Jun 15 2007
Nifong Is Gone
Good riddance to a man who abused his position and tried to game the system to inflict legal scars on innocent kids for personal gain. Nigong is resigning no matter what happens in his trial – in a clear attempt to try and save what little of his reputation is left. It seems clear he is trying to offer up his preferred punishment so as to avoid the total loss of his career. Not sure it will be enough. He misused his office. Now we need to see more of the same with Ronnie Earl and Patrick Fitzgerald.
HERE HERE, at least we agree on that! What he did was despicable and Fitz was no less.
What’s the status of Tom DeLay’s case? Anyone know?
Wonder how the Appellate Court will rule in Libby’s emergency appeal and whether the Appellate Court will agree with Robbins and Stancil…
Levin is going to help Landmark write an amici brief in support of Libby.
Walton made a gross error in his ruling.
Lurker
Even Tom’s own blog rarely addresses the issue.
Nobody on the other side even cares any more, even if Earl gets slapped down, it doesn’t matter.
Hammer is gone, mission accomplished.
If it goes to trial at all, it will be closer to the election to stir the pot by generating timely headlines and talking points.
Having great fun watching the Nifong spectacle today – although Court TV’s editorial decisions are maddening, as always. For example: while Nifong was being cross examined about the interplay between his campaign loans, his primary race, his inflammatory statements, and his public comment that “this publicity is worth $1,000,000”, Court TV cut away from the live shot and instead put on two talking heads who rattled on about how they couldn’t possibly imagine why he would do something like that. At least Bannon got in a nice shot at the always fatuous Nancy Grace the other day, saying in Court (and in a section carried live on Court TV “Who listens to Nancy Grace?” Haven’t heard her comment on that one.
read your blog regularly, AJ, just haven’t felt like contributing for a while. been kinda busy. 😉 – WWS
Biker
It’s not just the Libby trial.
Fritzlaw is also turning into another piece of cake to watch right now in the Conrad Black case.
Only difference is the judge for that trial doesn’t seem to “feel the love” as much as Walton did.
Regarding Tom Delay’s case, or the case that Time (and Ronnie Earle) forgot – that case has entered a legal TWiLiGhT ZoNe now, one which it will probably never leave. I can’t find any record of anything at all happening in that case for over a year, and although there will be some maneuvering here and there, I put the odds of it ever going to trial at about 1000 – 1 against.
Since Delay resigned (which was the point of the indictment) there’s no need for Earle to push it, and no real incentive for Delay to fight it, and so both sides have settled for procedural limbo, in which every order is appealed all the way up the line, until the next procedural step which will take another couple of years of pre-trial appeals, and then the next step which will take another couple of years of pre-trial appeals, ad infinitum. The problem for the prosecution, of course, is that the grand jury procedure was abysmal (a longstanding criticism of all of Earle’s prosecutions, non-political cases included) and in this case it was so sloppy that it can probably never stand up. (don’t forget, people hooted when us legal types said Nifong’s lineups would never stand up)
Most likely outcome – the case will plod slowly from one procedural motion to another for another 18 months until Ronnie Earle retires (as he has said he will) and the next prosecutor will quietly drop it because there’s no point in his wasting time on tired old baggage.
– WWS
The lingering question about Nifong is would the judicial system have cleaned up this mess if it had not been such a high profile case?
I mean how proactive are bar associations in these type of issues and how high is the bar before they get off their duff.
Does the AG of the state have a role in this review process.
That’s a good point Merlin, it was mostly a lot of ‘bitching and whining’ from the blogosphere and talk radio that saved those young mens asses.
To me the justice system took the wrong turn with the expansion of media sources and the birth of the net to the point it became an alternative source crawling it’s first baby steps at the OJ trial.
There are two camps who say opposing things about that trial.
One say he was guilty as sin and the jury fuggered up the process.
Others say time travel, dna rebirth and just plain evidence planting tainted the whole process.
No matter which side everyone came down on that contentious issue, one undeniable fact can not be escaped.
The media of all stripes covered this trial mainly from the “green zone” of how far their mike could extend from the satellite truck parked in front of the court house.
Thousands of press people gave their talking head analysis parsing words to give their specific insight.
