Dover Lawsuit
stcynic | October 19, 2006The ACLU just held their annual conference and one of the discussion panels dealt largely with the Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District case. That panel included many of the plaintiffs in the case and some interesting stories were told about what went on in the community during the case (you can view or listen to podcasts of the panel here). Ronald Bailey attended the conference and writes about this panel:
One of the ACLU's clients, Bryan Rehm, teaches Bible school, was elected to the school board. Rehm told the audience of several ugly moments during the campaign. For example, one voter…
stcynic | September 15, 2006As Wesley and I work on our book on the history of the Dover trial, one of the things we will have to incorporate and comment on is the absolutely frantic attempts by the DI to rewrite that history after the ruling came down. Watching their reaction evolve has been a source of great amusement to me. They were all for the school passing a pro-ID policy, sending lots of material to school board members to encourage them further. Once they realized that the board members had been so brazen about calling ID creationism and deliberating the issue in starkly religious terms (like Buckingham's…
stcynic | August 26, 2006Wes Elsberry has uncovered this article by Patrick Malone about things to avoid when choosing an expert witness pursuant to Daubert and Federal Rule of Evidence 702. Daubert is the controlling Supreme Court precedent that governs when courts should accept or reject expert scientific testimony. Malone's advice includes the following:
Before Daubert, an adversary’s discovery that your expert had formed an opinion, then read the relevant literature, would amount to, at worst, a credibility point for cross-examination. Now, that kind of discovery can get an expert tossed off the case.
Beware the…
stcynic | August 25, 2006Despite no longer working as legal counsel for the Discovery Institute, Seth Cooper has still been quite busy writing articles on their behalf slamming Judge Jones' ruling in Kitzmiller. Not content with the whopper he told a few months ago in an article he wrote with Joe Manzari of the American Enterprise Institute, he's now back with this article on the DI website. Wesley Elsberry has already handled the main charge that Cooper makes regarding the question of whether Judge Jones should have allowed the plaintiffs to subpeona draft versions of the next edition of Pandas; I'm going to deal…
stcynic | August 1, 2006Barbara Forrest has a new article at CSICOP about the Dover trial and Dembski's "vise strategy". This is a fun read as we watch Dembski's predictions collapse upon him:
Grousing that "only the evolution critics are being interrogated," Dembski was "waiting for the day when the hearings are not voluntary but involve subpoenas in which evolutionists are deposed at length." When "that happy day" came, Dembski predicted, the Darwinists "won't come off looking well." On May 11, Dembski portrayed "evolutionists" as too chicken to participate: "[E]volutionists escaped critical scrutiny by not…
stcynic | July 21, 2006There is a new interview with Judge Jones in the July/August edition of the Pennsylvania Lawyer. The article is not available online, but I wanted to share some of the more interesting bits. As he did at the close of the trial and many times since, he offered a great deal of praise to the attorneys, particularly from the plaintiffs team:
In this case, however, it wasn't simply a matter of everyone just doing their jobs. In Jones' view, the lawyers performed exceedingly well.
"I think that some of the cross-examination was absolutely fabulous," said Jones. "It will endure, and I think it will…
stcynic | July 9, 2006I know, that's hardly worth noting. But it's just amazing to watch someone be so completely disingenuous in making an argument. He can't be dense enough not to realize how weak the arguments are. In a new comment on the thread over at Larry's blog where he endorsed the bullying and intimidation of the children of the plaintiffs in Dover, he spews this crap too:
Blaming the old school board for violating the law is hindsight. They didn't believe they were violating any laws and one lone district court judge's opinion is hardly the definitive word on whether or not they actually did violate the…
stcynic | July 8, 2006This comment is rather blunt even for someone of DaveScot's loutishness. Speaking of the Dover plaintiffs, he endorses bullying their children and committing vandalism to drive them out of town:
I hope someone keeps track of the 11 parents and their children. Everyone in Dover knows damn well that no children were forced to listen to the 60 second announcement regarding evolution and intelligent design. So what you have is 11 parents whose religious hostility extended to such a trivial matter they were willing to make the tiny school district pay a million dollars.
I grew up in a small town…
stcynic | January 4, 2006One of the most fascinating aspects of the last couple weeks since the Dover ruling came down is surveying just how low some of the IDers are willing to go to attack Judge Jones. It's all the more interesting because when he was assigned the case they were quite happy about the selection. After all, they had gotten a conservative judge, appointed by President Bush and with close ties to Tom Ridge and Rick Santorum. How could they have asked for anything more? Alas, once he ruled against them they turned on him like a pack of rabid dogs, engaging in one ad hominem after another. But the worst…
stcynic | December 29, 2005Law.com has an interesting article about Eric Rothschild and Steve Harvey, the two Pepper Hamilton attorneys who led the legal team for the plaintiffs in the Dover trial. One statement really stuck out to me:
Rothschild said what he was proudest of throughout this whole trial was his cross-examination of defense expert Michael Behe, a professor at Lehigh University and proponent of intelligent design.
