Nifong, described as a “rogue prosecutor,” pursued an indictment against Duke Lacrosse players despite an absence of evidence. Everyone involved has paid dearly for this, and the case has only served to heighten racial tension in this country. So thanks, Mike!

Thanks for setting back race relations with your rush to judgement and what seems to have been your blind pursuit of higher office.

Thanks for setting back victims’ rights with your unethical actions. Imagine, Mike, what the next real rape victim might have to endure because you ignored the lack of evidence.

But thanks, too, for reminding the majority community what it's like to be falsely accused, to have your life turned upside-down by a prosecutor with a greater appetite for conviction than the truth - although I doubt this one case will change the majority community's basic belief in the criminal justice system as fair.

I think everyone involved should spend a week with the people behind the Innocence Project, the group that works to use DNA testing to exonerate those wrongly imprisoned. To date, project organizers have freed more than 182 people. And, where ethnicity is known, 75 percent of those released are men of color.

David Evans, Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty should talk to Alan Newton, a man who walked out of a Bronx courtroom last year, 22 years after he was convicted for a brutal rape that DNA proved he didn't commit. And while the results aren't yet know, they should also talk to the family of Larry Griffin, a St. Louisan executed for a fatal St. Louis drive-by shooting. An investigation into whether he was falsely convicted and ultimately executed should wrap up soon.

Most of the Innocence Project’s cases involve witness misidentification -witnesses who wrongly pointed the finger at someone. It's not known if the witnesses did it on purpose, couldn't really remember what the attacker looked like or were prompted by overzealous prosecutors and police.

I may sound just a bit unfeeling, but it is often in such critical times in a person's life that the course of their life changes. Maybe these young men will develop a sense of the suffering of the lesser-known and the poor and that shared suffering may lead them to want to make sure this doesn't happen to anyone else.

But, for me, lingering questions remain. While few feel sorry for the accuser, Crystal Gail Mangum (who has been publicly named, unlike real rape victims, whose names are kept private), I still want to know how her life spiraled so out of control that she wound up stripping and using sex toys in front of strangers to make a living. And although prosecutors won't charge her, we now know that she had been taking anti-psychotic medication and was diagnosed as bipolar.

And now the accused. Wikipedia.com says the players requested two white strippers, but instead an African-American woman and a half-Asian, half-black woman arrived. I didn't know you could order strippers like a hamburger with no pickles.

Neighbor Jason Bissey tells a local newspaper that as the women were leaving, one player reportedly shouted, “Thank your grandpa for my nice cotton shirt.”

An e-mail given to police that was sent from the Duke account of sophomore lacrosse player Ryan McFadyen about three hours after the strippers first arrived discussed hiring strippers and “killing the b-----.”

What good can come of putting yourself in such a situation as this woman and these young men did? No one is standing up and saying in so many words, “What did you expect would happen?”

And keep in mind that Mangum has children. What will become of them?