Cohan's False Portrayal of Williamson

Well beyond his odd arguments, William D. Cohan has distinguished himself through a highly unusual editorial strategy. In many cases relying solely on the word of a convicted liar (often presented second- or even third-hand), Cohan allowed Mike Nifong to launch unsubstantiated attacks against virtually anyone who challenged the rogue district attorney at any point during the lacrosse case.

It’s difficult to infer a benevolent motive to Cohan’s strategy. It’s also hard to determine how Scribner’s editorial and legal staff allowed Cohan to get away with this approach. The first article to appear on the book—by Joe Neff—exposed the problem: relying solely on Nifong’s word, Cohan claimed that Attorney General Roy Cooper “blindsided” his senior prosecutors when he declared the falsely accused students innocent. Unlike Cohan, Neff actually spoke to Jim Coman, who dismissed the presentation of events as a “figments of [Nifong’s] imagination.”

Another key figure in the case targeted by Nifong and Cohan has now refuted the Cohan presentation. Lane Williamson, who presided over the Disciplinary Hearing Commission in Nifong’s case, was a powerhouse, handling the case with unchallenged intellectual and moral authority. (UPI ends with a majestic quote from Williamson.) Williamson also produced the most dramatic moment of the entire proceeding, when he asked Nifong about his then-current view of the case.

(In the clip above, Nifong made no mention of his bizarre Japanese-rape-club example that Cohan floats as his current theory of the case in the book. Cohan did not seem to ask him when, after his testimony above, he embraced this novel interpretation of the facts of the case.)

It would seem as if the outcome of the Bar hearing placed Williamson on Nifong’s enemies list. And given Cohan’s uncritical acceptance of virtually anything Nifong told him, Williamson became a target of Cohan as well. On p. 559, Nifong-through-Cohan challenged Williamson’s integrity and impartiality, claiming that “at least part of Lane Williamson’s sentencing memo was done the night before I testified. At least part of that had been written. I could’ve said anything. I could’ve called Jesus Christ as a witness, and [h]e could have testified and ascended into heaven, and they would’ve said, ‘Well, obviously you can’t make anything of that testimony. That doesn’t mean anything. You’re obviously guilty.’”

For reasons that he has never explained regarding multiple figures in the book, Cohan produced this passage without attempting to contact Williamson. Unsurprisingly, given its reliance on the word of a convicted liar, the book’s portrayal of Williamson is untrue. In a comment (verified by me), Williamson noted,

I have never commented on this or any other blog about the Nifong case, but feel compelled to do so now. I did not prejudge Mike Nifong: rather, I evaluated the evidence presented at the hearing to reach my conclusions. I wrote no part of my concluding remarks prior to the end of the hearing: those were extemporaneous except for a few notes that I made during the panel’s deliberation following closing arguments on the punishment phase of the hearing.

Mr. Cohan has never contacted me. [emphasis added]

As with Jim Coman, then, so too with Lane Williamson: (1) Cohan uncritically accepted a less-than-plausible assertion from Nifong; and (2) despite Nifong’s credibility problems, didn’t even try to check his protagonist’s veracity with the person that Nifong had targeted.

That said, the wild Cohan/Nifong claim should give everyone an opportunity to return to one of the high points of the case. I have embedded Williamson’s remarks below, or, you can watch the entire Williamson closing in a single file, in higher quality, at the WRAL site.