Connect the Dots

The Durham City Council is scheduled to meet today to consider the proposed civil suit settlement--reportedly $30 million, plus adoption of a host of procedural reforms to ensure the sort of abuses that occurred in the lacrosse case never recur in Durham. As they do so, they might reflect on what exactly transpired between Mike Nifong and Durham employees:

March 24-March 26: In his capacity as official spokesperson of the DPD, Cpl. David Addison made a series of public statements riddled with false assertions about the case. Addison stated, among other things, “You are looking at one victim brutally raped. If that was someone else’s daughter, child, I don’t think 46 (tests) would be a large enough number to figure out exactly who did it”; “Addison said police approached the lacrosse team with the five-page search warrant on March 16, but that all of the members refused to cooperate with the investigation”; There is “really, really strong physical evidence”; and “We’re not saying that all 46 were involved. But we do know that some of the players inside that house on that evening knew what transpired and we need them to come forward.”

March 27: Mike Nifong was briefed by DPD officers Ben Himan and Mark Gottlieb on the holes in the case. He concluded, “You know, we’re fucked.” He then began his own pre-primary campaign of slanderous remarks. No one from the Police Department ever corrected even one false statement that Nifong made.

March 28: Ben Himan met with accuser Crystal Mangum. He never produced a statement about what transpired at the meeting.

March 28: Police Department spokesperson Kammie Michael e-mailed H-S reporter Brianne Dopart and falsely stated that police not only did not know the identity of the first 911 caller from the night of the party, but that police were certain the call did not come from Kim Roberts.

Michael’s false assertion, acting in her official capacity as the spokesperson for a Durham government entity, left in place the public impression that the lacrosse players had yelled racial slurs at two innocent black passersby on the night of the party. [This item has not previously been publicly reported, but it’s in UPI.]

In fact, Roberts had told police on March 14 that she made the call, and that she had lied in the call; she reiterated both points in her March 22 statement. Michael has never explained why she provided the public with false information.

March 29: Mayor Bell, City Manager Baker, and Police Chief Chalmers met with Himan. Bell urged the police to wrap up the investigation quickly, because, he later said, he feared racial unrest in Durham. This unrest, of course, had been fueled in large part by the false statements of Addison, Michael, and Nifong, each of whom acted in their official capacities when making these statements. (Neither Michael nor Addison has, to my knowledge, been disciplined for making false statement.) In public, Bell had been downplaying all talk of racial unrest, suggesting that it was a figment of the national media.

In an interview yesterday with Ray Gronberg of the Herald-Sun, Bell claimed that he did not pressure police to make arrests and do so quickly: “I felt it was important to get some resolution relative to the investigation, but I didn’t ask them to forget about thoroughness in doing it.” It is not hard to believe, however, that police officers could have construed his remarks as pressure to make arrests quickly.

Reflecting in May 2006 on this and other late March/early April meetings, City Manager Baker asserted to the N&O, “I’ve had a lot of conversations with the investigators in this case and with officials at Duke, and at no time did anyone indicate [Crystal Mangum] changed her story. If that were true, I’m sure someone would have mentioned it to me.” In fact, Mangum never told the same story twice, and therefore changed her story each time she spoke to an officer. Baker has never explained his rationale for providing the public with false information.

On the same day, ironically, Baker and Bell gave WRAL a completely different version of events, admitting that they were told that at least one officer (presumably Sgt. Shelton) believed Mangum lied. Their reaction? Outrage at Shelton’s behavior, coupled with a request that Police Chief Chalmers investigate the information. Linwood Wilson would later assert that he conducted an internal affairs inquiry into Shelton’s conduct.

March 29: Nifong learned from the SBI lab that there were no matches to any lacrosse players. It is unclear when he and Officers Himan and Gottlieb communicated this information to Bell, Baker, and Chalmers. Baker subsequently told the N&O that Chalmers was exercising vigilant oversight: “I know he always has his Blackberry with him and he gets regular updates about the case.”

March 31: Fresh from his March 29 meeting, Himan, joined by Mark Gottlieb, heard Nifong’s demand to run a third lineup, this one violating city policies (confined to suspects; telling Mangum that it was confined to suspects; letting Gottlieb, someone involved in the inquiry, run the lineup). Senior officers in the DPD did not protest Nifong’s move.

March 31: Appearing on MSNBC, Nifong personally demonstrated the manner in which Mangum was “choked” during the “crime.”

March 31: Bell made a donation to Nifong's election campaign.

April 4: The procedurally improper lineup occurred, yielding the only evidence used to indict Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty. Among the other items from the array was Mangum’s recollection of seeing Brad Ross chatting with Kim Roberts outside the house. But Ross was in Raleigh that night—and his attorneys had provided police with unimpeachable evidence of the fact. Nifong and the police ignored the information of Mangum’s unreliability.

City Manager Baker later told the N&O, “I met with the investigators, and I am satisfied we followed every applicable policy.”

Later that spring, Chalmers, Nifong, and Deputy Police Chief Ron Hodge would meet with Baker: all would agree with him that no procedural problems existed with the lineup. Baker later rationalized that the lineup was proper because not all the lacrosse players were suspects on April 4: “That you’re a suspect in the beginning of an investigation for even one day doesn’t mean you’re going to be a suspect in a week or two weeks.” Neither he nor anyone else has ever explained which lacrosse players were not suspects as of 4-4-2006, or how police arrived at that conclusion.

April 5: At City Manager Baker’s request, Gottlieb presented him with a timeline of the investigation until that date. Baker said he wanted the timeline to keep the City Council informed of what occurred.

April 6: Baker withheld the document from the City Council at its regularly scheduled meeting. Yesterday, he told the N&O he did so “because his focus at the April 6, 2006 council meeting was the first seven to 10 days of the investigation.”

At the City Council meeting, according to H-S reporter Ray Gronberg’s article the following day, Baker “told the council the Police Department is following its standard procedures for investigating rape cases.” At this point, of course, Baker already had been informed, by his own admission, of the procedurally flawed lineup.

At the meeting, Council member Diane Catotti termed Mangum's allegations “both appalling and horrific.” Catotti later would go out of her way to frustrate any independent inquiry of the DPD's misconduct in the case.

April 10: Nifong, Gottlieb, and Himan met with Dr. Brian Meehan, who told them that not only were there no DNA matches to any lacrosse players, but that Mangum’s rape kit yielded matches to at least four unidentified males. This information was withheld from the public until December 15, 2006.

April 11: Hodge informed MSNBC that “I don’t think we would be here if it wasn’t (a strong case).” Hodge has never revealed the basis for his assertion.

The new elements in this timeline (in bold) came from just one document. Can you imagine what will spill out if the city is forced to enter into the discovery process in a civil suit? And what more evidence would federal investigators need of a conspiracy to deny civil rights?