Ex-Duke Lacrosse Prosecutor Faces Contempt Charge

Thursday, August 30th 2007, 11:14 am

By: News On 6

DURHAM, N.C. (AP) _ The former prosecutor who led the now-discredited Duke lacrosse rape case never intentionally tried to mislead the court and believed he gave all DNA test results to defense attorneys, a lawyer for Mike Nifong said Thursday during his criminal contempt trial.

Nifong turned over all the information during the pretrial discovery phase in his case against three Duke lacrosse players, said his attorney, Jim Glover. And when he told a judge the defense had all the DNA test results, it was a mistake _ but little more than an oversight.

``The question is not whether those statements Mr. Nifong made are literally true or literally false,'' Glover told Superior Court Judge W. Osmond Smith III. ``The question is were they willfully and intentionally false and were they also part of an effort ... to hide potentially exculpatory evidence, and that's the issue before the court.''

Defense attorneys for the three falsely accused young men asked a judge to punish Nifong for initially telling the court he had turned over all DNA test results when he knew, and failed to disclose, that genetic material from multiple men was found on the accuser _ but none from any lacrosse player.

If held in contempt, Nifong faces up to 30 days in jail and a fine of up to $500. Nifong pleaded not guilty to the charge at the start of the hearing, which began Thursday and was to resume Friday.

Nifong, the former Durham County district attorney, led the investigation into a woman's allegations that she was raped at a March 2006 lacrosse team party where she was hired as a stripper. That spring, Nifong secured indictments against Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty and Dave Evans for rape, kidnapping and sexual offense.

A month later, Nifong learned that a private laboratory determined the genetic material found on the woman was from several men, none of whom were Duke lacrosse players.

But Nifong didn't provide that information to the defense until October, and only then amid nearly 2,000 pages of raw DNA test data that defense attorney Brad Bannon testified Thursday took almost all of November to decipher.

Glover said Nifong believed he was being truthful when he told the judge he had given the defense all the DNA testing results, though he didn't always know the specifics in every report, Glover said.

During his cross-examination of Bannon, Glover tried to portray the initial DNA report prepared by lab director Brian Meehan in May 2006 as adequate while suggesting no additional information would have helped clear the players.

``The fact is, you've got nothing significantly exculpatory beyond what you already knew from the report itself,'' Glover said to Bannon.

``That's absolutely false,'' Bannon said abruptly. ``And you know it.''

Meehan, who testified later Thursday, denied that Nifong told him to withhold any exculpatory material. He said he considered the DNA results provided to the defense to be an ``interim'' report since other test specimens had yet to arrive.

Afterward, Meehan told reporters that he included all test results by referring in the report to other ``non-probative'' but unspecified DNA materials _ the genetic material found on the accuser.

When asked why he didn't just list those test results, Meehan said, ``You know, because I'm not perfect, OK? ... I said there are additional evidence items where there were profiles and they're available upon request. There was no intent or thought in my mind to withhold anything.''

In December, six months after receiving the DNA test results, Nifong dropped the rape charges when the accuser changed a key detail in her story. He later recused himself from the case after being charged with ethics violations by the North Carolina State Bar.

State prosecutors took over the case and dropped the remaining charges against the three players in April, calling them innocent victims of a ``tragic rush to accuse.''

Nifong later resigned as Durham County's district attorney. He was disbarred in June for more than two dozen violations of the state's rules of professional conduct during his prosecution of the lacrosse case.