News Article

Originally published in The Daily Law Record

The public now generally acknowledges that the rape case against three Duke lacrosse players, dropped last month by North Carolina’s attorney general, was fraught with injustice.

However, people shouldn’t assume that a good outcome for the innocent defendants was inevitable, according to an attorney for one of the students.

James P. Cooney III plans to remind people of that fact Friday morning when he speaks at the Camden Club in Baltimore ahead of the NCAA Men’s Lacrosse Championship. Duke is one of four teams vying for the Division I title to be decided at M&T Bank Stadium over the weekend. Cooney, a 1979 Duke graduate who was on the school’s lacrosse team his freshman year, is a lawyer in the Charlotte, N.C., office of Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice PLLC. The firm just opened an office in Linthicum, headed by former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. Cooney spoke with The Daily Record about handling the high-profile case this week.

Q. How did Reade Seligmann end up coming to you for help?
A. He was being represented by another lawyer in October, when I was in the middle of another jury case. I got a call asking if I would be willing to take the lead on his defense. It actually came from Joe Cheshire, who is representing Dave Evans. I remember Joe told me I would never have a more innocent client.

Joe and I have worked together before. We tried the Alan Gell case. Alan was an innocent man on death row and we freed him.

Q. What was it like representing such a high-profile client?
A. Well, it really was kind of a different experience. From a legal perspective, you know, you’d file a pleading and then there would be a thousand people on the Internet taking apart your pleading sentence by sentence, word by word, document by document — not to mention the media. I distinctly remember filing one pleading — going up to the clerk’s office, filing it, it was just me and the clerk. By the time I walked down three floors to go outside, my cell phone was ringing from a newspaper reporter wanting to know if I had any comment on the motion I just filed.

Well, that’s the way this case worked. The cycle was so incredibly quick and it seemed that in October and November and December and January, everything we did was immediate front-page news that you really had to both be careful and then use that as an advantage. It was a great way of communicating, but you had to be very careful about what and how you were communicating. It puts an extra layer of pressure on things.

Q. How did you go about coordinating the defenses?
A. We all worked well together. As I said, Joe Cheshire and Brad Bannon, who represent Dave Evans — I worked with them before, so … we understood each other. We had good communication. Even though there were great trial lawyers on the team, everybody was really good about checking their egos at the door. We all had one goal, which was our kids are innocent and we needed to prove that.

Q. Did you change your approach since your client was truly innocent?
A. As a practical matter, innocent clients are few and far between. You always approach an innocent client differently, because I don’t throw the word “innocent” around like it’s a box of popcorn. Innocent means something. But this one we had to approach a little differently because we frankly had a prosecutor on the other side who didn’t care. And what we needed to do was go around him and communicate that evidence and the impossibility of the prosecution’s case.

Q. What was your reaction to the attorney general’s statement when he decided to drop the case, saying Mike Nifong was a rogue prosecutor?
A. Well, I think it was courageous. He had two very good deputies working on this case — Jim Coman and Mary Winstead, who did a magnificent job and made very strong recommendations. And he was courageous in following those recommendations. I think he did what he needed to do not only for the case but for these kids and, most importantly, for the justice of North Carolina. We needed to let the country know that Mike Nifong was not the justice system in North Carolina.

Q. Was this a defining case in your career?
A. Well, sure. Innocent people don’t come along too often and you don’t get this high-profile of a case that much. To be able to fit the two together and then do it in a way that makes a positive impact on the justice system is always a really monumental occurrence in any attorney’s life.

Q. Have you been sought out in other high-profile cases as a result?
A. Well, I got a lot of inquiries. I got a stack of mail on my desk from folks in jail all over the country. How many of them are innocent, I’ve got to figure out.

Q. Does the outcome of this case give you confidence in the justice system or are you more wary than before?
A. I think the public has had a window into the justice system they haven't had before. It’s something criminal defense lawyers knew about and now the public as a whole knows about it. And I think as a result of this case, people are gong to take the presumption of innocence more seriously and not just blindly believe whatever prosecutors say.

Q. Why did you agree to speak about your experience ahead of the lacrosse championship in Baltimore?
A. There was national interest in it, particularly with the Final Four. Everybody seems to be acting in a way that seems as though all this was inevitable — that of course it was gong to be dismissed, of course they were innocent. I think people need to be reminded that there was nothing inevitable about this case. There were a thousand different points where if something had broken differently, we’d be in the middle of a trial right now.