Just what to hell happened to some of those of this shark feeding frenzy getting off their duff and doing shoe leather time in the street and going out to do the hard work of proving or disproving the story line as it was developed.
It wasn’t done. Pure and simple. Instead at one point in this trial it degraded to news people interviewing other news people because they simply ran out of things to say.
Overall they were picking which color lipstick to paint the pig with and chose to ignore the actual data in the story itself.
By doing that they started their own downfall of credibility that has yet to be reversed.
I look forward to and await the revolution where the new new journalism will not consider homework as an optional choice.
Another worthy experiment is how the coverage itself influenced opinion.
A few years ago, I transferred the video tapes my wife had made of the trial coverage to dvd just to preserve them.
But then an idea occurred to me that since the talking heads and the full in court coverage may have influenced the issue, I tried a different approach.
I took the full monty dvd and edited it down to just the in court trial coverage when the jury was present. In other words I eliminated all the talking head coverage, the no jury present arguments of points that talked about evidence that was in many cases never presented to the actual jury because of court rulings.
This was done just to see exactly what did the jury have to work with.
You would be amazed by the time differential and what was really presented to the jury to base their conclusions on.
I had to in some cases had to edit out 2 or 3 days of non jury proceedings that those in the audience had their whole mind perception obviously compromised by the non admissible points never presented to the jury.
Perhaps enough time has passed that if the shorter version was reviewed on it’s merits would show how the longer tainted version influenced opinion on the case.
If for example the in court tv coverage were to have been restricted to only being allowed when the jury was present and seated rather than covering all the other stuff, I do not believe that such a division of opinion would have existed, or at least it would not have been so far gapped as it was.
My wife had a full blown obsession with the trial coverage and I had three sets of tapes from the major networks and I had to boil down the multi dvd set since she was running three video recorders on the different channels.
The results of the edit down were instructive.
The gallery in any trial that has the jury excused from the court room will always be influenced by the extra information not provided to the jury.
There is no way to avoid that.
To Bikerken, re saving those young men’s asses: sad to say, the blogosphere had nothing to do with it. No on in the NC legal system gives a damn about anything outside their own little world – what saved those boys is the $3 million in legal fees that fortunately they were in a position to pay. (yes, that is the defense teams bill so far – good chance they’ll be able to recover it from the City and the County. Nifong, of course, has already places all of his assets in his wife’s name and will file personal bankruptcy to nullify any future personal judgment against him)
Don’t think that money was wasted or excessive, though – that defense team is what broke this case wide open, and they deserve wider recognition for what they did. To try and hide the DNA results, Nifong in October handed over 1800 pages of raw test data with no summary or analysis, thinking that no one would be able to go through it and see what was really there. Bannon (I believe he was Finnerty’s lawyer, although all 3 defense attorneys worked together) bought a DNA data interpretation textbook from Amazon and then spent about 100 hours reading the textbook and going through all 1800 pages of data, line by line. He did that so well that he found the incriminating data that Meehan and Nifong were trying to hide. When he took this to his partners, they were incredulous and at first didn’t believe him – so he took his findings and the data to some established DNA experts, who said “you’re exactly right!”
Then came the Dec. 15th hearing, and the Perry Mason moment where Bannon caught Meehan on the stand and asked about what Meehan didn’t think anyone knew – all of the unidentified positives. Meehan broke down and on the stand confessed the entire scheme to hide them from the defense, and that’s when this case broke wide open. Everything since then (including the current hearing) is just cleaning up the mess.
Interesting little side battle in the Dec. 15th hearing – Nifong didn’t want any experts questioning Meehan, so he didn’t notify the defense that Meehan was coming to the hearing (as he was ethically and legally required to do) Meehan showed up unannounced to take questions, and Nifong thought it would be a snap since only “experts” can understand DNA data. He never imagined that Bannon would have taught himself DNA science in his spare time, and that’s why Bannon was able to pull Meehan’s shorts down around his ankles. (and Nifong’s as well)
I wish people would take more notice – because no way was this the “first” dirty prosecution that Durham county prosecutors have done, this is just the first time they went after some honest people who were lucky enough to have the resources to fight back.
– WWS