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."

For months, Bannon and other defense lawyers had pressed Nifong to release all the DNA evidence. Bannon pushed for the notes from the three trips Nifong made to DNA Security. Nifong said there were none.

Bannon was skeptical. A prosecutor, a scientist and two investigators met three times to discuss one of the most complicated areas of forensic evidence, yet not a single note was made?

At a September hearing, Nifong insisted that DNA Security's 12-page report contained all the DNA findings, and he mocked Bannon's efforts as a witch hunt. Judge W. Osmond Smith III asked Nifong whether there were other statements from lab director Brian Meehan. "No other statements," Nifong said. "No other statements made to me."

Smith ordered Nifong to turn over all documents and raw data from DNA Security. On Oct. 27, Bannon received 1,844 pages of technical documents.

Bannon, a lean and youthful 36, spread the papers out on a big table in a conference room in his law firm's fourth-floor office, overlooking Fayetteville Street in Raleigh.

Bannon looked through the stack of numbers, squiggly lines and acronyms. The documents showed electropherograms and extractions worksheets. An English major in college, he had bought a textbook to guide him: "Forensic DNA Typing: Biology, Technology, and Genetics of STR Markers," by John Butler of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The conference room became Bannon's virtual home as he worked 18-hour days, going through each document, page by page, line by line.

Four others' DNA

After a month, Bannon had decoded the documents: DNA Security's Meehan had found DNA from at least four unidentified men on Mangum and in her underwear.

Nifong had never disclosed these results, even though the new discovery law required him to hand over "a report of the results of any examinations or tests conducted by the expert."

Nifong had done nothing to identify or investigate these men.

Bannon filed his findings with the court and Nifong two days before the hearing scheduled for Dec. 15. Before the hearing, Nifong, defense lawyers and Judge Smith met privately in a small conference room next to the grand jury room.

Nifong said he didn't know about the withheld results. "I just, in terms of the discovery issues, frankly, you know, I got the [motion] and I was like, 'whoa.' So I immediately faxed a copy to Dr. Meehan and said, 'Read this, and I'll call you in the morning and get your opinions about this.' And we discussed it, and I said, 'This is a major issue for the defense. They're entitled to hear about it, and I think it needs to be addressed right away.' "

When the hearing began in open court, Nifong made a similar statement: "The first I heard of this particular situation was when I was served with these reports -- this motion -- on Wednesday of this week. ... It's crucial that everybody have access to all of the evidence in this case."

Nifong faced a difficult decision. He could have told the judge that there had been a mistake and that he would fix it by having Meehan provide an updated report with all the test results.

Instead, he called Meehan to take the stand. Nifong had not notified defense lawyers Meehan would be present. The lawyers had not prepared to cross-examine a scientific expert on DNA.

It turned out that Meehan was not prepared. Nifong had not provided him with the lab documents that Bannon had focused on.

Bannon walked him through the documents, and Meehan repeatedly admitted that he and Nifong had agreed not to report that he found DNA from unidentified men in the rape kit. Meehan admitted violating his laboratory standards by not reporting the results of all tests.

When Meehan said he and Nifong intentionally agreed not to report the results of all tests and examinations, some supporters of the players burst into applause.

Meehan testified sitting straight in front of Nifong, about 12 feet away. The prosecutor looked ashen, resting his face in his hands or staring down at the table.

His expert had just become a witness for the defense.

Coming Wednesday: Another new version of events.