Cohan: "Defense Attorneys" Want Nifong "Literally Dead in the Ground"

Author William D. Cohan recently departed a columnist’s position at Bloomberg View for one at Huffington Post (which generally does not pay its columnists). Cohan then used his first HuffPost piece to lash out at the free speech rights of his critics.

Huffington Post also provided what likely will be Cohan’s final promotional appearance for his book. As with each of his interviewers other than WUNC’s Frank Stasio, the HuffPost Live asked no meaningful questions about Cohan’s revisionist thesis. Cohan, even so, came across as noticeably more ill-tempered than in his initial interviews about the book; at times, he seemed almost unhinged when talking about his critics and (especially) the defense attorneys.

Cohan, Unhinged

Cohan was asked who had suffered the most in the case. The answer supplied by the passionate Nifong apologist would come as little surprise. But then the author seemed to lose touch with reality.

COHAN at 13.30: “So you ask who, who came out the worst in all of this, who suffered the most: I think, obviously, Mike Nifong, the prosecutor, suffered the most. He’s the only one who spent any time in jail, he spent a day in jail. He lost his job, he was disbarred as a lawyer. He filed for personal bankruptcy. I mean, there are—of course, the defense attorneys would say, ‘That’s not good enough for him, that’s too good for him, and he should be, you know . . .’ They won’t be happy until he’s literally dead in the ground. And they’re doing everything they can to try to put him there!”

Here is a link to the audio:

Incredibly, the HuffPost host made no comment, no request for substantiation, as her guest made this wild assertion.

Since the criminal contempt trial, the defense attorneys have had no dealings with Nifong. The idea that they’re “doing everything they can” now to place him “literally dead in the ground” is nothing short of bizarre.

It should go without saying that while Cohan offers such a crazy claim, he never even tried to interview any of the attorneys he now claims want Nifong “literally dead.” So how he reached this determination about their thoughts must remain a mystery.

Seligmann, Finnerty, and the Party

Early in the interview, Cohan offered what appears to be a new description of the party.

COHAN at 1.53: “In this situation, you had three students, accused of sexual assault, and rape, after all day of partying, and drinking, when they thought it would be a great idea to invite strippers to their house, off campus.” [emphases added]

By this point, it’s beyond clear that Cohan simply doesn’t know very much about the topic on which he wrote. But could he actually now have come to believe that Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty lived with the three captains? That they were at the house “all day” during the day of the party? That strippers were invited to “their” house? His statement makes no sense otherwise.

The Nifong Apologist

The host asked, without providing specifics, if Cohan had a response to criticisms that the book sought to rehabilitate Nifong:

COHAN at 3.06: “I really find it humorous [at this stage in the video, Cohan looks anything but amused] and counterintuitive . . . To be criticized for talking to one of the principal players in this drama, no pun intended, the prosecutor, Mike Nifong, who brought this action, [voice rising] to be criticized for actually giving him a chance to tell his story, by other journalists who criticize me—many other journalists [voice rising again] have criticized me for allowing Mike Nifong to have a microphone!”

Given that a bit later in the interview, Cohan would lament Nifong’s suffering, present him as the major victim in the case, and wildly claim that defense attorneys were trying to leave him “literally dead in the ground,” the denial about his status as a Nifong apologist rings a bit hollow.

In the event: to the best of my knowledge, no one has criticized Cohan for speaking to Nifong. I certainly haven’t. The criticism—made by the first person to publicly comment on the matter, Joe Neff, and echoed by me after I got to read the book—has been that Cohan uncritically accepted the version of events presented by a convicted liar, that instead of functioning as an “investigative journalist,” Cohan saw his role as a pro-Nifong propagandist.

Nothing Cohan has said or done at any point in his publicity tour has refuted this criticism.

Math Lessons from William D. Cohan

COHAN at 4.00: “So you’ve got a 620-page book, 600 pages of which are incredibly critical of everything Mike Nifong did along the way, and 20 pages of it are Mike Nifong explaining why he did what he did, and also to some extent admitting many of the things his critics ascribe to him, and basically saying if he could have done it differently, he probably would have, and yet also defending many of his actions!”

I addressed this very strange argument previously. At this point, Cohan’s repeating the assertion suggests either that he hasn’t read his own book or he possesses an almost casual willingness to make demonstrably false statements.

