I think this will be the final word on the Shallit issue. I've uploaded the court's rulings on a series of in limine motions, including the defendant's motion to exclude Shallit's testimony. This ruling came down on September 22nd, just before the trial began, and in it the judge refers to an agreement between the two sides that Shallit would not testify during the plaintiff's case, but would be reserved as a rebuttal witness if necessary:
As the parties agreed at the September 9, 2005 oral argument on Defendants' previously filed Motion for Summary Judgment that Plaintiffs will not present Dr. Shallit during Plaintiffs' case-in-chief and will instead reserve him as a rebuttal witness, if necessary, we will defer any further resolution of the issues presented in Defendants' Motion in Limine to Exclude the Testimony of Jeffrey Shallit, Ph.D. (doc. 154), until if and when they are reasserted by defense counsel at the time of trial.
If the defense uses Dembski's expert report in their case, then the plaintiff's will call Shallit to rebut the validity of that report. The TMLC will no doubt then offer objections to that testimony and the judge has deferred a ruling on that until if and when it occurs. At this point, it does not look like this will come to pass at all. So we have now conclusively demonstrated that Dembski's assertion that Jeff Shallit was kept off the witness stand because his deposition was "an embarrassment" to our side is false.
Now, the true test: will Dembski admit that he was wrong and that he made that claim without bothering to check the facts? I'll place the odds of him doing so at well beyond the proposed "universal probability boundary" of 1 in 10^150. Unless of course I've somehow managed to shame him into doing so. But Dembski has never shown any sense of shame before, so why start now?
- Log in to post comments