Reading his contempt decision from the bench minutes after the conclusion of two days of testimony, Smith said Nifong "willfully made false statements" to the court in September when he insisted he had given defense attorneys all results from a critical DNA test.
In fact, Smith found, Nifong had provided the defense with a report on the DNA testing that he knew to be incomplete. The omitted data contained test results showing DNA of multiple men, none of whom were lacrosse players, was on a woman who said she was attacked at a March 2006 party thrown by Duke's lacrosse team.
Taking the stand in his own defense, Nifong insisted yesterday that he didn't intentionally lie about whether he had turned over the DNA evidence.
But he acknowledged that the report he gave defense attorneys was incomplete.
"I now understand that some things that I thought were in the report were in fact not in the report," Nifong said. "So the statements were not factually true to the extent that I said all the information had been provided."
A defense attorney found the omitted data amid 2,000 pages of documents Nifong gave the defense months after the initial report. Nifong said that by the time he realized the data wasn't contained in that report, "it had been corrected. The defendants already had it."
"It was never my intention to mislead this or any other court," Nifong said. "I certainly apologize to the court at this time for anything I might have said that was not correct."
Earlier yesterday, Brian Meehan, the director of a private lab who prepared the DNA testing report, said the omissions were a misunderstanding. He said Nifong asked him to test DNA samples from lacrosse players to see whether any matched genetic material found on the woman who told police she was raped.
Although male DNA was found, no sample matched a lacrosse player.
State prosecutors who took over the case dropped all charges against the three men and declared them victims of a "tragic rush to accuse."
Nifong was disbarred in June for more than two dozen violations of the state's rules of professional conduct during his prosecution of the lacrosse case. He resigned a month later as district attorney.