Cohan and His Enemies

COHAN at 4.22: [increasingly passionate as he proceeds] To somehow ascribe to me motives, as if I were trying to rewrite this story [recoils, as if horrified], or to give Mike Nifong a platform he doesn’t deserve, to me is so ridiculous, and so absurd, that I was absolutely—I wasn’t shocked by it, but I couldn’t believe that people who consider themselves to be professional, responsible journalists today, and who have gotten space in some of our most well-respected publications like the New Republic [Stuart], and Commentary [me], and the Wall Street Journal [Dorothy Rabinowitz], to make their, you know, vitriolic cases against me. One of their main criticisms would be that I gave air time to Mike Nifong and Crystal Mangum, two of the principal uh, uh, actors in this drama, is patently absurd.”

Cohan has already made clear that whether his critics deserve free-speech protections is an open question. The criticism that Cohan gave “air time” to Nifong and Mangum appeared nowhere in any of the reviews that Cohan mentioned.

Notice that amidst his self-professed horror, Cohan nowhere in the interview addresses the actual criticisms of his book. At this point, I think it’s fair to say that his silence regarding the substantive critiques speaks volumes.

Proper Procedures for Prosecutors

The host clearly knew very little about the case. But she did know that Nifong was disbarred, and six minutes into the interview, she tried to get Cohan to explain precisely what Nifong did. The guest wasn’t interested.

COHAN at 5.51: “[Nifong] was disbarred by the State Bar, . . . then he was found in contempt of court and spent that 24 hours in jail . . . all for doing what prosecutors are supposed to do: which is, if they believe a crime was committed . . . You know, and prosecutors can believe a crime is committed for any number of different reasons—they believe the witness, they believe the police investigation, they looked at, you know, the documentary evidence and the DNA evidence, they talked to the nurse that examined Crystal Mangum on the night this supposed, uh, felony was committed. For whatever reasons that he believed a crime was committed, his job as a prosecutor is to take that evidence . . . forth into a trial.”

It’s terrifying that Cohan believes that a prosecutor who lies to a judge, withholds exculpatory evidence, violates ethical guidelines regarding public statements amidst an election campaign, and orders the police to run a photo array that violates their own guidelines was just “doing what prosecutors are supposed to do.”

Beyond that point, take a look at the remainder of Cohan’s statements and apply it to this case. Nifong first made his public statements that he had come to “believe a crime was committed” early in the afternoon of 27 March 2006. At that point, he hadn’t spoken to the witness, the police investigation had uncovered nothing, he hadn’t looked at the documentary evidence, there was no DNA evidence, and he hadn’t talked to the nurse that examined Crystal Mangum on the night this supposed felony was committed.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Cohan’s protagonist, Mike Nifong, admitting as much during the ethics hearing.

 

So is it Cohan’s conclusion that a prosecutor can “believe” a crime occurred, and thus take a case to trial, for any reason at all?

The Nifong Record

COHAN at 6.58: “Well, this was a situation in which this prosecutor was not allowed to bring this evidence to a trial. By the way, this was a guy who had been in the Durham DA’s office for 28 years, and before this he was generally thoroughly well-regarded as a very strong prosecutor . . .”

Cohan here is describing a legacy that includes the Darryl Howard case, in which Judge Orlando Hudson found that Nifong made “false and misleading” statements that led to the conviction, for murder, of a likely innocent man.

At no point in a 15-minute interview did Cohan ever say that Mike Nifong made ethically improper public statements in the hopes of bolstering his election campaign, or that Mike Nifong improperly withheld exculpatory DNA evidence, or that Mike Nifong lied in open court to a judge. Instead, he said that Nifong made unspecified “mistakes.”

Enemies of the “Truth”

COHAN at 8.57: “I dug up as much as I could that raised some serious questions about what happened. Of course, any time you say this, there’s an established narrative out there—there’s an established narrative out there that the people are very, very wedded to (the parents of the kids, the kids themselves [he’s describing here people in their late 20s or early 30s], their attorneys, and their powerful allies in the media) who don’t want anybody bringing this up, and would go to whatever length they could—for them, this is a war. This is a war that began in 2006, and it’s going to continue until, uh, you know, until it can’t continue anymore. Until all the principal people are no longer alive! And by me taking an objective look at what happened, seven or eight years after it happened, it apparently, you know, something that they’re having a real trouble dealing with.”

Cohan might, at some point, want to consult a dictionary to determine the meaning of “objective.”

That said, consider the oddity of Cohan’s first sentence. With regards to the criminal case, the only thing that Cohan “dug up” was the revelation that as his ethical misdeeds were exposed, Nifong confined his reading to the New York Times. None of his lengthy interviews with Nifong brought any new facts about the criminal case. His shorter jailhouse chat with murderess Crystal Mangum did dig up two new items, but both (that medical personnel had to remove wooden shards from her, that Reade Seligmann carried her to the car) were demonstrably false.

