse players.

Superior Court Judge W. Osmond Smith III immediately moved to consider a punishment for Nifong, who has already been stripped of his law license and has resigned from office. He faces as many as 30 days in jail and a fine as high as $500.

Reading his decision from the bench minutes after the conclusion of two days of testimony, Smith said Nifong “willfully made false statements” to the court in September when he insisted he had given defense attorneys all results from a critical DNA test.

In fact, Smith found, Nifong had provided the defense with a report on the DNA testing that he knew to be incomplete. The omitted data contained test results showing that DNA of multiple men, none of whom were lacrosse players, was on a woman who said she was attacked at a March 2006 party thrown by Duke’s lacrosse team.

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So the Duke Lacrosse 30 for 30 aired last night, and just as I expected, it was a must watch. Hope everyone who missed it has a chance to catch up on it at some point this week. Because as mad as it will make you and how absolutely outrageous the whole thing is, I think it’s never been more important than right now to see the damage that the mob-mentality and media/Internet witchhunting can do.

Let’s break down the top 5 most hated characters from it.

5) Crystal Magnum

Listen Crystal Magnum was a liar who purposely tried to ruin the lives of Duke students and, worst of all, made it harder for real sexual assault victims to come forward in the future. But she is easily the least hateable in this whole affair, at least for me. I mean she was basically diagnosed as psychotic. She was on an unclear mixture of sleeping pills and anti depressants and anti anxiety meds at the time of the incident. She was literally bipolar. I place way more blame on the prosecutors who used this obviously vulnerable and unstable person to further their careers and try to get reelected.

4) Mark Gottlieb

I would say he was a completely incompetent detective, but unfortunately he knew exactly what he was doing. Hated Duke students and actively looked to throw them in jail:

The News & Observer suggested that the supervisor of the lacrosse investigation, Sgt. Mark Gottlieb, had unfairly targeted Duke students in the past. Gottlieb has made a disproportionate number of arrests of Duke students for misdemeanor violations, such as carrying an open container of alcohol. Normally, these violations earn offenders a pink ticket similar to a traffic ticket. From May 2005 to February 2006, when Sgt. Gottlieb was a patrol officer in District 2, he made 28 total arrests. Twenty of those arrests were Duke students, and at least 15 were handcuffed and taken to jail. This is in stark contrast to the other two officers on duty in the same district during that same 10-month period. They made 64 total arrests, only two of which were Duke students. Similarly, The News & Observer charges that Gottlieb treated nonstudents very differently. For example, he wrote up a young man for illegally carrying a concealed .45-caliber handgun and possession of marijuana (crimes far more severe than the Duke students who were taken to jail committed), but did not take him to jail. Residents complimented Gottlieb for dealing fairly with loud parties and disorderly conduct by students.

Duke’s student newspaper, The Chronicle, depicted other examples of violence and dishonesty from Sgt. Gottlieb. It published that one student threw a party at his rental home off-East Campus before the Rolling Stones concert in October 2005. The morning after the concert, at 3 A.M., Sgt. Gottlieb led a raid on the home with nine other officers while the students were half asleep. It reported that one student was dragged out of bed and then dragged down the stairs. It reported that all seven housemates were put in handcuffs, arrested, and taken into custody for violating a noise ordinance and open container of alcohol violations. Sgt. Gottlieb reportedly told one student, an American citizen of Serbian descent, that the student could be deported. Other stories include the throwing of a 130 pound male against his car for an open container of alcohol violation, refusing the ID of a student since he was international, searching through a purse without a warrant, refusing to tell a student her rights, and accusations of perjury.

