Nifong-  What do Nifong and North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper have in common?       They are both corrupt.  Nifong prosecuted a rape case against three Duke lacrosse players, although: there was no evidence against them; the alleged victim was unstable; and the alleged victim gave conflicting testimony against them.  Worst of all, Nifong withheld exculpatory evidence. He did all that simply to get elected.  It has cost the defendants $3,000,000 in legal funds.  If they didn't have the money, they might be in jail by now.  They were convicted in the press and by many of the cowardly Duke faculty, who do not believe in due process of law.  The mainstream media has only skimmed the surface of this story.         When the charges were first brought, many believed them, because they did not understand how corrupt the North Carolina "justice system" is.  Why did Nifong think he could get away with it?  Because of Roy Cooper.  Many people wrongly see Cooper as the good guy in all of this, without knowing the true background.  Nifong thought he could get away with hiding exculpatory evidence because it has happened before in North Carolina and the perpetrators were not punished.           The Alan Gell case demonstrates how the "justice system" really works in N.C.  Gell spent 9 years in prison, mostly on death row, for a murder he didn't commit.  Why?  Because prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence.  The State of N.C. had evidence that the witnesses against Gell, one an ex-girl firend of Gell's, had changed their stories.  The state attorney's also withheld the statements of 17 witnesses that saw the victim alive one day after the state said that the victim was murdered. Scientific evidence by three experts, experts who usually testify for, or work with, the State of N.C., said that the victim died 11 days after the state alleged he died.  Gell was in jail for auto-theft and/or out of town during the time frame that the murder occurred.          Although Gell couldn't have committed the murder, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper ordered a re-investigation and a new trial.  After deliberating just 2 and one-half hours, the jury found Gell innocent.  The women who testified against Gell received reduced sentences for their parts in the murder.  Nothing happened to the prosecutors who withheld the exculpatory evidence. Cooper brushed off their fraud on the courts as un-intentional.          You can see why Nifong thought that he could get away with withholding evidence favorable to the defense.  The N.C. Attorney General's Office did it to Gell and others.  You can see why Cooper had no problem lying to the Fourth Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court.           Normally, criminal cases are prosecuted by the local district attorneys.  However, because of a  conflict of interest, the local district attorney turned it over to Roy Cooper's office.  The case was handled by his special prosecutions unit.  David Hoke and Debra Graves, who prosecuted the case, received a mild reprimand from the State Bar Association.           Of course, Cooper could have decided not to re-prosecute Gell, just as he could have interfered in the Duke fake rape case much sooner.  That would have spared the defendants, their families, and the nation, a great deal of trauma.