Relying on a mixture of interviews with Nifong and previously available material, Cohan portrays Nifong as a courageous prosecutor who tackled a difficult case as best he could, even as many of his key advisers let him down at critical junctures. Nifong might have made a few mistakes, in this version of events, but his heart was in the right place. As with the Times in 2006, a superficially neutral tone conceals a fundamentally dishonest thesis — that “something happened” (precisely what occurred the author leaves to readers’ imaginations) to accuser Crystal Mangum.

At its core, the lacrosse case was a story of three Duke students — Dave Evans, Collin Finnerty, and Reade Seligmann — accused of a heinous crime that never occurred, and their impressive ability to endure a false arrest and intense, often malicious, public scrutiny. But since Cohan was unable to interview any of the three or their family members, he cannot provide any new insights into their experiences. Instead, relying on the same evidence that a comprehensive investigation from North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper’s office had found worthy of a declaration of innocence, Cohan baselessly implies that one of the falsely accused might have been a criminal after all. For good measure, he launches unsubstantiated character smears against a second of Nifong’s targets. . . .

The lacrosse case generated the backlash it did because it illustrated the breakdown of institutions that purport to offer a dispassionate commitment to the truth. Professors at an elite university, obsessed with themes of race, class, and gender, abandoned the academy’s traditional fealty to due process to exploit their own students’ distress. Journalists from the New York Times to the local newspaper in Durham seemed to view their central task as propping up Nifong’s case by any means necessary, lest a false accusation contradict their editors’ (and many of their readers’) ideological biases. North Carolina civil-rights activists set aside their longstanding calls for fair treatment of criminal suspects to bolster whatever version of events Mangum happened to be offering.

Cohan isn’t much interested in these aspects of the story, but any book on the lacrosse case must address such matters. The Price of Silence covers them in a slipshod fashion, cutting and pasting lengthy excerpts of remarks from key figures, or summarizing, one after another, items that appeared in various publications (including my own blog on the case). In his acknowledgements, Cohan thanks his research assistant, who presumably did yeoman’s work compiling the many snippets that the book uses. But readers deserve more than mind-numbing, context-free synopses of dozens of articles or columns or blog posts.