Let me say this at the top, just so we don't have any misunderstandings: former Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong got what he deserved. He was recognized as incompetent by his peers long before he managed to get himself elected--he did almost no work on the notorious Michael Peterson case, and the local scuttlebutt was that then-D.A. Jim Hardin didn't trust Nifong to get anything right--and proved that judgment correct with his treatment of the Duke lacrosse case and a few other, less-publicized, cases. He's a bum, and I'm glad he's not going to be practicing law one minute more.

That said, it is curious to me that the North Carolina Bar came down with great vengeance and furious anger in his case and not in two recent cases where prosecutors intentionally sent innocent men to death row.

Oh, and for my "northern" audience, let's nip the race card in the bud, okay? Alan Gell, who spent four years on death row after being wrongly convicted, is white. Certain people I know who blanch at certain stereotypes would insist that you know that. Anyway, the main witnesses in his case were taped by prosecutors as saying they needed to make up a story for the police. Also, Gell was in jail on other charges when the murder he supposedly committed took place. The prosecutors illegally withheld the tape of the witnesses and lied (a characterization they probably wouldn't agree with, but fuck them) to a forensic examiner so that they could say the murder took place on a day that Gell wasn't incarcerated.

Let's see. Lying to the court, fabricating evidence, withholding testimony...not wholly unlike what got Scooter Libby thirty months in Club Fed. What happened to David Hoke and Deborah Graves, the prosecutors in the Gell case? Nothing. In 2004, the Bar brought a feeble case against them, and they received a written reprimand. It goes on their permanent record, but much like high school, that doesn't count for anything in the real world.

Two years later, the Bar brought a much stronger case against Kenneth Honeycutt and Scott Brewer, accusing them of lying, cheating and withholding evidence in another capital case. The panel deciding the case dismissed it, however, essentially saying the statute of limitations had expired (the case was 10 years old).

As you've no doubt heard in many a movie, there is no statute of limitations when it comes to murder. I don't understand how there can be a statute of limitations on misconduct in a capital case. If someone's gonna die (or has already died), then there should be no limit.

Both of those earlier misconduct cases focused a lot of attention on Nifong's hearing. Leaders in the state legislature threatened harsh regulation of the Bar if Nifong kept his license. Would the legislators have been so forthright in their righteous indignation if the aggrieved were poor folks on death row rather than the scions of wealthy families? Maybe. But I doubt it. In the last few years, there have been a number of death sentences overturned in North Carolina and the rest of the country, but none of those cases has received even a small percentage of the attention seen with the Duke lacrosse case.

I mentioned the Michael Peterson case earlier. He was convicted of killing his wife, though the case was hardly open-and-shut. In fact, many legal observers thought that if he had killed his wife, it was accidental and not intentional. In Durham, however, being a famous (among Vietnam War fiction fans, anyway) author and having lots of money is a distinct disadvantage. Juries in Durham tend to root for the underdog and punish authority. That jury saw Peterson as a member of a society that they could not join, and I think that colored their deliberations to an extent.

In the same way, it would have been political suicide for Nifong to dismiss the rape charges out of hand. Even if he had taken more care with the case and laid out all the exculpatory evidence, he was going to take shit from both the left and the black community--a sizable majority of the People's Republic of Durham-- if he dropped the charges. Almost certainly, he would not have been re-elected. What's clear here is that doing the right thing might be painful, but trying to play all the political angles is a game best left to the professionals--which Nifong certainly is not.

Mike Nifong is the first prosecutor in North Carolina history to be disbarred for misconduct. I hope the scrutiny on the Bar remains, and that he is far from the last. Because if future miscreant prosecutors escape justice, then an awful lot of people will continue to see the law as applying to "just us."

Jon Worley has no sympathy for the Duke lacrosse players. They continue to get much better than they deserve.