From the Scottsboro Boys to Clarence Gideon, some of the most memorable legal narratives have been tales of the wrongly accused. Now “Until Proven Innocent,” a new book about the false allegations of rape against three Duke lacrosse players, can join these galvanizing cautionary tales. We know how the story ended: the attorney general of North Carolina dismissed all charges against the lacrosse players, declaring them completely innocent, and he denounced Michael Nifong, the district attorney who brought the case, as a “rogue prosecutor.” Nifong was not only disbarred and disgraced; his name has become a synonym for gross prosecutorial abuse. To be “Nifonged” now means to be railroaded.

In their riveting narrative, Stuart Taylor Jr., one of America’s most insightful legal commentators (and a former reporter at The New York Times), and KC Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York, portray Nifong as “evil or deluded or both.” They call him a “race-baiting demagogue” who tried to fan racial hatred against innocent white students (and lock them up for 30 years) in order to win black votes in his re-election campaign. Soon after an African-American stripper claimed she had been gang-raped at a Duke lacrosse party, the authors charge, Nifong should have known that the woman he called “my victim” was lying. She made the claim of rape only when threatened with confinement in a mental health center. She then recanted and re-recanted, offering a series of contradictory claims to having been raped by 20, five, four, three and two players, before finally settling on three, none of whom she could confidently identify. Her fellow stripper at the party called her story a “crock.”

Image Credit... Rodrigo Corral and Chris Brand

Nifong didn’t know all this, however, because, incredibly, he never interviewed his “victim” about the facts. Instead, he set out systematically to demonize the accused players, violating pretrial publicity rules while suppressing evidence of their innocence. After the accuser proved unable to identify her assailants during two photo lineups, Nifong told the police to give her a third chance, showing her pictures only of the 46 white lacrosse players without any pictures of “fillers,” or nonsuspects. This violated local, state and federal rules for reliable identification procedures. He refused to drop the charges after no DNA from any of the players was found on the accuser. When the DNA of as many as four other men, none of them Duke students, was found on her, Nifong refused to turn over this crucial exculpatory evidence to the defense. And he refused even to meet with defense lawyers to consider the conclusive “digital alibis” they had assembled from cellphone calls, A.T.M. deposits and time-stamped photos proving their clients could not have committed the crime. In this case, the technologies of the surveillance state served the cause of liberty.