DA ought to hand off case

There are two ways for Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong to get out of the mess otherwise known as the Duke lacrosse case.

One, he can surrender to criticism and call for a special prosecutor to step in and take command.

Two, he can wait for a write-in candidate to make history and unseat a sitting Democratic district attorney in Durham County.

Great choices, eh?

Every time I think this case can't get any messier, it reaches new lows.

We still don't know what happened in that house near the Duke campus. Perhaps Nifong has a stash of evidence that will make it clear the woman who danced for the lacrosse players was indeed held against her will and violated, as the indictments against the three men charge.

But publicly at least, the prosecutor's case appears to be unraveling, and the work of the Durham Police is once again called into question. (I'm having a Mike Peterson flashback.)

Most troubling is what the district attorney appears to have known, compared with what he said, in the early days of the investigation -- about the use of condoms by the alleged perpetrators, for example, or the identity of the 911 caller.

And of course there was the DA's harrowing description of the crime itself -- which appears to contradict the emergency room report and the woman's own conflicting accounts.

To think that for a brief moment I actually pitied Nifong for the attacks on his handling of the case. What a joke.

Nifong is the one who described this thing in such incendiary terms from the start that it was impossible to ignore.

Say all you want about the media's rush to judgment. But the truth is we report on allegations and charges out of district attorneys' offices every single day. And when a DA, especially one with Nifong's reputation for being a quiet, behind-the-scenes guy, comes out not only saying that a rape occurred, but that it was a brutal gang rape, in which the woman was strangled and beaten, you had to figure he had incontrovertible evidence.

Apparently, he didn't.

Whether he was shooting from the hip based on word-of-mouth inaccuracies or flat-out making the stuff up, I don't know.

I do wonder whether his over-the-top remarks don't violate the bar's admonition against prosecutors "heightening public condemnation of the accused."

This case has affected the reputations of three young athletes, possibly unfairly. It has torn off the scabs on race and class -- in Durham and beyond. You need look no further than the blogosphere for evidence of that.

Sadly, it has also further eroded a wary public's confidence in our legal system.

I tried contacting the prosecutor Friday to talk about all this, but his office was swamped with a new (false) rumor that he was planning a news conference to announce that he was asking that the case be dismissed. He never called me back.

At this point, Nifong has damaged his own reputation and his own office to the point where he cannot possibly handle this case to its resolution.

It's time for him to call in a special prosecutor and put himself -- and the rest of us -- out of our misery.