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On a rainy afternoon in April 2007, satellite trucks lined up outside Raleigh’s 19,000-seat RBC Center. Inside, scores of reporters from around the country, including CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric, settled into a makeshift press room. They trained their cameras on a wooden lectern bearing the seal of the N.C. Department of Justice.
A few miles away in a downtown hotel, three Duke University athletes huddled with their families, attorneys, and supporters, eyes glued to a TV.
Audiences across the country were awaiting the news conference as if it were the finale of a year-long reality show, one that exposed tensions over race, class, and privilege. The Duke lacrosse case had featured lurid claims of sexual assault, candlelight vigils, “potbanger” protests, and dramatic testimony. One prominent blog called it “Durham in Wonderland.”
For state Attorney General Roy Cooper, a Democrat who would go on to serve two terms as governor and is now running for the U.S. Senate, this was about to become the biggest stage of his career.
By the time he stepped before the cameras, the case that dominated headlines for more than a year had begun falling apart.
Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong, who prosecuted three white lacrosse players for the alleged rape of a Black woman, faced disciplinary hearings from the N.C. State Bar for how he’d handled the case. Under pressure, he’d turned the case over to Cooper’s Justice Department, which did its own investigation.
Cooper took the stage shortly after noon. He said that his office’s investigation “shows clearly that there is insufficient evidence to proceed … [These] cases are over, and no more criminal proceedings will occur.”
If that did not surprise many people, what he said next did.
“We believe that these cases were the result of a tragic rush to accuse and a failure to verify serious allegations,” Cooper said. “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.”
Brooklyn College historian KC Johnson, who co-wrote a book about the case, said Cooper’s pronouncement “was an incredibly courageous thing for him to have done.”
“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.”
Roy Cooper
“The safer political course would have been just to announce that he was dismissing the charges because there was insufficient evidence to obtain a criminal conviction—and then walk off the stage.”
Others were less enthusiastic.
“I don’t think it should have taken courage because I think that what he did was the right thing to do,” said Duke Law School professor Jim Coleman, director of its Wrongful Convictions Clinic. “My criticism of him is that he didn’t do that in other cases where I think it was warranted.”
Cooper has held elected office since 1987, when he was 29. He’s a skilled politician with a knack for gauging public opinion and never getting too far out front. On a few occasions in his long political career, he’s taken calculated risks—and succeeded.
The Duke lacrosse case is one of them.
Police Report a ‘Brutal Rape’
The case that thrust Cooper into the spotlight started 394 days earlier in a quiet Durham neighborhood.
Trinity Park, a historic area bordering Duke’s East Campus, is popular with faculty and students. In the spring of 2006, three co-captains of Duke’s lacrosse team lived in a rented white bungalow at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. They planned a March 13 party and hired two strippers from Allure Escort Services.
The women arrived shortly before midnight. One was Crystal Mangum, a 27-year-old student at North Carolina Central University. Their performance lasted all of four minutes, evidence would show. The players were angry. Taunts were exchanged. The women locked themselves in a bathroom.
By 12:37 a.m., Mangum was apparently passed out on the back porch. A player helped put her into the other woman’s car, and they drove off before 1 a.m.
Though Mangum would later give conflicting accounts, her allegation of rape caught the attention of police. On March 16, Durham Police executed a search warrant at the house. A week later, Cpl. David Addison told the media that “a brutal rape … occurred within that house.” That was the day Nifong took over the investigation.
On April 17, he persuaded a grand jury to indict players Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty. The third player, Dave Evans, was indicted a month later.
“The safer political course would have been just to announce that he was dismissing the charges because there was insufficient evidence to obtain a criminal conviction—and then walk off the stage.”
KC Johnson, Brooklyn College historian
Seemingly everybody had an opinion about the case. Many rushed to Mangum’s defense and assailed the players. Protesters marched past the party house chanting “Shame” and waving signs that said “Castrate.” A group of 88 faculty members ran an ad in the Duke Chronicle criticizing a campus culture of “white straight male privilege.”
