The mills of justice grind slow, but they grind exceeding small

National Review, July 9, 2007

* The mills of justice grind slow, but they grind exceeding small. Latest to learn this has been Mike Nifong, district attorney in Durham, N.C. Nifong's prosecution of three Duke University lacrosse players went on for ten months, until the state attorney general's office took over the case in January, quickly dismissing all charges.

The lacrosse players, all white, had been accused of raping a black stripper at a party in March 2006. It soon became apparent that there was no real evidence in the case, but Nifong pressed ahead anyway, in a transparent effort to garner black votes by harpooning three Great White Defendants. Now the state bar's disciplinary committee has stripped Nifong of his law license for leading "a clear case of intentional prosecutorial misconduct" involving "dishonesty, fraud, deceit, and misrepresentation." The ugly paradox here is that Nifong's vendetta, widely supported by black North Carolinians for reasons of ethnic solidarity (i.e., with the stripper), has highlighted the frightening power district attorneys can wield when they choose. In North Carolina and elsewhere, the victims of that power are mostly not affluent and educated, like the Duke lacrosse players, but poor and clueless. In all likelihood, they are disproportionately black.