Duke lacrosse teammates Dave Evans, Reade Seligmann and Colin Finnerty knew that North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper was going to drop the sensational sexual assault case against them. But how would Cooper explain it? Would he just say that the charges were not provable beyond a reasonable doubt—which some saw as the safest way out for the attorney general politically—and leave their reputations in limbo? Or would he say the word they were waiting for?
Six paragraphs into his statement, Cooper ended their agony: “We believe these three individuals are innocent of these charges.” Innocent. Watching on TV, the defendants and their parents, teammates and friends burst into cheers.
Cooper did not stop there. “We have no credible evidence that an attack occurred in that house that night,” he said. “The eyewitness identification procedures were faulty and unreliable. No DNA confirms the accuser’s story. No other witness confirms her story. Other evidence contradicts her story. She contradicts herself.”
The attorney general had done what prosecutors almost never do, and what many of the falsely accused students’ supporters had feared could never be done: he gave them their reputations back.
Cooper’s special prosecutions unit took the case over on Jan. 13, after Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong withdrew to focus on defending himself against disbarment proceedings brought by the North Carolina State Bar. The bar’s complaint accuses Nifong of (among other things) scheming with his DNA expert to hide powerful scientific evidence of innocence from the defense and with lying repeatedly to the court, the defense, the public and the state bar itself. Cooper said that Nifong’s conduct “shows the enormous consequences of overreaching by a prosecutor,” adding that “in the rush to condemn, a community and a state lost the ability to see clearly.”
With Nifong leading the assault, the three young scholar-athletes had been smeared from coast to coast as thugs, racists and probable rapists—by dozens of their own professors, by black and feminist leaders and by many in the news media, for the better part of a year.
Nobody but cranks and haters will ever be able to hurl those lies at them again.
At a defense press conference later in the day, the three defendants and their lawyers mixed eloquent testimonials to one another with expressions of anger—forcefully articulated by defense lawyer Joseph B. Cheshire V—at the Duke professors, journalists and others who had so eagerly joined Nifong’s mob. But they also spoke thoughtfully of a broader lesson: if affluent young men able to afford the best legal talent in the business could be victimized in this way, imagine what must happen every day to countless poor defendants who lack the means to fight back against bad prosecutors and cops.
“This has opened my eyes up to a tragic world of injustice that I had never imagined,” Reade Seligman told a ballroom full of reporters, teammates and others. “We all need to take a step back from this case and learn from it.”
To prevent similar persecution of others, Roy Cooper called for a new law giving the state Supreme Court the authority to remove a case from a prosecutor who has shown himself unfit to continue handling it. Dave Evans and Colin Finnerty called for reforming the grand-jury system to make it a real check on prosecutorial abuses; under current law, grand juries are rubber stamps, because prosecutors control what evidence they can hear and allow no transcript that would help keep them honest.
“Sweet are the uses of adversity,” added defense lawyer Wade Smith, quoting Shakespeare. “They have been tested in great fires,” he said of the three defendants, “and something great will come of this.”