While some cautioned against a rush to judgment, others stood with the players. One was a brash Duke undergraduate named Stephen Miller, now a top adviser to President Donald Trump, who called the case a “witch hunt” and began making a name for himself on Fox News and CNN.
Over the next few months, there were plenty of red flags: A police lineup of suspects that included only Duke lacrosse players (in violation of Durham Police Department policy), conflicting timelines, and a lack of forensic evidence.
Nifong, who is white, was appointed district attorney to fill a vacancy. When the lacrosse case broke, he was running for reelection in a competitive Democratic primary with a large and politically active Black electorate.
At a candidate forum that April, Nifong said, “I’m not going to allow Durham’s view in the mind of the world to be a bunch of lacrosse players at Duke raping a black girl from Durham.”
Nifong “forged ahead in what became a single-minded quest to confirm the woman’s story,” wrote News & Observer reporter Joseph Neff, who broke several major stories about the case.
In mid-December 2006, the Duke case saw a surprising breakthrough—in part because of seemingly unrelated reporting from Neff, and in part because of a decision Cooper made three years earlier.
Open Files
Alan Gell was a 20-year-old small-time drug dealer in Bertie County when he was arrested for the 1995 shotgun slaying of retired truck driver Allen Ray Jenkins. In 1998, a jury convicted Gell of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to death.
But in late 2002, Neff and The News & Observer showed Gell could not have committed the crime because he was in jail for a different offense at the time. A Superior Court judge threw out the conviction. He said the prosecution had withheld key exculpatory evidence, including a secretly taped phone call in which the prosecution’s star teenage witness said she “had to make up a story.”
It was the first time a Superior Court judge had overturned a death sentence after just a hearing with lawyers. It left Cooper, in office less than a year, to choose whether to appeal the decision, retry the case, or drop it. Gell’s supporters wanted him to drop it.
Cooper chose not to appeal. He asked his top deputies to review the case to see if a retrial was warranted. They thought it was. And so he chose to retry it, though not as a death penalty case.
“At the time I was upset,” Gell’s attorney, Jim Cooney, told The Assembly. “In retrospect it was the best thing that could have happened to Alan and our justice system. … The Alan Gell case was the most consequential case we’ve had in this state in the last half-century.”
Gell’s retrial took place in February 2004. A jury took just 2 and a half hours to acquit him. Afterward, Cooper called the original trial a “travesty.”
“The original prosecutors in this case owe everyone an apology: the defendant, the victim’s family, the community, and everybody in the state,” Cooper said at the time. “An unfair trial occurred.”
Cooper became a champion of so-called open-file discovery, which requires prosecutors to give defendants any exculpatory evidence. In 2004, North Carolina became the first state to adopt such a law for all felony cases; an earlier law only required it in capital cases.
That law played a dramatic role in the Duke lacrosse case two years later.
Stunning Testimony
The Durham County courtroom was packed on December 15, 2006, for a pre-trial hearing. Lacrosse players, their families, and their attorneys were there, as well as local reporters and those from the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. So was an unexpected witness.
Brian Meehan ran a forensics lab in Burlington. Nifong had asked him to analyze 46 samples of DNA from Mangum and the Duke lacrosse players. A few weeks earlier, the judge had ordered Nifong to turn over those findings to the defense: 1,844 pages of arcane statistics and technical language.
When Nifong put Meehan on the witness stand, it caught defense attorneys by surprise. In the ESPN documentary Fantastic Lies, Seligmann attorney Jim Cooney called it “a brilliant move.”
“I’m not going to allow Durham’s view in the mind of the world to be a bunch of lacrosse players at Duke raping a black girl from Durham.”
Mike Nifong, former Durham district attorney
“We hadn’t come prepared to cross-examine a DNA expert about DNA,” Cooney said. “We had no idea he was going to be there. Joe [Cheshire, the lead defense attorney] said, ‘We don’t have a choice. We’ve got to move forward. If we don’t, we’re going to get killed.’”
Eyes turned to young defense attorney Brad Bannon, who had pored over the DNA records as part of the new open-file discovery law. Bannon asked Meehan about the samples from Mangum.
