Durham Says It Should Be Dropped From Former Duke Players' Lawsuit

City said it had no responsibility for former district attorney Mike Nifong's actions

Jan. 16, 2008

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - The city of Durham says it should be dropped from a lawsuit filed by three former Duke lacrosse players wrongly accused of rape, saying the plaintiffs were overreaching in an effort to put taxpayers on the hook for a prosecutor's mistakes.

In its response to the former players' federal lawsuit against it and several other defendants, the city said it had no responsibility for disgraced former district attorney Mike Nifong's actions, or for the DNA laboratory that conducted key testing in the case.

The response, filed Tuesday and publicly posted in a federal court database Wednesday, said that since Nifong's employer, the state of North Carolina, has immunity, the plaintiffs were making "overreaching conspiracy claims and other novel legal theories" in an effort to make Durham, city administrators and police officers liable.

"All this creativity is in aid of an effort to impose on Durham taxpayers untold millions of dollars in damages for Plaintiffs who were publicly exonerated and never spent a moment in jail," the filing said.

The lawsuit filed in October by the former players, Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty and Dave Evans, accuses Nifong, Durham, police investigators and others of conducting "one of the most chilling episodes of premeditated police, prosecutorial and scientific misconduct in modern American history."

The players were accused of raping a woman hired to perform as a stripper at a lacrosse team party in March 2006, but were cleared more than a year later by state prosecutors who took special care to call them innocent of the allegations.

The lawsuit seeks unspecified punitive and compensatory damages, attorneys fees and numerous reforms to the way the Durham Police Department handles criminal investigations.

Nifong was disbarred for more than two dozen violations of the North Carolina State Bar's rules of professional conduct in the case. He ultimately spent one night in jail for lying to a judge during a hearing in the case during the fall of 2006.

The two Durham police investigators who handled the case - Investigator Benjamin Himan and Sgt. Mark Gottlieb - also filed responses Tuesday that were posted Wednesday. They claimed immunity and pointed a finger at Nifong, saying they reported complete results of their investigations to him and that he had the responsibility to make sure defense attorneys received all necessary information.

That information included the results of DNA testing that found genetic material from several unidentified males, but none from a lacrosse player, on the accuser and her undergarments - information that was not provided to the defense for nearly six months, and only then in the form of nearly 2,000 pages of raw test data.

In their own responses to the lawsuit, the DNA lab and Nifong's chief investigator also said responsibility rested with the former district attorney. The deadline for responding to the lawsuit was Tuesday, but no response from Nifong had been posted by Wednesday.