So this lacrosse investigation was right in his wheelhouse. Kicked things off with a totally illegal photo ID process:

Lawyers and media reports alike suggested the photo identification process was severely flawed. During the photo identifications, Mangum was told that she would be viewing Duke University lacrosse players who attended the party, and was asked if she remembered seeing them at the party and in what capacity. Defense attorneys claimed this was essentially a “multiple-choice test in which there were no wrong answers”,[98] while Duke law professor James Earl Coleman, Jr. posits that “[t]he officer was telling the witness that all are suspects, and say, in effect, ‘Pick three.’ It’s so wrong.”[99]

U.S. Department of Justice guidelines suggest including at least five non-suspect filler photos for each suspect included,[100] as did the Durham Police Department’s own General Order 4077, adopted in February 2006.

Then just basically botched the entire case from there on out, ending up with so many lawsuits and forced settlements that he just went ahead and killed himself.

3) The Media

You can honestly fall down a rabbit hole Googling and reading/watching old media coverage. That’s exactly what just happened to me. Spent so much time last night and this morning checking out literally everything on the internet that I don’t even have time to write more words here. Just check for yourself. Hate-watching is good for the soul.

PS – Great article from Slate here: Witness for the Prosecution?

2) Mike Nifong

Kind of an upset he’s not #1 here. The scumbag at the center of the entire thing. A guy who used the case as his meal ticket to getting reelected with a 40% black voter base and was quoted as saying the case would be millions of dollars of advertising for him. 24 hours in jail he got. 24 hours! Yeah he was disbarred which is a career ruiner. You know what else is a career ruiner, forever associating 3 kids with a rape they didn’t commit.

1) Duke Protestors/Professors/Administrators

Easily the scariest part of the whole thing. The Duke 88. The administrators and professors who immediately jumped all over this and declared them guilty. The protestors who called for all Duke lacrosse players to be castrated. Faculty members who are supposed to be there to teach and educate and help their students grow, instead couldn’t WAIT to turn on some of their own that they thought might be a little too rich and privileged.

Because remember, this was 10 years ago…imagine today? Holy shit. It would be 1000x worse. I doubt the lacrosse players would even make it to trial. They’d be murdered and dismembered by mobs with pitchforks well before that ever happened. They’d use a hot iron to brand their #TwitterHashtag into their chest right before they slit their throats.

The Group of 88 was a term applied to 88 professors at Duke University who signed an advertisement published two weeks after a woman asserted that she was raped by members of Duke’s lacrosse team. The assertion was later shown to be false, and the players declared innocent of all charges. The prosecuting district attorney Mike Nifong was judicially removed, charged with misconduct, and disbarred.

Karla F.C. Holloway, a professor of English and African-American Studies was the person who initially thought of placing the ad.

One signer, Kim Curtis of the Political Science Department, failed two members of the lacrosse team who were in one of her classes. When one of them appealed the grade, Duke did not act immediately; they eventually raised his grade to a D. Dowd and his parents sued Curtis and the university. Duke settled, listing the grade as “Pass”.

One of the signers, English professor Cathy Davidson, wrote in the Raleigh News & Observer in January 2007 that the ad was a response “to the anguish of students who felt demeaned by racist and sexist remarks swirling around in the media and on the campus quad in the aftermath of what happened on March 13 in the lacrosse house.”

From Durham in Wonderland:

Eighty-eight of them rushed to judgment, signing a statement (whose production violated Duke regulations in multiple ways) affirming that something had “happened” to false accuser Crystal Mangum, and thanking protesters (“for not waiting”) who had, among other things, urged the castration of the lacrosse captains and blanketed the campus with “wanted” posters. As the case to which they attached their public reputations imploded, Group members doubled down, with most issuing a second statement promising they would never apologize for their actions. (Only three Group members ever said they were sorry for signing the statement, and two of that number subsequently retracted those apologies.) For months, the Duke administration was either in agreement with the faculty extremists or cowed by them—or some combination of both.

The lacrosse case provided a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the mindset of an elite university—and the look was a troubling one. There is no evidence of any accountability at Duke: the university has the same leadership and the same hiring patterns it had in 2006. Several members of the Group of 88 have gone on to more prestigious positions, their efforts to exploit their students’ distress causing them no problem in the contemporary academy.