“Is there multiple male DNA on there?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Meehan replied.
“Does it not match anybody on the Duke lacrosse team?” Bannon asked.
“That’s correct,” Meehan said.
Cooney took over and asked Meehan if his report had included the fact that no DNA from Duke players had been found on Mangum.
“No,” Meehan said. He had only included test results, not a summary of what the data showed.
“And that was an intentional limitation arrived at by you and [Nifong]?” Cooney asked.
“Yes,” Meehan said, contradicting what Nifong had told the judge.
Applause broke out in the courtroom. Johnson and his co-author wrote that the judge “looked momentarily stunned.”
“The case had imploded at that point,” Cooney told ESPN.
‘She Lied’
Mary Winstead remembers picking up the phone.
“You’re going to regret taking this call,” her colleague, Senior Deputy Attorney General Jim Coman, told her.
Facing an N.C. State Bar probe into his handling of the case, Nifong had asked Cooper to take over in January 2007. Cooper in turn asked Coman and Winstead, a special deputy attorney general, to launch their own investigation.
For three months, they worked out of a 5th-floor “war room” full of easels and whiteboards. They studied timelines, pictures, time stamps, DNA evidence, and cell phone records. They interviewed police investigators, players, and attorneys. They talked to Mangum and found more inconsistencies in her claims.
“We can’t see where she was ever asked the tough questions,” Cooper told 60 Minutes that April. He and his investigators even examined the bathroom where the incident had allegedly happened. “It was very difficult for me to see how that could have occurred,” Cooper told reporter Lesley Stahl.
In 2014, Coman told The News & Observer their investigation persuaded them that Mangum had lied. “I was just adamant,” said Coman, who died in 2018. “She lied, she made up a story, and damn it, we’ve got to do the right and ethical thing.”
Coman told The N&O that he and Winstead wanted Cooper to declare the players innocent. “Roy was absolutely appalled at Nifong’s conduct, which gave the North Carolina justice system a black eye,” Coman said.
In their book, Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr. reported that Cooper’s political advisers cautioned against an unequivocal proclamation of innocence, saying that could alienate some Black voters whose support he would need in future elections.
In an interview with The Assembly, Cooper explained why he did it anyway.
“These inconsistencies were so significant and so contrary to all of the objective evidence, there was just really no critical, credible evidence that an attack even occurred,” he said.
“They shouldn’t have gotten into this position to start with,” he said of the three players. “But they certainly were innocent of these charges, and I thought it was important for me to say that.”
Mangum later admitted that her claim had been a lie. “I testified falsely… by saying they raped me when they didn’t, and that was wrong,” she told an interviewer in 2024. At the time, Mangum was in a state prison for the second-degree murder of her then-boyfriend.
The Duke case would come up again a decade after Cooper exonerated the players.
‘Seriously Flawed’ Investigation
A banner hung from the stage of the Winston-Salem State University auditorium in early 2016 that said, “NC Attorney General Roy Cooper: Kalvin Michael Smith’s Black Life Matters.”
More than 100 students were rallying for Smith, a Black man convicted in 1997 of the near-fatal beating of a white woman who had been imprisoned for nearly two decades.
“If he’s willing to intervene for the three white Duke lacrosse players, he must be willing to intervene for Kalvin,” Wake Forest University student Corrine Sugino told the crowd.
At the time, Cooper was in his fourth term as attorney general and was running in the Democratic primary to take on incumbent Republican Gov. Pat McCrory.
Critics had long questioned Smith’s imprisonment. A citizens committee appointed by the Winston-Salem City Council raised doubts about the original investigation.
In 2012, former FBI agent Chris Swecker, who did a 16-month review of the case, concluded that the police investigation had been “seriously flawed” and that Smith deserved a new trial. He thought it was “highly likely” that Smith was innocent.
Swecker, who’d been assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, was chairman of McCrory’s Crime Commission. Swecker and Cooper had worked together; in 2010, Cooper asked him to lead an independent review of the State Bureau of Investigation crime lab that ultimately found 230 botched cases.