Has Cohan now conceded that all that his book “dug up” about the criminal case was precisely . . . nothing?

Media Expert

COHAN at 3.20: “The job of the investigative reporter is to go back to Ground Zero of the story, accumulate all the information that he possibly can, all the documentary evidence, and talk to as many people as possible who would talk to him.”

Author Cohan fulfilled the task of seeking to “talk to as many people as possible who would talk to him” by not seeking to talk to (among many others): any of the defense attorneys, any of the senior prosecutors in the AG’s office, the Bar prosecutors, Nifong’s primary campaign manager, the DHC chair and members, Judge Smith, the criminal contempt prosecutor, and (it appears) 43 of the 44 unindicted members of the 2006 lacrosse team.

It would seem, therefore, that Cohan failed the “job of the investigative reporter,” at least as he defines it.

“Rush to Judgment”

The host—who at several points in the interview seemed a bit startled by the passion that Cohan brought both to his defense of Nifong and to his attack on the falsely accused players—noted that from the standpoint of the falsely accused, there was a rush to judgment. Cohan responded:

COHAN at 12.17: “Everybody rushed to judgment, including the prosecutor, Mike Nifong. But he did, you know, believe that a rape had occurred, and he was going to make it his duty to bring it to a court of law, which is his job, to either prove it or not prove it.”

If it’s possible to get beyond Cohan’s claim that the defense attorneys want Nifong “literally dead,” this was clearly the oddest statement of the interview. If, as Cohan now admits, Nifong “rushed to judgment,” how, possibly, could it have been proper for him to have sought charges based on his rush to judgment? That question, unsurprisingly, was one that Cohan showed no interest in answering.

Contempt for the Falsely Accused

COHAN at 12.36: “Uh, you know, the kids, from their point of view—I mean, people are accused of crimes, you know, all the time. Uh, either they did them, or they didn’t do them. Either they could be proved in a court of law they did them, or they didn’t do them, and you know, there are plenty of cases where there are people who are wrongfully convicted [like Darryl Howard], who spend, you know, 18, 20 years in prison [like Darryl Howard], and get out based on new evidence, or new DNA evidence [like Darryl Howard], and they get, you know, whatever, $20,000 a year for their pain and suffering. I mean, these three kids didn’t spend a day in jail, there was no trial, and they ended up with $20 million each. [No, they didn’t.] This party cost Duke $100 million, all told, with legal fees and settlements, etc.” [No, it didn’t.]

The Attorney General

COHAN at 8.35: “There was a secret investigation done by the state attorney general [no criminal investigation in North Carolina is conducted in the open], who declared them innocent at the end of that 4-month investigation, and he won’t be interviewed about it [untrue: Roy Cooper did a press conference, and then was interviewed by Lesley Stahl], and he won’t allow his investigatory filed to be viewed [because it’s the law] . . .”

COHAN at 14.01: “We’ll never know what really happened . . . The State AG won’t open his investigatory files. I have sued in North Carolina to force him to open those files. I’m sure I’ll lose, and he won’t have to.”

I hope that representatives of the North Carolina attorney general’s office take notice of this comment, which essentially features plaintiff Cohan admitting that he has filed a frivolous lawsuit.

Cohan’s Publicity Tour Is (Literally) Cut Off

COHAN at 14.22: “This is just sort of one of those incredible anomalies of justice that’s occurred in our society, that if you even have the temerity to talk about it, you get, you know, eviscerated by—”

At that point, the host appeared to have had enough with Cohan’s pity party, cut the author off, and ended the interview.

Due Process and False Charges                                                                   

Cohan also offered his typically bizarre interpretation of the legal system, suggesting that even though the prosecutors from the AG’s office and the defense attorneys both believed the players were innocent, they nonetheless should have faced a trial:

COHAN at  7.12: “In our system of jurisprudence, the prosecutor brings cases before the jury, the people decide whether he’s right or he’s wrong, the people are not guilty or guilty, and that’s the way the system works. Here was a case—whether these kids were not guilty or guilty, they were ultimately declared innocent by the state attorney general. Our justice system was subverted in this case. And I think that is the most profound uh, uh action to come out of this whole incident. That our system of justice was subverted by very clever, deep-pocketed defense attorneys who exploited every mistake that the prosecution made and that the principal witness made.”

A good response to this basic misunderstanding of our legal system came from one of these “deep-pocketed defense attorneys,” Brad Bannon, during the Nifong ethics hearing:

  

Needless to say, this was another section of Bannon’s testimony that never found its way into Cohan’s book.