Mike Nifong Gets His Just Desserts

The disgraced lawyer will never be able to practice law again:

District Attorney Mike Nifong was disbarred Saturday for his "selfish" rape prosecution of three Duke University lacrosse players — a politically motivated act, his judges said, that he inexplicably allowed to fester for months after it was clear the defendants were innocent.

"This matter has been a fiasco. There's no doubt about it," said F. Lane Williamson, the chairman of the three-member disciplinary committee that stripped the veteran prosecutor of his state law license.

Even Nifong and his attorneys supported the decision, though the veteran prosecutor refused to admit to the end that no crime occurred at a March 2006 lacrosse team party.

The committee said Nifong manipulated the investigation to boost his chances of winning his first election for Durham County district attorney. In doing so, he committed "a clear case of intentional prosecutorial misconduct" that involved "dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation."

Williamson specifically cited Nifong's comments in the early days of the case, which included a confident proclamation at a candidate forum that he wouldn't allow Durham to become known for "a bunch of lacrosse players from Duke raping a black girl." He also called the lacrosse team "a bunch of hooligans" at one point.