On Dec. 5, Jim Cooney met Mike Nifong for the first time. Cooney, a veteran defense lawyer from Charlotte, had recently taken over as lead attorney for Reade Seligmann, one of three Duke lacrosse players Nifong had charged with rape.

Cooney wanted to start on the right foot with the man trying to put his client in prison for 20 years, so he began with a goodwill gesture. Back in May, Seligmann's former top lawyer had filed a motion arguing that Nifong's misconduct was so severe that a judge should yank the district attorney off the case.

Cooney withdrew the hostile motion four days before meeting with Nifong in his sixth-floor office.

"You don't want Reade Seligmann in the case," Cooney recalls saying. A jury would never convict Seligmann because of his powerful digital alibi: Cell phone records, an ATM surveillance photo and dorm records showed Seligmann left the party minutes after the two dancers stopped performing.

According to Cooney, Nifong said he was displeased that Seligmann's prior attorney had made the alibi public.

"There is no such thing as an airtight alibi," Nifong said.

Cooney was prepared to offer to bring in Seligmann for questioning. He was willing to open his entire file and investigation, but Nifong again said he would stick by Crystal Mangum's story.

"There is nothing you can show me that will change my mind," Nifong replied. "Only her and her story. As long as she's willing, we're going forward."

And she was not going to be bullied off the case by defense lawyers, Nifong said: "She is not intimidated."

Cooney got up, shook Nifong's hand and left. He did not offer his client for questioning, and he did not mention what was coming next.

DNA door opened

Defense lawyers were preparing to file several motions the following week, in advance of a Dec. 15 hearing. They would ask a judge to throw out Mangum's identification of the defendants because of flawed lineup procedures and ask for the trial to be moved from Durham.

But the biggest counterattack concerned the DNA evidence that a doctor at Duke Hospital collected from Mangum on March 14, 2006. Every person has unique DNA, which acts as the blueprint and instructions for every part of the body. Over the past two decades, DNA has become an increasingly powerful tool to convict the guilty and exonerate the wrongly accused.

One of Cooney's colleagues on the defense team, Brad Bannon, had been deeply concerned about DNA evidence since May 15, when his client, Dave Evans, was indicted. Evans was the only defendant with any connection to DNA collected in the case.

No player was connected to DNA recovered from Mangum during her medical examinations. But tests from a private laboratory hired by Nifong, DNA Security Inc., showed that DNA from several men was found on false fingernails recovered from a trash can in a bathroom at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd., where Mangum said she was raped.

Evans could have been one of the men; tests excluded 98 percent of the population, but not him.

From the day Evans was indicted, Bannon led the effort to push Nifong to open his investigative file, which Nifong was required to do under a new state law. The open file discovery law was passed following the widely publicized case of Alan Gell, an innocent man who spent five years on death row because prosecutors withheld evidence showing his innocence. Bannon and Cooney were intimately familiar with the law; they and Bannon's senior partner, Joseph B. Cheshire V, represented Gell. All three helped get the law passed.

As Nifong opened his files, the defense lawyers found a trove of evidence favorable to the lacrosse players: conflicts in Mangum's stories, flawed photo lineups and statements from the second dancer at the party that rape charges were a "crock."

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