Duke Player: Nightmare Is Over

(CBS/AP)  Prosecutors dropped all charges Wednesday against the three Duke lacrosse players accused of sexually assaulting a stripper at a party, saying the athletes were innocent victims of a "tragic rush to accuse" by an overreaching district attorney.

In a stunning show of solidarity, the entire Duke men's and women's lacrosse teams gathered to support their former teammates at a news conference following the announcement, reports CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric.

David Evans, one of the defendants, reflected on the case.

"It's been 395 days since this nightmare began. And finally, today, it's coming to a closure," said Evans, his voice breaking at one point. "We're just as innocent today as we were back then. Nothing has changed. The facts don't change."

He added: "I'm excited to get on with my life. It's been a long year, longer than you could ever imagine. But I hope these allegations don't come to define me."

Joe Cheshire, one of the players' attorneys, bitterly accused the media of portraying the athletes as criminals, and said: "We're angry, very angry. But we're very relieved."

North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, who took over the case after Durham County District Mike Nifong was charged with ethics violations that could get him disbarred, said his own investigation concluded not only that the evidence against the young men was insufficient, but that no attack took place.

"We have no credible evidence that an attack occurred in that house on that night," Cooper said.

---

Lesley Stahl will have an exclusive interview with the three players on "60 Minutes" this Sunday at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

---

It was March of last year when a 27-year-old African-American woman, one of two exotic dancers hired to perform at a Duke lacrosse team party, told police she was forced into a bathroom, beaten, and raped by three white men, reports CBS News correspondent Bob Orr.

Arrests came swiftly — and publicly.

Reade Seligmann and Colin Finnerty were paraded in handcuffs, adds Orr. Evans, their lacrosse team co-captain, was booked in front of TV cameras.

But the sensational case had been troubled almost from the start after DNA samples found no link to any of the Duke lacrosse players and the accuser's story about what happened that night began to change.

The attorney general said the eyewitness identification procedures were unreliable, no DNA supported the woman's story, no other witness corroborated it and the woman contradicted herself.

"Based on the significant inconsistencies between the evidence and the various accounts given by the accusing witness, we believe these three individuals are innocent of these charges," Cooper said.

He said the charges resulted from a "tragic rush to accuse and a failure to verify serious allegations."

"I hate to say it, I have absolutely no feelings at all, at all," Reade Seligmann's father, Phillip, told Couric, referring to the players' accuser. "This is a woman who perpetrated a hoax on the state of North Carolina as well as the city of Durham, Duke University, and these three kids and their families."

Cooper called for the passage of a state law that would allow the North Carolina Supreme Court to remove a prosecutor "who needs to step away from a case where justice demands."

"This case shows the enormous consequences of overreaching by a prosecutor," he said.

The allegations at first outraged the Raleigh/Durham community. But that anger largely shifted to Nifong as his evidence against the three fell apart and questions surfaced about the accuser.

Nifong, who was away from his Durham office Wednesday, has been charged by the state bar with ethics violations connected to his handling of the case and could face disbarment.

"Nifong is done as a prosecutor, and perhaps as an attorney, too," said CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen. "By far the worst mistake he made was his failure to promptly interview the alleged victim in the case to determine for himself from the outset whether her story would or could withstand the scrutiny they both knew would come."

From its earliest days, Nifong, seeking re-election as district attorney after being appointed to the job a year earlier, had driven the investigation. The woman initially said she was gang-raped and beaten by three white men at the March 13, 2006, party thrown by Duke's highly ranked lacrosse team.

The three indicted players' insisted the accusations were "fantastic lies," and another dancer who had been with the woman also questioned if she had been raped.

At the end, it appeared the case was based only on the testimony of the accuser, whom defense attorneys said had told wildly different versions of the alleged assault.

The other dancer who was at the lacrosse party raised questions about the accusations and Nifong dropped the rape charges in December after the accuser changed a key detail in her story, Orr reported. Nifong recused himself a few weeks later after the state bar charged him with violating several rules of professional conduct.

Nifong's recusal in January put the players' fate in the hands of Cooper, who promised "a fresh and thorough review of the facts."

The North Carolina State Bar charged Nifong with making misleading and inflammatory comments about the athletes under suspicion. It later added more serious offenses of withholding evidence from defense attorneys and lying to the court and bar investigators. He's scheduled to stand trial on those charges in June.

Nifong had accused the lacrosse team of refusing to cooperate, calling them "a bunch of hooligans," and promised DNA evidence would finger the guilty. His case started to erode, though, when no DNA evidence tying any player to the accuser was found.

The players largely cooperated with police, and the defense later said a series of tests Nifong ordered from a private lab found genetic material from several men on the accuser's underwear and body, but none from any member of the Duke lacrosse team.

However, if the defendants try to sue Nifong for the way he handled the case, "they are going to have their hands full winning that civil case," said Cohen. "All public officials, and prosecutors in particular, are afforded tremendous immunity from lawsuits when they are acting in their official capacities, as Nifong was here."

