Our reporting was guided by our prejudices, and even though the story turned out to be false, we stand behind our prejudices.

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Roy Cooper is the North Carolina Attorney General who took over the Duke Lacrosse case from AG Nifong (who is currently in a whole heap of trouble with the State Bar Association and perhaps the Criminal justice systen for misconduct in his prosecution of the case). It was easy to drop the obviously false charges, however, it took a lot of nuts for an AG to speak so candidly. The Volokh Conspiracy reports:

I find it remarkable, then, that he went so much further, saying that the accused players were in fact innocent, that there was no credible evidence against them, that the accuser's many different statements could not be rectified and that she contradicted herself, etc. This was not a garden-variety statement about insufficient evidence but instead was about as complete a vindication as the defendants could have imagined. Indeed, I think that Cooper said just about everything that the defendants could have wanted. Cooper must have really been convinced.

Here is an update to my post on the duke lacrosse prersecution.... i mean prosecution.

Update: More here from Durham :

This case is particularly unusual in that a direct relationship exists between Nifong’s procedural violations and flawed outcomes: in effect, the case was constructed upon tissue of procedural irregularities. Had Nifong followed even one of the North Carolina State Bar’s Rules of Professional Conduct outlined below, he could not have brought charges.

1.) Rule 3.3a(1): A lawyer must not “make a false statement of material fact or law to a tribunal or fail to correct a false statement of material fact or law previously made to the tribunal by the lawyer.”

Nifong started his involvement in the case—on March 23-4, when his office filed a motion demanding that the 46 white players on the team submit DNA and photo samples—by violating this rule. It is now clear that this motion was fraudulent in three ways:

• Nifong claimed that the players called each other by first-name aliases and uniform numbers at the party; he had no evidence for either claim, and, indeed, no evidence for either claim exists now.
• Nifong withheld from the court that the accuser had failed to identify any suspects in an official photo lineup, conducted in two parts on March 16 and March 21.
• Nifong, it turned out, falsely promised the court that negative DNA tests would “immediately rule out any innocent persons.”
  

The effect of this procedural violation: without the results of the court order, Nifong would have no case.

Flawed procedures beget flawed results.

2.) Rule 3.8(f): Prosecutors must “refrain from making extrajudicial comments that have a substantial likelihood of heightening public condemnation of the accused.”
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Even the district attorney’s defenders in the state NAACP have conceded that he violated this rule. Some of Nifong’s more outrageous statements:

• “One would wonder why one needs an attorney if one was not charged and had not done anything wrong”;
• Deeming all the players “hooligans”;
• Claiming--“to my knowledge”--that he did not know Kim Roberts had made both 911 calls, thereby creating a false impression of a racist atmosphere throughout the party.
  

The effect of this procedural violation: had he not made these remarks, Nifong might have had the political freedom to back down following the negative DNA tests—though it’s worth remembering that he had almost $30,000 of his own money riding on the DNA results.

Flawed procedures beget flawed results.

Read the whole thing. This case is a travisty of justice.