Rothschild said he knew what he was talking about when he moved to the witness stand, and he owes that to the National Center for Science Education, which thoroughly explained intelligent design…
stcynic | December 26, 2005This is certainly interesting. Rush Limbaugh weighed in on the Dover ruling. No one will be surprised that he thought it was a bad ruling, but he said something very interesting in his discussion of it. The Worldnutdaily reports:
Limbaugh continued, "On the other hand, I do think this: I think that the people - and I know why they're doing it, but I still think that it's a little bit disingenuous. Let's make no mistake. The people pushing intelligent design believe in the biblical version of creation. Intelligent design is a way, I think, to sneak it into the curriculum and make it less…
stcynic | December 23, 2005The American Family Association has issued an amusing press release on the Dover ruling. It says:
"According the logic of the court, any hint of the existence of God, whether derived by scientific means or otherwise, renders it off limits to public schools," said Stephen Crampton, Chief Counsel for the AFA Center for Law & Policy (CLP). "The rigid denial of any competing theory to evolution suggests that evolution itself may be the only god allowed in our schools," Crampton added.
Isn't it interesting how, in order to counter Judge Jones' ruling, the pro-ID crowd has to distort it…
stcynic | December 23, 2005I mentioned the other day that I thought Judge Jones was being particularly courageous to issue this ruling because it essentially means the end of any hope for an appeals court nomination. A close White House ally has now confirmed that:
"This decision is a poster child for a half-century secularist reign of terror that's coming to a rapid end with Justice Roberts and soon-to-be Justice Alito," said Richard Land, who is president of the Southern Baptist
Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and is a political ally of White House adviser Karl Rove. "This was an extremely…
stcynic | December 22, 2005This is very funny. Rick Santorum is now leaving the Thomas More Law Center board in the aftermath of the Dover ruling. And despite having written an op-ed piece praising the Dover school board last year, he now says he never supported their policy. Hilarious. NIck Matzke has the full story here.
stcynic | December 22, 2005Nick Matzke has a really well written post at PT about the reactions of ID advocates to the judge's ruling. It's good enough that I would say if you only read one article on the Dover outcome from our side, this is the one you should read. The conclusion is absolutely perfect:
In fact, if the ID movement were intellectually serious, they would withdraw completely from interfering with public education, realizing that introductory science classes simply have to educate students in the basics of accepted science, and are not the right places to try getting recruits for fringe science. They…
stcynic | December 22, 2005Sandefur has an excellent post up about the Dover ruling and the hollowness of the charge that the judge was engaging in "judicial activism" in his ruling.
stcynic | December 22, 2005The Federal prosecutor in Pennsylvania is investigating possible perjury charges against various members of the school board in Dover after Judge Jones bluntly declared that they had lied in their depositions in the case:
U.S. Middle District Attorney Thomas A. Marino said yesterday that decision will take time because there is "a lot of reading to do" to determine if the statements rise to the level of a crime.
"I want to question a couple of people who were present," he said. They will not include Judge John E. Jones III, who presided over the case, he said...
n his opinion, Jones accused…
stcynic | December 22, 2005This is a guest post from Allen Macneill, an evolutionary biologist and writer. He currently teaches an introductory evolution course for non-majors at Cornell, and is writing an introductory evolution textbook, also for non-majors. HIs most recent article, "The capacity for religious experience is an evolutionary adaptation to warfare" has just been reprinted in an anthology on war and peace, published by Greenwood/Praeger.
In the post below, Macneill is replying to an article by William Dembski about the Dover ruling that appeared in Science and Theology News.
1) Dembski makes the…
stcynic | December 21, 2005I thought I'd post what some legal scholars are saying about yesterday's ruling, since a good many of them have blogs and have responded. First, Timothy Sandefur writes at the Panda's Thumb:
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District is a major victory for science and a major blow to those who have tried to sneak religion into the classroom by disguising in scientific garb. But it's more than that. It is a brilliant, insightful, profound decision that reaches to the bottom of ID and finds it empty.
Well okay, everyone already knew where Sandefur stood on it. How about some others. Ann Althouse…
stcynic | December 21, 2005Friend and fellow Panda lover Wes Elsberry has an interesting post on the Dover ruling on his personal blog where he points out two fascinating items. First, that Dembski may owe someone a bottle of good scotch:
I'll wager a bottle of single-malt scotch, should it ever go to trial whether ID may legitimately be taught in public school science curricula, that ID will pass all constitutional hurdles. To see why, check out the fine Utah Law Review article by David DeWolf et al. at http://www.arn.org/docs/dewolf/utah.pdf.
In case you were wondering, Bill, I prefer Lagavulin (21 year old) or…