Alan Childress at the Legal Profession Blog offers his thoughts on the disbarment of Mike Nifong for his misconduct in the Duke lacrosse prosecutions.
Childress makes one very good point that I had not seen elsewhere and that I think I agree with: Even assuming Nifong deserved to be punished this harshly, disbarment after one hour of deliberation is, at least historically, a highly unusual and harsh punishment for even extreme cases of prosecutorial misconduct. And a possible explanation for that difference is the high-profile and politicized nature of the case. In other words, the very thing that allegedly caused Nifong to engage in misconduct arguably caused the Bar panel to punish him severely, unusually so.
Childress writes:
. . . On the other hand, there is some history in bar discipline across the nation that would suggest that similar prosecutorial misconduct goes less punished, generally. It may be the right decision, but is it also possible that the N.C. bar [maybe even understandably] is doing some of what it accuses Nifong of doing: treating a case differently than it might have otherwise because it has gone public and taken a political life of its own? Do not some of the handwringing statements quoted from the bar seem designed for public consumption, more so than the usual panel finding? My query probably overstates the reality that Nifong created much of the "life of own" of his prosecution, and made the statements in the press not as part of a regular process like issuing a bar decision. But my experience is that bar boards don't decide cases in a day (or really, a year), write such strong statements, or slam prosecutorial overreaching this efficiently or thoroughly. I think they should in many cases, but this one is just more public than most.
This is a different point that is implicit in Andre's post. Rightly or wrongly and deserved or not, Nifong is, descriptively, being treated in an unusual fashion.
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