Swecker wanted Cooper to drop the charges against Smith. He said he tried to present his findings to Cooper, but didn’t get anywhere.
“It was a miscarriage of justice, and that was what I tried to convince him,” Swecker told The Assembly. “It was my hope that Roy Cooper, who had trusted my judgment in the past, would trust my judgment on this one.”
Asked how he would reconcile Cooper’s action in the Duke lacrosse case and lack of action on Smith, he said, “I can’t reconcile it.”
Smith was released by a Forsyth County judge in 2016 after his lawyers filed a motion saying his trial attorney neglected to present evidence that likely would have led to a shorter sentence. Smith died in 2023.
Cooper declined to comment on Smith or any other specific case. “Each case is different,” he said.
“It was my hope that Roy Cooper, who had trusted my judgment in the past, would trust my judgment on this one.”
Chris Swecker, former FBI agent
During his two terms as governor, Cooper issued more pardons and commutations than any of his three immediate predecessors, according to the Governor’s Executive Clemency Office. On his last day in office, he commuted the sentences of 15 men on death row to life without parole. No governor before him had commuted more than two death sentences, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
“I would like to think his conduct at the end of his two terms as governor (both in granting clemency and pardons of innocence) and in the lacrosse case …reflected his finest hours as a minister of justice and governor,” Coleman, the Duke Law professor, wrote in an email. “His office’s defense of the prosecutors in the Smith case and his indifference to the facts of the case represented a low point.”
Some defense lawyers say prosecutors are naturally reluctant to recognize innocence. To Jamie Lau, supervising attorney for Duke University’s Wrongful Convictions Clinic, that reluctance is “endemic to the institution.”
“They defend these convictions no matter how horrific they look today,” he said. “In the attorney general’s office, [Cooper] did the right thing in the Duke case but the office itself has defended cases that proved to be wrongful convictions.”
Since 1989, 78 wrongfully convicted people in North Carolina have been exonerated, according to Marcus Pollard, a Duke Law School policy analyst.
‘A Very Cautious Politician’
Cooper has run for statewide office six times and never lost, projecting steadiness and competence.
“Over the arc of his political career, I think he has proved himself a very cautious and careful politician who doesn’t take risks,” said longtime political reporter Rob Christensen, who has written several books about North Carolina politics. “Obviously there are exceptions.”
His first major gamble was in 1989. He was a young, second-term member of the state House, and frustrated by the often heavy-handed tactics of four-term House Speaker Liston Ramsey and his lieutenants.
Cooper and 19 other rebel Democrats joined minority Republicans to topple Ramsey and support reform Democrat Joe Mavretic for speaker.
“There were no guarantees that it would work,” Mavretic said. “If we had lost we would have been in deep trouble. I think Roy understood that as well as anybody who was involved in the coup.”
“It was a big political gamble for Cooper because he was seen as a rising star in the party,” Christensen said.
Mavretic won. Cooper thrived in the legislature, and eventually won his first term as attorney general in 2000.
In 2016, after passing up two chances to run for governor, Cooper challenged McCrory in a state where an incumbent governor had never lost.
Cooper won narrowly.
In this year’s Senate race, Republicans have cast Cooper as soft on crime. They’ve specifically criticized the state’s 2021 release of 3,500 prisoners as part of a COVID-era settlement with the ACLU and other groups.
Others, however, say he didn’t release enough.
“I appreciate everything the Duke lacrosse players went through, but they didn’t spend one night in jail,” said Chris Mumma, executive director of the nonprofit North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence. “It boggles my mind that we can’t get the same amount of attention for people who have been in prison for decades for something they didn’t do.”
Cooney, the lawyer for one of the Duke players, has a nuanced view of Cooper. “There’s no question he’s cautious. But he wants to consider what the consequences of actions are going to be,” he said.
“He didn’t right every injustice we had. [But] what he did in the Gell case and the Duke lacrosse case was as consequential as any criminal case in my lifetime in this state.”
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