Crime & Federalism points to a Durham in Wonderland post about the seeming disregard by the prosecution paid to one defendant's exculpatory evidence:
Ross also was a key figure in the lacrosse case. He was the only team member that Crystal Mangum twice remembered, with 100 percent certainty, seeing at the party. Indeed, in the April 4 “witness” lineup, Mangum even described what Ross was doing—standing outside, she said, chatting with Kim Roberts.
There was, of course, a small problem with Mangum’s recollection: Ross not only wasn’t at the party, he wasn’t even in Durham that evening. As Iowa State’s Gary Wells noted, the flawed identification of Ross placed Mangum “in the questionable category of eyewitnesses who [are] capable of being positive and wrong. That’s a red flag.”
The Baker/Chalmers report recently claimed that the indictments of three factually innocent people without probable cause had to go forward because defense attorneys didn’t give the DPD exculpatory evidence. But Ross did just that—to no effect.
In early April, just after President Brodhead canceled the season, Ross assembled cellphone, dorm keycard, and other forms of electronic evidence showing that he was in Raleigh from 3.00pm on March 13 through 1.00am March 14 and establishing (through his dorm keycard) that he returned to Durham only well after the party ended. His attorneys presented this material to authorities—thereby proving, essentially before the legal case even began, that Mangum was an unreliable witness, that the flawed procedures used by Mike Nifong and the DPD had yielded flawed results.
A reader of the Baker/Chalmers report might have believed that authorities would have welcomed Ross’ exculpatory evidence. At the very least, it should have slowed down the rush to indictments. Instead, the Ross evidence was ignored. The DPD, it seems, was far less interested in exculpatory evidence than the Baker/Chalmers apologia claimed.
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