Ward Churchill has his day in court.

[Magda Hassan]

I have heard from a reliable source that the jury in Ward Churchill's case has returned a verdict in his favor!!! I can see nothing on the web sites following the trial yet so it is not confirmed yet so this may be the first place it is published. I wonder what the University of Colorado will do?

[Magda Hassan]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/us/03c...ll.html?hp

Jury Says Professor Was Wrongly Fired

By KIRK JOHNSON and KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: April 2, 2009
DENVER — A jury found on Thursday that the University of Colorado had wrongfully dismissed a professor who drew national attention for an essay in which he called some victims of the Sept. 11 attacks “little Eichmanns.”
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[/URL] David Zalubowski/Associated Press
Ward Churchill, who was a tenured professor at the University of Colorado, left, walked with his lead attorney David Lane out of the courtroom after a jury ruled that he was wrongly fired by school administrators, on Thursday.



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Pool photo by Mark Leffingwell
Ward Churchill, left, and his attorney David Lane after closing arguments in Churchill’s civil suit against the University of Colorado in Denver on Wednesday.





But the jury, which deliberated for a day and a half, awarded only $1 in damages to the former professor, Ward L. Churchill, a tenured faculty member at the university’s campus in Boulder since 1991 who was chairman of the ethnic studies department.
The jurors found that Mr. Churchill’s political views had been a “substantial or motivating” factor in his dismissal, and that the university had not shown that he would have been dismissed anyway.
“This is a great victory for the First Amendment, and for academic freedom,” said his lawyer, David A. Lane.
Whether Mr. Churchill, 61, will get his job back, and when, was not resolved. Mr. Churchill’s lawyers said they would ask Judge Larry J. Naves of Denver District Court to order reinstatement, in light of the verdict.
A spokesman for the university, Ken McConnellogue, said administrators would oppose the request. Reinstatement, Mr. McConnellogue said, would probably draw a sharp reaction among many faculty members, because a faculty committee was instrumental in his firing.
The verdict by the panel of four women and two men — none of whom wished to be interviewed by reporters, court officials said — seemed unlikely to resolve the larger debate surrounding Mr. Churchill that was engendered by the case. Is Mr. Churchill, as his supporters contend, a torchbearer for the right to hold unpopular political views? Or is he unpatriotic or — as his harshest critics contend — an outright collaborator with the nation’s enemies at a time of war?
The jury seemed at least partly undecided on what to think about the man at the center of the fight, whose essay made him a polarizing national figure.
While the panel agreed with the argument that an environment of political intolerance for Mr. Churchill’s views was a factor in his firing, Mr. McConnellogue, the university spokesman, contended that its decision to deny him financial damages also sent a message — that Mr. Churchill was not necessarily a figure to be revered, either.
“The jury’s award is some vindication,” he said.
Mr. Churchill, wearing sunglasses in the hallway outside the courtroom, said the size of the award did not matter. “I didn’t ask for money,” he said, “I asked for justice.”
The case has been seen as a struggle between freedom of speech and academic integrity, and it revived the longstanding debate about whether hate speech deserves protection by the First Amendment.
But the monthlong trial mostly focused on Mr. Churchill’s academic work. The jury had to decide whether he had plagiarized and falsified parts of his research, particularly on American Indians, as the university contended in dismissing him. His lawyers described the search for professional misconduct as simply a pretext for a foregone decision to get rid of him.
On Sept. 12, 2001, Mr. Churchill wrote an essay in which he argued that the United States had brought the terrorist attacks on itself. He said that some of those working in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 were not innocent bystanders but “formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire.” He described the financial workers as “little Eichmanns,” a reference to Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi who has been called the architect of the Holocaust.
The essay garnered little notice at the time but gradually seeped through the Internet, coming to light in 2005, and then creating an uproar.
In their closing arguments on Wednesday, lawyers for each side urged the jury to focus on the First Amendment.
Mr. Lane, Mr. Churchill’s lawyer, said his client had been a spokesman throughout his academic career for disempowered people and causes — a trait, Mr. Lane said, that never made Mr. Churchill popular with people in power. “For 30 years, he’s been telling the other side of the story,” Mr. Lane said.
What the university did in firing Mr. Churchill, he told the panel, was political payback, a rigged inquiry into his work that was a “charade of fairness.”
The university’s lawyer, Patrick O’Rourke, asked the jury to think about standards. The pattern of academic misconduct, Mr. O’Rourke said, was not in doubt.
“There’s the real university world, and there’s Ward Churchill’s world,” he said. “Ward Churchill’s world is a place where there are no standards and no accountability.”
Mr. Churchill, he said, was using the Constitution as a smokescreen. “You can’t take the First Amendment and use it to justify fraud,” he said.
Around 3 p.m. on Thursday, jurors asked the judge questions about damages.
First, they asked whether it was possible to award no damages. A few minutes later, they asked whether, if all but one jury member could agree on a dollar amount, that person could be replaced by another juror. (The answer was no.)
The jury then resumed deliberations for about an hour before returning its verdict in Mr. Churchill’s favor.
Kirk Johnson reported from Denver, and Katharine Q. Seelye from New York.

[David Guyatt]

Last evening I watched the excellent film "Good Night and Good Luck" about the fight of Edward J Murrow and his fight against Joseph McCarthy and his bloody horrible and appalling Un-American Activities Committee.

This case strikes me as a modern repeat of this inherently mean, nasty and neanderthal attitude that seems to infest American political life from time to time.

[Peter Lemkin]

Knowing Ward and having been a student at the University of Colorado this means a lot to me.....a victory in a sea or defeats!.....may it be the first of many!

[Peter Lemkin]

And you’ll excuse me this moment of excess April 3, 2009

(Cover the kids’ ears.)

I’ve spent the last four years watching a good man get his name drug through the mud for making the eminently reasonable point that you ought not be killing other peoples’ kids. And that if you are in the business of killing other peoples’ kids, they have the absolute right to fight back in any way they can.

I’ve seen the most vicious smear campaign of my lifetime. A horde of shiteating columnists and radio shockjocks have made it their life’s work to destroy one man. They went after his life, his livelihood, his family, and his reputation. There is no level to which they haven’t stooped to ruin him.

I’ve watched Denver’s local media crawl like dogs to eat the shit of their canine superiors in the rightwing national media. There has not been a single article in the Denver media to actually interrogate the trumped-up charges of academic misconduct levelled by the hopelessly biased CU investigative committee. Not one. Like with their coverage of the Iraq war (or for that matter, the preceding sanctions), they have gone to incredible lengths to never actually investigate the shit they were more than willing to eat out of the paws of their presumed betters.

Moreover, in that so-called bastion of higher learning at CU, I can count on my fingers and toes those faculty members who were willing to actually stand up and point out the absurdity of the smear campaign launched against Ward Churchill. Almost to a man or woman, they refused to make any kind of stand for the principles they pretended, every day, to represent. Nothing has been more disheartening than the absolute, unmitigated cowardice of the faculty of my alma mater. I’ve met pedophiles and rapists with whom I’d rather share an occupation.

But, I’ve also watched Ward Churchill, with his family, put their stake in the ground and refused to back up an inch. That’s what courage is, and I’ve been proud as hell just to witness it. In the last round of McCarthyism, there were very few to fight back. I think of Dashiell Hammett, and I think of Ward Churchill.

So this one’s for CU. And for Bill O’Reilly, Caplis and Silverman, Vincent Carroll, and the rest of the Denver media.

Fuck you.

http://wardchurchilltrial.wordpress.com/