Morning Session Highlights

Highlights of the morning session:

At times, the goal of Nifong attorney Jim Glover appeared to be to put everyone in the courtroom to sleep. "Wandering" is a charitable description of his questioning style. It didn't help that Brad Bannon knew the basic facts of the case so much better than Glover did.

In the most emotionally charged moment of the morning, Brad Bannon eviscerated Glover’s claim that the multiple male DNA found by Meehan was “not significantly exculpatory.”

Bannon responded, “That’s absolutely false.” He then paused before adding, “And you know it.”

A critical item from the Himan testimony: the officer offered much more clarity on the April 21 meeting between Nifong and Meehan than we previously have heard. Meehan told them, Himan remembered, that he had discovered DNA from four unidentified males.

This revelation would seem to have strongly damaged Glover’s other line of defense—that Nifong couldn’t have been expected to have remembered what Meehan told him, because he took no notes. Himan, it seems, had no trouble recalling this important fact.

There were at least two occasions in which Glover almost seemed to imply that Nifong never should have moved ahead with the case after the SBI returned its DNA findings, noting that the SBI lab showed that there was no semen evidence “to support this story that she told.”

Finally, Glover portrayed Nifong in such a way to provide a further reminder that this man never should have been a prosecutor:

Nifong, said Glover, “simply didn’t pay any attention(!)” to what was in the DNA Security report, since he had “developed a habit of not paying much attention to the details and specifics of what was in these reports.” Glover concluded, “What he did in this case was what he did in other cases.”

This statement was nothing short of astonishing.