Darryl Howard and the rampaging prosecutor: Durham learns little from Duke lacrosse debacle

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Last edited Thu Mar 27, 2014, 12:18 PM - Edit history (1)

I started this thread in the General Discussion forum. Thinking it belonged here instead, I deleted it there. So if you're wondering what happened to it there, that's the story.

This is a sad display of prosecutorial misconduct. Maybe malevolence is a better word than misconduct.

Darryl Howard and the rampaging prosecutor: Durham learns little from Duke lacrosse debacle

The Watch
A reported opinion blog on civil liberties and the criminal justice system

By Radley Balko March 20 at 12:11 pm

When Darryl Howard was convicted of murder in 1995, he cried out ”I didn’t do it!” then sobbed in open court. He has maintained his innocence ever since.
....

Now, newly discovered evidence further argues for Howard’s innocence. In court papers filed this week, the Innocence Project reveals that DNA testing of a rape kit taken from Doris Washington found some sperm that went undetected during the initial investigation. That sperm is a match to a career criminal, not to Howard. Attorneys for Howard have also uncovered evidence that prosecutors in the case may have withheld important exculpatory evidence, including a credible statement from an informant days after the murder who attributed the crimes to a local gang, not to Darryl Howard.

Discovery of the memo, which was known to police and should have been known to prosecutors, shows that the state failed to turn over relevant evidence pointing to Howard’s innocence. But the contents of the memo also suggest that Howard’s prosecutor not only put on perjurious testimony from a police investigator, he then used that evidence to give false statements in court himself.

Perhaps most interesting of all is just who that prosecutor was: Michael Nifong, then an assistant district attorney for Durham County. Nifong of course would later be appointed, then elected district attorney, and then make national headlines in 2006 when he falsely charged three Duke University lacrosse players with sexually assaulting a stripper. In 2007 Nifong was disbarred for his handling of evidence in that case. He was also found in contempt for making false statements about the case in court.

[Justice_58]

1. This is a sad display of prosecutorial misconduct.

Nothing that we didn't see in spades in the DukeLAX rape hoax/frame.

The parallels between the Howard case and Nifong's behaviour in DukeLAX are telling.

[pnwmom]

2. I always said that it wasn't just the Duke students who were hurt by Nifong.

If he'd do it to them -- knowing all the resources they had to fight back -- it wasn't his first time. I'm actually surprised they haven't found a lot more cases like this -- but probably they're not looking.

Thank goodness one or two of those students' parents had the millions they needed to fight like hell, and they got at least one bad prosecutor disbarred.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

3. more on this

Comments on the Balko Article

A Turn of Season

Tuesday, March 25, 2014
A Turn of Season

For the politically correct, the lacrosse case proceeded through three stages. The first came in spring 2006, when figures like Selena Roberts and factions like the Group of 88 not merely presumed guilt, but drew broad moral lessons from the crime they were certain occurred. The second came in winter 2006 and spring 2007, when many of these same figures denied they their previous comments had referred to the criminal case at all, and instead launched a biting cultural critique against the lacrosse players. The third came in summer 2007, when the politically correct rushed to move on.

A few recent signs, however, suggest we might be moving back toward that second phase. The most obvious comes from cnn.com, which found time to break away from its round-the-clock coverage of the Malaysian Airlines disaster to run a column on the . . . cutting-edge . . . topic of lowering the drinking age (to 19, rather than 18, suggesting that the author believes it’s OK to prevent some people who can vote and die for their country from drinking alcohol).

The argument of the column, by William Cohan—that the lacrosse players were drunken louts, that we’ll never know if something happened to Crystal Mangum, that despite their innocence the players should have faced a trial—is little more than a warmed-over version of the Herald-Sun editorial pages from winter 2006. But given the column’s ill-concealed status as a promotion for Cohan’s forthcoming book, presumably this thesis will reappear in Cohan’s April publication as well. So I assume we’ll be hearing lots more about how college students should be judged on how the worst of their group behaved at a spring break party—a standard that the paragons of political correctness rarely apply to all college students.

A second sign came in Jim Coleman’s comments to Radley Balko. The Duke law professor wildly claimed that the three falsely accused students failed to have used their experience “as an opportunity to subject the criminal justice system to a searing review. It’s as if they believe the only bias in the system is against wealthy white college students.”

