Judge is asked to remove Nifong

DURHAM -- Saying that Mike Nifong's name now means injustice, a political foe of the district attorney asked the courts Friday to remove him from office.

But the judge who will hear the case said he would wait for the State Bar to resolve its ethics case against Nifong before taking up the petition filed in Durham County Superior Court.

The filing by Beth Brewer, made under a state law that establishes a procedure for removing a district attorney, accuses the prosecutor of willful misconduct and conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice, which brings the office into disrepute. The accusations focus on Nifong's actions in the Duke University lacrosse sexual assault case.

"I'm looking forward to having the case heard and having the opportunity to have my side told publicly," Nifong told the Associated Press. "I would really hope that everybody would be willing to withhold judgment until that procedure that is already in place had been given an opportunity to work."

His attorney, David Freedman of Winston-Salem, noted that Brewer's efforts to beat Nifong at the ballot box failed last year.

"Now she's attempting to use a collateral move to remove him from office when she couldn't do it through the democratic process," Freedman said Friday afternoon.

Brewer, who ran a campaign against Nifong in the November election, declined to answer questions. In a news release, she said she wanted Nifong removed because he had eroded the public's faith in the justice system.

Brewer, 48, is a billing manager at Verizon who has long taken an active interest in the happenings at the Durham courthouse. She was an avid follower of the murder trial of novelist Mike Peterson and has closely followed the lacrosse case.

Last spring, Nifong won the Democratic primary and faced no Republican opposition. But after defense lawyers in the lacrosse case stepped up their criticism of weaknesses in the investigation, a petition drive yielded enough signatures to put Durham County Commissioner Lewis Cheek on the ballot as an independent.

Cheek said he would not accept the job, and Brewer began an effort to have voters pick Cheek anyway. If he had won and refused the job, the governor would have had to appoint a district attorney.

Nifong won the election with 49 percent of the vote. Cheek got 39 percent, and nearly 12 percent of voters picked a write-in.

Under state law, Durham Senior Resident Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson has 30 days to review the complaint. He said in an interview Friday after a quick look at the document that because many of its allegations follow the State Bar's charges against Nifong, he planned to postpone any decision until the State Bar, which licenses and disciplines lawyers, has completed Nifong's trial, which is set for June.

The charges

Three former players, David Evans, 23, of Bethesda, Md., Collin Finnerty, 20, of Garden City, N.Y., and Reade Seligmann, 20, of Essex Fells, N.J., each face a charge of sexual offense and kidnapping. The players say the allegations against them -- that they assaulted an escort service dancer hired to perform at a team party -- are lies. Their lawyers have sharply criticized Nifong's case as a rush to judgment on scant and flawed evidence.

In December Nifong dropped a rape charge against the players when the woman said she was no longer sure of a key detail of her story.

That same month, the State Bar accused Nifong of an ethics violation for his early public statements about the case. Nifong asked to be removed from the case in January and the lacrosse prosecution is now in the hands of the state Attorney General's Office. The bar amended its complaint in January, heaping more serious charges against Nifong, who it accused of withholding evidence and then lying about it.