Nifong, already stripped of his law license for his misconduct in the Duke lacrosse case, is to report to the Durham County Jail at 9 a.m. Friday and stay behind bars until 9 a.m. Saturday.

Smith could have sentenced Nifong to as many as 30 days in jail and fined him up to $500.

"If what I impose with regard to Mr. Nifong would make things better or different for what's already happened, I don't know what it would be or how I could do it," Smith said Friday after a two-day criminal contempt hearing.

The sentencing brings to a close the final chapter in the criminal case that Nifong brought against three former Duke lacrosse players in 2006.

Nifong, a veteran prosecutor and rookie politician running in a hotly contested race for office, seized charge of the case that thrust him into the national spotlight.

In claiming that three white Duke athletes had brutally assaulted a black escort service dancer, he stoked racial and class tensions.

Nifong clung to the case as it imploded over the ensuing year, but he was eventually forced to yield control to N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper.

In April, Cooper cleared the three lacrosse players, declaring them innocent of all charges stemming from a lacrosse team party in March 2006. He said they were victims of "a tragic rush to accuse."

This summer, the state bar yanked Nifong's law license.

Smith said Friday that the two-day contempt proceeding was not about the merits of the lacrosse case, but was about protecting and preserving the integrity of the justice system.

"It's about the candor, accuracy and truthfulness in representations to the court, particularly in important matters where the liberties and rights to a fair trial of those accused of crime may be jeopardized by the absence of such honesty by counsel," Smith said. "The court expects, as well it should, to be able to rely on lawyers' representations."

The contempt hearing was tightly focused on a brief courtroom exchange in September 2006, when Nifong assured the judge that he had turned over to the defense everything he knew and had about a private lab's DNA test.

That turned out to be false.

DNA from others

It was already known by then that no DNA from any lacrosse team member had been found on the body or clothing of the accuser, Crystal Gail Mangum. What Nifong did not disclose was that the lab had found DNA from other, unidentified men on Mangum's clothes and body.

Nifong and his attorney argued that he did not intentionally mislead the court, but special prosecutors in the case used the former district attorney's own words to show otherwise.

"I now understand that some things that I thought were in the report were in fact not in the report," Nifong testified Friday. "So the statements were not factually true to the extent that I said all the information had been provided."

The evidence of the DNA from the unidentified men was unearthed by defense lawyer Brad Bannon from 2,000 pages of raw DNA-lab data the defense team received in October 2006, nearly a month after the hearing on which the contempt charge was focused.

"It was never my intention to mislead this or any other court," Nifong testified. "I certainly apologize to the court at this time for anything I might have said that was not correct."

Smith said he did not believe there was a conspiracy between the private lab director and Nifong to withhold evidence.

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