Pick one.

The Duke lacrosse travesty cannot continue. The N&O today pours over 1,800 pages of Matt Nifong’s case and finds contradiction after contradiction after violation of department policy after jarring lack of common sense.

Toss in what looks like some willful deception — Nifong refuses to release any info from his final meeting with the accuser and investigators before he went to the grand jury — and no fair-minded person can have any confidence in the merits of this case. None.

No summary can do this story justice. Stacked one upon the other, the details show that Nifong never made finding the truth a priority. Nifong simply assumed that the exotic dancer had been raped by at least one lacrosse player even though her accounts of the attack were never remotely consistent.

Most amazing of all, the photo lineup used to ID the players who were charged — the third one Durham police had presented the accuser while trying to get a positive ID of suspects — did not include non-players. The results were sadly predictable:

On March 31, Nifong sat with Gottlieb and Himan, the two investigators, to discuss another lineup procedure. According to Gottlieb’s notes, Nifong suggested that, instead of a lineup or photographic array, they simply have the accuser look at each picture and recall if she saw the person at the party.

The lineup Nifong suggested violated the Durham Police Department guidelines, which call for photographic arrays to include at least five nonsuspects for every suspect in the lineup. Police and prosecutors had named all 46 players as suspects. The guidelines also called for an independent administrator to conduct the lineup, not an investigator in the case.

The accuser viewed the photos at the police substation at Northgate Mall on April 4. Gottlieb told her that she was going to “look at people we had reason to believe attended the party,” according to his notes. This differed from the March 16 and 21 lineups, where police gave her specific instructions that the suspect might not be in the lineup: “The person who committed the crime may or may not be included.”

The woman identified four players as her assailants. Nifong brought indictments against three.

That is madness. That is prosecutorial misconduct.

That is justice in North Carolina.