Nifong asks to be removed from case

THE LATEST: Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong has asked to be removed from the Duke University lacrosse case.

• Nifong made the request in a letter delivered to the office of N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper.
• The attorney general's office could take over the case.

THE DETAILS: Nifong sent a letter to Cooper this afternoon, according to Noelle Talley, a spokesman for Cooper. The letter asked Cooper to appoint his office's special prosecution unit to take over the case, Talley said.

Nifong answered the phone in his office about 5:30 p.m. but refused to say whether he had asked to be recused from the case.

“I'm not sure where y'all are getting this stuff,” Nifong said. When asked whether he had sent a letter to the state attorney general, he said, “I'm not commenting on anything about this case. Bye.”

"We are pleased, and we offer the Attorney General our full and complete cooperation," said Wade Smith, defense attorney for Collin Finnerty, one of the three men charged in the case. "We will meet with them at any time, and we are glad that people with such qualifications are going to take over the case."

John F. Burness, senior vice president for public affairs and government relations at Duke, issued the following statement:

“We welcome the news that the district attorney has asked to be removed from this case," Burness said.

"As President Brodhead has emphasized, this matter needs to be placed in the hands of an independent party who can restore confidence in the fairness and integrity of the legal process," Burness said, referring to statements previously made by Duke President Richard Brodhead.

"We hope this change will lead to a fair and speedy resolution of this case.”

In other news, Nifong met in his office Thursday with the accuser in the case.

Defense lawyers had served a subpoena on the woman addressed at Nifong's office. She was in the office Thursday and personally received the document, the subpoena said.

And Nifong also has hired a Winston-Salem lawyer who was critical of his early handling of the case during a national TV interview in April.

David Freedman, one of a handful of North Carolina attorneys with a sizable practice defending lawyers battling State Bar complaints, said today that he regretted comments he made on MSNBC's "The Abrams Report."

"My opinion was just based on media reports," Freedman said. "As an experienced trial lawyer, I should know better than to base my comments just on what I had read."

In December, the Bar charged Nifong with violating ethics rules during numerous media interviews he gave shortly after an escort service dancer alleged that she was sexually assaulted at a lacrosse team party.

It is unprecedented for the Bar to charge a prosecutor during an ongoing criminal case.

Penalties range from disbarment to losing his license for up to five years.

A preliminary hearing on those charges is set for Jan. 24 at the Bar offices in Raleigh.

Nifong said today that he was not worried about Freedman's early comments.

During an April 19 segment of "The Abrams Report," Freedman said this about the case:

"Well, that everything has been mishandled from the start. You had a district attorney coming out and making potentially unethical statements, saying he believed a crime occurred, which he should not do. He should not be commenting on the evidence. He took an adversarial position from the start."

As for Nifong's request to be removed from the case, Duke law professor James Coleman said Nifong did the right thing, but should have done it sooner.

"In light of the substantial way in which [the accuser] changed her story and the fact that [Nifong] has ethical charges pending against him, it was not possible for him to continue to prosecute the case," Coleman said.

That doesn't mean the case will end immediately, he said.

"I don't think it should be over in the sense that there should be a rush to drop the charges," he said. "The new prosecutor should do the kind of thorough investigation Nifong should have done to determine whether there is any basis to go forward."