Can Duke Players' Reputations Be Repaired?

Today America was reminded justice isn't just blind, she can be slow.

Three young men, all vindicated but still victims.

Twenty-four-year-old David Evans graduated from Duke the day before he was indicted. His dream of working on Wall Street has been put on hold. He now works for a computer company, CBS News correspondent Byron Pitts reports.

Collin Finnerty — age 20 — was suspended his sophomore year. Now he's an assistant lacrosse coach at his old high school in New York. His applications to other colleges deferred — awaiting today's outcome.

Reade Seligmann is 21. He, too, was suspended his sophomore year. He also coaches lacrosse back home in New Jersey, with his college applications also on hold.

Here in Durham, N.C., the three are referred to as "the Duke three." It's estimated that their parents spent an estimated $3.5 million on lawyers.

Vindication is one thing — restoring reputations is something else.

"The biggest losers here I think are the three students who were indicted," said James Coleman, a Duke University law professor.

Coleman has been a voice of reason from the beginning.

"As opposed to the rest of us, the city, the university, Duke students in general, I think they will never overcome what happened," Coleman said. "And I think they will always be known as the lacrosse players — the Duke lacrosse rape defendants."

How unfair is that?

"It is about as unfair as it gets," Coleman said. "I mean, that is the whole point. That's why I complained about what was going on in the very beginning, because it is very difficult to undo an injustice like that once you're tagged as a person that has committed an infamous crime."

It was a stripper with a troubled past and prosecutor in a tight election race who "tagged" them.

For months is seemed District Attorney Mike Nifong couldn't say enough about the case.

Not now.

Pitts tried to talk with Nifong recently. His response: "Don't come into my yard."

"Can we talk to you for a second, sir?" Pitts asked.

Nifong shook his head "no," and turned his back when Pitts asked him "what would you say to these boys' families, Mr. Nifong?"

Today, Nifong lives in virtual seclusion as he awaits the outcome of an ethics investigation.

"I don't see that he has much of a future," Coleman said. "Certainly he has no public career and as a lawyer he is like — the irony is — just like the students he indicted. I mean, this is going to be an albatross around their neck and around his neck."

For one year it's been a story of race and class tied together by an alleged crime.

"It was an American kind of Southern novel," Coleman said. "It involved an elite university in the south with a historic history — but also a dark side of the history. It had race, it had sex, it had wealthy white students, it had a prosecutor who claimed he was the white knight for the black community in Durham. And you put all that together and that's a pretty big story."

And in the end, when this novel is completed?

"In the end it couldn't finish the story," Coleman said. "It fell apart."

Books are easily rewritten. But not lives.