Morning in Wonderland

Even in the Wonderland that is Durham, this morning’s session was surreal.

A sitting judge served as a de facto character witness for a district attorney who was forced to resign his office after being disbarred.

A sitting ADA testified as the Durham equivalent of Sgt. Schultz, suggesting that he “knew nothing”—or at least as close to nothing as absolutely possible—about how the case was prosecuted.

Mr. Obfuscation was in rare form—with Dr. Brian Meehan suggesting at one point that he’d speak “two ways” about his own company’s protocols(!)—but finally admitted that Mike Nifong’s Sept. 22 statement to the court was “false,” and that, in fact, that none of the conversations between Nifong and him were memorialized in the report.

And then there was the ex-DA himself. Nifong acted as if he were addressing a seminar of young prosecutors, giving his recommendations on how to prosecute a case.

He evidenced no awareness of the fact that no crime occurred in this case.

He reminisced that when he took over the case on March 24, “no one had been identified as a suspect at that time” [except, of course, for the 46 lacrosse players listed in the non-testimonial order as suspects].

Nifong thrice referred to Mangum as “the victim.” (His attorney did so another two times.)

He twice stated that a mixture from which Dave Evans’ DNA (and that of two percent of the males in the United States) could not be excluded constituted a DNA “match” that was consistent with Mangum’s myriad stories.

When the negative results came from SBI, he simply changed his theory of the crime: “It was evident to me,” Nifong told the court, “that this had been a non-ejaculatory event.” Therefore, it became an eyewitness ID case (in which he would order the DPD, the very next day, to violate their own procedures and run a suspects-only lineup).

One problem: his own “victim” had explicitly said that it was an “ejaculatory event.”

His “primary interest” in going to DSI was “ferreting out” fingernail mixture—suggesting that this evidence was the key to the case. (He went out of his way to name Dave Evans in his testimony.)

On April 21, maybe Ben Himan did hear Meehan say that the DNA from at least four unidentified males had been found in the rape kit, but the remark passed over Nifong’s head: “At that meeting, the focus was almost exclusively on the findings on that particular sample.”

Anyhow, these males could have been anyone, likely someone unconnected with the case. Nifong had previously suggested that the unidentified male DNA might have come from the police car(!). Today, in a perfectly rational tone, the former “minister of justice” of Durham County stated that it was possible that one of the unidentified males whose DNA was found on Mangum’s rectal, vaginal, oral swabs, and panties could have been her 6 or 7 year old son.

Only in Wonderland.