Evans, 24, of Bethesda, Md., graduated the day before he was indicted in May. Duke temporarily suspended sophomores Finnerty and Seligmann in the wake of their arrest. Both have been invited to return to campus, but neither has accepted. John Danowski, the former coach at Hofstra who took over the Duke program last summer, has said that both are welcome to continue their lacrosse careers with the Blue Devils.

Danowski said he had moved the team's afternoon practice to Wednesday night so his players could attend a planned defense news conference with their former teammates.

[meditao]

I grew up with boys like that and attended college with them. They thought the world was theirs for the taking, with no consequences. I'm interested in seeing how this affects their lives. I think it will make them more intelligent people. I think it might even make them better people, if they don't become racists and mysogenists first.

I didn't think they were guilty of the crime, but they deserved the shame and humiliation. Obviously their coach didn't trust them and resigned pretty immediately. Also, one of the accused assaulted a young man in Georgetown last year. I wonder what happened about that.

The stripper still has my sympathy. She is a very young and troubled woman in a profession full of young, troubled women, many of whom have turned to that kind of work after being sexually assaulted or traumatized.

It's an expensive lesson for the boys to learn, but maybe they should have restricted their activities to a strip bar or commercial joint instead. Buyer beware.

[pine16]

I have children. There is a black conspiracy against whites in our country at every level. I have had personal experience with this in the public school system with two black female teachers. One in their middle school who taught and one in their high school. They are purposely failing whites. I had a back ground check done on a black teacher at their high school and found out that she wasn't certified. She taught Algebra 1 and 2. when I called the school board they would not verify this, so I wrote a letter to the superintendent and also confronted both the teacher and the principal. They didn't care. Yes, the Principal admitted that she wasn't certified and the teacher admitted it too. One can get a teaching job with a BA degree and then they have two years to get their certification. The Principal of their high school is black too. My kids are now adults, and they received their diplomas. I want to say however that please be aware of what is going on. I am white and have friends of all races and have lived in 3 different states. I am not prejudice, but I can see what is happening in our country. In our schools and in the workplace. Protect your children, for the times are changing.

[gwlafayette]

they found the dna of her boyfriends on her. if the dna they found matched any players, we would know and the case wouldnt have been dropped.

did she at least give back the money the team paid her to do her Ho dancing?

[gwlafayette]

are you serious?

Nobody raped her. She faked a hate crime to make money. The black panthers may have set it up because they seemed to be on the scene suspiciously soon after the alleged rape was reported.

[djermano1]

So...who raped the black girl? Just because those who were let off, doesn't mean that some other players weren't involved. They have DNA of men on her garments. If not the accused; then Who? Certainly from the Duke *** Party I think.

[gwlafayette]

the innocent hate crime victims should sue the family of the lying stripper and al sharpton for bringing it to the level it reached. in my opinion, these three kids deserve an apology about one billion times greater than imus' to the rutgers team. the lacrosse players lives have been destroyed by a fradulent accusation of a hate crime, and thus are a much bigger victim than the stripper would have been if the allegations were true. the racial double standard in america is sickening.

[rudy654-2009]

To jdwriter:

You are so correct! We do not have a country where one is innocent until proven guilty as long as the media can take that person and pass judgement in the court of public opinion. This kind of circus nonsense leads to prosecutor misconduct as it becomes a political game subject to manipulation all for popularity and saving face. It is sad! It is sad that too many people have become victims with little or no recourse after such travesties of justice. As one of the parents said, this prosecutor messed with the wrong people. I would hate to think what would have happened if they had been anybody else.

[richnj1]

To meditao: I have no sympathy for the stripper, period. She deserves jail time for what she did to those players. Or maybe someday she really will be the victim of a crime, and no one will believe her. That would be karmic justice.

The sad thing is that the next time some other woman really is assaulted, she will have a harder time being believed.

[jdkeefe]

What this story needs now is action: enactment of a Collin's Law to protect the identity of the accused till proven guilty, spirited prosecution of the accuser for lying, the DA for his actions in prosecuting an empty charge, and perhaps even litigation against the media sources who jumped on the case to sensationalize and grab viewers with no moral compass with which to guide their acions. Everyone, it seems, is guilty except the accused. And everyone should take a long, long hard look at how the criminal justice system can go so far out of whack. Thank god these boys had money. If they were poor they'd all be in jail.

[richnj1]

To jipoku: while that jogger rape was not covered as widely, the Duke case didn't just attract attention because they were exonerated; the start of the Duke case was a media lynching of the entire lacrosse team. So it isn't as if these kids got favorable coverage from the start because they were white. At first, the story of rich white kids "assaulting" a black stripper was more broadly covered because they were white (reverse racism). Now it's only fair that their exoneration is receiving as much publicity as the initial accusation.