In Court News
A jury gives Ward Churchill $1, says he was wrongly fired. A judge will determine whether he gets his job back. AP. It comes down to whether you think he was fired because he made highly irresponsible, insulting and defamatory remarks to 3,000 dead Americans and their families when he called them “Little Eichmanns,” or whether you think he was fired because those remarks prompted an academic review by 20 of his faculty peers who found him to be a plagiarist. The first sounds like a good excuse to fire up the second to me, but apparently the jury thought otherwise.
Meanwhile, a Bush-appointed federal judge extends U.S. habeas corpus rights from Guantanamo to … Afghanistan. NYT doesn’t explain why people who are being held by the United States in Afghanistan can’t appeal to Afghan courts. Does note that the Obama admin liked Bagram as an overseas holding facility to replace the one it is shutting down in Guantanamo, though.
Following DOJ’s mea culpa and the dismissal of failure-to-report-gifts charges on which Sen. Ted Stevens was convicted at the height of an election he lost by about 4,000 votes, the Alaska GOP is calling on Democrat Mark Begich to resign and for a special election to be held. Fox.
Finally, you remember how Rod Blagojevich has been running around squawking that he hadn’t even been indicted yet? Well, now he has been. A lot. Chicago Trib.
Topics: academia, justice, law & order
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:00 pm on Thursday, April 2, 2009
2 Responses to “In Court News”
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
April 3rd, 2009 at 2:53 pm
I don’t understand how Churchill could have been wrongly fired when he was shown to be guilty of plagiarism and fraud, but at least the jury gave that crapweasel a satisfying middle finger with that $1 award. If the University of Colorado is forced to take him back, that’s another matter. However, the Old Style Amish have nothing on university faculties when it comes to subtle insult and shunning, so I wouldn’t worry too much about that either.
As for Blago, it’s a sad fact that we, the voting public, have allowed our politicians to get away with too much for too long. We’re now in an era when our elected leadership not only commit wrong, but they now don’t believe it is wrong.
April 3rd, 2009 at 6:09 pm
RebeccaH:
You can find a very smart post on the issues surrounding the Churchill affair here.