N.C. wins Bill of Rights copy fight By MATTHEW EISLEY, Raleigh News & Observer North Carolina's copy of the original draft of the U.S. Bill of Rights is coming home, 138 years after it went missing from the state Capitol at the end of the Civil War. Federal prosecutors and the historic document's previous owner, Connecticut antiques dealer Wayne Pratt, have reached a deal: Pratt is giving it to the state, and the feds are dropping their lawsuit to get it, and also probably their threat to put Pratt in prison. "The people of North Carolina prevailed," U.S. Attorney Frank Whitney told U.S. District Court Judge Terrence Boyle at a court hearing Thursday in Raleigh. "Wayne Pratt showed good citizenship and returned to the people of North Carolina" one of the most important documents in the state's history, Whitney said. Boyle didn't rule an official end to the sixth-month court battle over the purloined parchment, but about all that remains is for him or someone else to decide whether former co-owner Bob Matthews, who helped Pratt buy the document for $200,000 from two elderly sisters three years ago, will get anything for it -- such as a $15 million tax write-off for donating, with Pratt, a document worth up to $30 million. "We want to see this document ultimately in North Carolina," said Matthews' attorney, Mike Stratton of New Haven, Conn. "We just don't want to see our interest in the document sidelined." For that, Matthews might have to sue North Carolina or Pratt, his former business partner and friend, who says there's no sale profit to share. "This was a gift to North Carolina," said Pratt's attorney, Tom Dwyer of Boston. "We didn't even ask for a dollar." Pratt had some incentive beyond charity to give the document up: Whitney had threatened to prosecute him for selling stolen property. Just last month, Dwyer denied knowing that the copy was North Carolina's. Gov. Mike Easley and Attorney General Roy Cooper, who was in court, want to put it on display at the N.C. Museum of History, where schoolchildren and other citizens can see what their state initially insisted on adding to the U.S. Constitution before joining the United States in 1789. The document, a handwritten draft of the proposed Bill of Rights, was among 14 copies President Washington ordered for the federal government and sent to the original 13 states to encourage them to ratify the Constitution and establish the nation. The draft contained 12 proposed constitutional amendments; 10 were adopted. They protect individual freedoms against the state and federal government. In the 1800s, North Carolina's document was displayed at the state Capitol. It disappeared when federal troops left Raleigh in1865 at the end of the Civil War. A soldier reputedly took it home to Tippecanoe, Ohio, then sold it to an Indiana man the next year for $5. An undercover federal agent posing as a buyer for the National Constitution Center museum in Philadelphia obtained it in March in a fake $5 million purchase.