When the Duke lacrosse story broke, I have to tell you, the accusations seemed plenty plausible to me. Privileged white D-1 jocks (at a school that I think helped inspire Tom Wolfe’s latest book), in a sport that’s cultivated a reputation for breeding a certain kind of punk, hire and gang-rape a black stripper in a Southern town that’s something less than Dr. King’s dream envisioned. I heard it and instantly believed it.

Slowly, though, the case began to develop a stench that was most noticeable to those standing downwind of of Durham County DA Mike Nifong. Had his insatiable taste for camera time been much worse we’d probably have pictures of him clubbing panty-less with Paris Hilton to deal with. We began hearing rumors that his evidence was … what’s the right word here? … problematic. And every time some curious tidbit or another casting doubts on his case leaked out, he responded with renewed determination, but not, apparently, with any substantive reason to justify the enthusiasm. If you thought the defendants were innocent, you probably wondered how this gloryhound expected to get away with such an obvious and cynical grab at the community’s “black vote.” If you thought the defendants were guilty, I guess you interpreted this as “he has all the evidence and he knows something we don’t.” As it turned out, both of these views were right, although what he knew that we didn’t know turned out not to be what we might have hoped for.

Those of you with television and the Internets know the rest. Turns out the victim was unreliable (that’s what we call a “charitable characterization”), the other stripper’s story oscillated like a cheap electric fan, and the physical evidence was like something out of a Colin Powell speech to the UN. Lab results found DNA evidence from “several men” on the accuser. None of them, by the way, played lacrosse for Duke University.

This revelation would have led any moderately sane prosecutor to realize he had a dog on his hands and drop the case. I mean, I never went to law school, but if defense counsel can stand up in front of a jury and wave around a pair of panties that have come into contact with everybody except the defendants, chances for acquittal are substantially enhanced. I’m pretty sure that’s one LSAT question I could answer correctly.

As a general rule, when you have a 100% chance of losing a case, you’re advised to drop it. Even if it’s one of those situations where you know you have the right culprit and just can’t prove it, you do not sacrifice large piles of taxpayer money on vendettas and publicity grabs.

Except here, in a novel I really hope Tom Wolfe finds time to write. No, here something else happened. Nifong suppressed the evidence and misled anybody and everybody within earshot (a crowd of people that included everyone with any sort of media access and at least one judge). And now, we learn that this is the sort of behavior that bar associations are interested in hearing about.

Ruh-roh. Not only are Mr. Nifong’s political aspirations in a bit of trouble, it looks like he’s going to be looking for work outside the field of law. As a UNC law professor noted, “if these allegations are true and if they don’t justify disbarment, then I’m not sure what does.”

I’ve been mad as hell about Nifong’s crusade for a long time now, and am having a beer to celebrate his impending nard-stomping. We have all kinds of crooked officials in the world, and it’s rarely that any of them get what they truly deserve. I’m tickled silly to see at least one opportunistic greaseball taken out of the game. But my joy at seeing justice circling like a buzzard over the near-lifeless corpse of Nifong’s career is tempered by my understanding of the real damage he’s done.

Durham, NC is a town with longstanding racial unease, and the explosion of emotion on the NC Central side of the tracks tells you something about the frustrations people there feel with respect to The System. The black community in this city isn’t the only one in America that feels like it’s been poorly treated, and you have to be a moron to believe that there’s no justification for this anger. I’m also sensitive to the initial (and subsequent) reaction on the Duke campus, where despite a severe case of Boulder-itis, race issues are a serious concern.

Nifong’s actions were calculated to capitalize on the community’s deep distress at what it perceives as an uneven playing field. At a glance, it may have looked like he was a champion willing to stand up to the exclusive, rich, lily-white old-boy Duke enclave. In reality, he was only using them, victimizing them, manipulating their outrage like so much Monopoly money. In the end, the man they thought was standing up for them was selling them out for his own selfish goals.

I don’t live in Durham, and I’m certainly not authorized to speak for the city’s black citizens, but my guess is that he has made the racial divide there worse.

I’m still more than capable of believing that some of the kids on that team have done plenty of things that merit a good caning (or worse). I’m not naïve. Thug comes in all colors and from all socio-economic backgrounds, so the “white kids from good families” patter counts for dick in this corner. For all I know, the three who were charged may be guilty, despite the cluster fuck the case has become. The inability to prove something doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. And while we can’t prove there was a rape, the things that we know about that evening from widely corroborated testimony makes clear what type of human being we’re dealing with. It’s a crying shame that things have evolved in such a way as to make them look put-upon. If the people responsible for running Duke University had the sort of character they’re supposed to have, the lacrosse program would be out of business.

But Nifong violated the public trust in ways that are appalling even by power-crazed lawyer/politician standards. He took a godawful situation and found a way to make it even worse. It might be decades before Durham fully recovers, and if there’s any justice in the world Nifong will still be flipping burgers at McDonald’s when that happy day arrives.

If anybody here knows Tom Wolfe, would you mention to him that I think this would be a great premise for a novel?

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