When the Headline Says It All
It's official: Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong was disbarred over the weekend. From the AP:
The five-day ethics trial ended Nifong's three-decade legal career, which he spent entirely as a prosecutor in Durham County. He was generally viewed as an honest lawyer before taking over the case of a woman who told police she was raped at a March 2006 lacrosse team party where she was hired to perform as a stripper.
Is it any wonder that a Google search for "honest lawyer" generates results like this?
(Oddly enough, the top result for "honest lawyer" is the Honest Lawyer hotel, in Durham -- but a different Durham.)
Disbarred Duke Prosecutor's Future Dim [Associated Press]
Prosecutor in Duke Case Disbarred by Ethics Panel [New York Times]
An honest lawyer [Aha! Jokes]
(10) Comments
Dook still sucks
They should put this guy under the jail.
Everyone loves a good meltdown story. Maybe he can sell movie rights?
Not a big loss for the legal profession.
Please go back to autoadmit, 9:53. We have no need for your kind here.
DOOK.
Eats it.
Those who characterize Nifong as an aberration are wrong. The legal system cannot afford to punish prosecutors for rampant misconduct because lawyers' stock in trade is not advice (as Lincoln suggested) but control. The American system of justice is shaped from the top to supress justice as much as to advance it. Even the Catholic church has abandoned notions of infallibility that the legal system depends on. Until plea dealings, mandatory sentencing, religiously based laws (sex and drugs and other consensual crimes), and prosecutions based on testimony bought by reductions of sentences and actual cash payments are declared illegal, the system will continue to be a joke that only lawyers get.
Those who characterize Nifong as an aberration are wrong. The legal system cannot afford to punish prosecutors for rampant misconduct because lawyers' stock in trade is not advice (as Lincoln suggested) but control. The American system of justice is shaped from the top to supress justice as much as to advance it. Even the Catholic church has abandoned notions of infallibility that the legal system depends on. Until plea dealings, mandatory sentencing, religiously based laws (sex and drugs and other consensual crimes), and prosecutions based on testimony bought by reductions of sentences and actual cash payments are declared illegal, the system will continue to be a joke that only lawyers get.
WHAT? "Notions of infallibility..." What are you talking about?
Nifong is indeed an aberration—not because he succumbed to the temptation to withhold exculpatory evidence in a criminal case—but because after doing so he was professionally disciplined for it.
A Chicago Tribune analysis of thousands of court records, appellate rulings and lawyer disciplinary records from across the United States found:
- Since a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court ruling designed to curb misconduct by prosecutors, at least 381 defendants nationally have had a homicide conviction thrown out because prosecutors concealed evidence suggesting innocence or presented evidence they knew to be false. Of all the ways that prosecutors can cheat, those two are considered the worst by the courts. And that number represents only a fraction of how often such cheating occurs.
However, a Tribune search failed to turn up a single prosecutor who was disbarred for securing a conviction while engaging in such misconduct in any kind of criminal case. And it found only two cases where prosecutors were convicted of criminal charges for such misconduct. Both of those convictions, one in an Ohio rape case and the other in a New York robbery case, were misdemeanors that resulted in $500 fines.
Link: http://www.ishipress.com/dishonor.htm