Less than a minute on Google proves the falsity of Coleman’s statement: Reade Seligmann, for one, has been extremely active with the Innocence Project, to such an extent that his work received extensive press coverage and an “Advocate for Justice” award from an Innocence Project committee. (Collin Finnerty and Dave Evans likewise have worked with Innocence Project events.) Would Coleman be willing to compare Seligmann’s record on this issue with that of any member of the Group of 88? Why does Coleman consider a law student repeatedly working with the Innocence Project to constitute a failure “to subject the criminal justice system to a searing review”?[/quote]

This is William Cohan's book: The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of Our Great Universities

I strongly urge you to read his article, Get real, lower drinking age to 19, in which he says:

Not only did excessive drinking lead to the lacrosse players' decision to hire, at a cost of $400 each, the two strippers in the first place -- apparently not uncommon at Duke fraternity and sorority parties -- but it also led to the boys' taunting of the women with a broomstick, to their unsavory public humiliation of the two dancers as the sexual fervor in the living room ratcheted up and to their hurling of ugly racial epithets at them after they abruptly left the off-campus house.

Whether it also led the three indicted players to rape Crystal Mangum, as she said happened in one of the bathrooms, will never be known.

Whoa - hold it. And I thought the "being gay is a choice" and "where's the real birth certificate?" zealots were full of nonsense.

Finally, I will be forever grateful that there was no Internet when I was the age of the Duke lacrosse players. I did so many stupid, stupid, stupid things....

The Duke Lacrosse Player Still Outrunning His Past

[mahatmakanejeeves]

4. Judges Overturns Howard Verdict, Citing Nifong's "False and Misleading" Statements

Judges Overturns Howard Verdict, Citing Nifong's "False and Misleading" Statements

Radley Balko reports that Durham judge Orlando Hudson has overturned the conviction of Darryl Howard, citing police and prosecutorial misconduct. (The prosecutor in the case was then-ADA Mike Nifong.) Howard will now receive a new trial. Given the paucity of actual evidence against Howard, hopefully the state will drop the case.

Balko covers the ruling in greater detail; and I’ve previously written about the case also. The thrust: much like the lacrosse case, Nifong reacted to a negative DNA test result not by wondering whether he was trying the wrong party, but instead by suggesting that the DNA evidence was irrelevant to the case. In the lacrosse case, Nifong behaved unethically by withholding exculpatory test results from the defense and lying about them to a judge. In the Howard case, he behaved unethically by misleading the court about the state’s original theory of the crime once that theory became inconsistent with DNA test results showing that the DNA of two unidentified men--but not Howard--was found in the two murder victims.

In his ruling, Hudson is unsparing in his criticism of Nifong. In comments about Nifong, the judge began by taking notice of the fact that more than a decade after the Howard case, Nifong would be disbarred and held in criminal contempt for “suppressing exculpatory evidence and willfully making false statements” to Judge Smith in the lacrosse case.

N.C. judge overturns Darryl Howard conviction, finds prosecutor misconduct by Mike Nifong

By Radley Balko May 27 at 2:59 pmMore

In March, I posted a long report on the Darryl Howard case. There’s a lot to this story, but here’s a quick and dirty summary: Howard was convicted in 1995 for murdering a woman and her 13-year-old daughter in a Durham public housing complex. Despite evidence that both women had been sexually assaulted, there was no physical evidence linking Howard to the crime scene. In post-conviction, Howard’s attorneys discovered a police memo describing a tip indicating that the murders were the work of a gang called the New York Boys. The tip seemed particularly reliable because it referred to the fact that the women had been raped, a piece of information that wasn’t public.

The memo was found in both the police file and the file of District Attorney Mike Nifong. But there’s no evidence it was ever turned over to the defense. When DNA testing of sperm found in the daughter excluded Howard, Nifong proceeded with the case as if the sexual assaults weren’t part of the crime.

In an opinion released today, North Carolina Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson overturned Howard’s conviction. Hudson’s decision finds for the defense on every major claim. It’s a resounding repudiation of the way Nifong handled Howard’s trial.