If they'd been black ... would justice have been served for the Duke lacrosse players if they were not white and well-off?(FEATURE)

PERHAPS WITHOUT KNOWING IT, the country witnessed a very rare event this year: Mike Nifong, the ex-county prosecutor who charged three white Duke University lacrosse players with raping a Black woman last year, lost his license to practice law. A state ethics panel in North Carolina found that Nifong had lied about DNA evidence in the case. He was also found guilty of making remarks about the defendants that would have prejudiced a jury.

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But could it be that Nifong's real offense was not misconduct, but rather treating three middle-class white defendants as if they were poor and Black?

Prosecutors routinely treat Black and Latino defendants as poorly as Nifong did with the three white men in the Duke case, going after the men with very little evidence. But prosecutors are rarely held accountable. Experts estimate that in the last 50 years, there have been fewer than 100 cases of sanctions against prosecutors, and many of those were for matters related to bribery or mishandling of money. While the Duke case was a very real miscarriage of justice (the evidence didn't support the indictment), what distinguishes it from so many others is not that justice was eventually done, but rather that justice was done because the defendants could afford it. At some point the system simply refused to treat these young white men like they were poor and Black.

When it comes to legal cases, prosecutors wield the substantial power of the state. They receive a great deal of discretion, and so the U.S. Constitution imposes on them the burden of presenting a case that will likely meet the standard of reasonable doubt. Regardless of the tawdry events of the Duke students' party last year, with all its racial and misogynous overtones, Nifong simply did not have the facts to support an indictment for rape.

To begin with, Nifong hired a private lab to run DNA tests, but the results did not match the DNA of the accused. Secondly, the identification of the defendants from a photo lineup was seriously flawed. There were no witnesses to the assault and not enough other evidence to suggest success in a prosecution. But in a press statement, Nifong referred to the Duke Lacrosse team as "hooligans hiding behind a wall of silence" and repeated his determination to go forward with a vigorous prosecution. At the same time, he was also running for reelection, and some local residents questioned whether his zeal stemmed from confidence in the case or a desire to curry favor from Black voters. Despite these weaknesses, Nifong held on to the case. Finally, when he stepped down amid the criticism and the state attorney took over the case, the three white men were found innocent.

After the charges were dismissed, the young men talked on 60 Minutes about how their lives had been irrevocably changed by the stigma of being charged with a crime. Nifong quickly became the target of their blame.