Dover Lawsuit
stcynic | November 9, 2005Here's some good news. In the wake of the Dover trial, there were elections for the Dover school board held last night. The result? How about all 8 board members who supported the intelligent design policy got voted out and all 8 challengers who opposed the policy were voted in, including one of the plaintiffs in the case? That's as thorough a victory as one could possibly hope for and I hope this sends a message to other school boards that not only do you risk a lawsuit when you pursue policies that bring in religious alternatives into science classrooms, but you risk your seat on the board…
stcynic | November 8, 2005Having spent considerable time pointing out the inconsistencies and problems in Michael Behe's testimony in the Dover trial, I was curious to see how he felt about it. And here he is on an ID blog giving his perspective on it:
The cross examination was fun too, and showed that the other side really does have only rhetoric and bluster. At one point the lawyer for the other side who was cross examining me ostentatiously piled a bunch of papers on the witness stand that putatively had to do with the evolution of the immune system. But it was obvious from a cursory examination that they were more…
stcynic | November 7, 2005On Friday, the curtain came down on the Dover ID trial. Rather ironically, the drama lasted a Biblically-significant 40 days and 40 nights from start to finish. Eric Rothschild delivered the closing argument for the plaintiffs, available here, and Patrick Gillen for the defense. After the attorneys finished their arguments, the judge addressed the participants in a heartfelt address, saying that watching their professionalism and passion had "made me aware of why I became a lawyer and why I became a judge" and that the two sides had delivered two of the "best presentations and finest lawyers…
stcynic | November 4, 2005Today is the final day of testimony in the Dover trial. Scott Minnich is scheduled to finish up his cross examination, and likely already has, and then we'll move on to closing arguments this afternoon. Expect a ruling in the next 6-8 weeks, give or take.
On another note, the New York Times has an interesting article today about the Thomas More Law Center that includes information I did not know. The TMLC, it turns out, has been going around the country trying to find a school board to adopt a policy like this so they could take it to court. They've gone in and lobbied for it, offering to…
stcynic | November 2, 2005I 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…
stcynic | November 2, 2005More information has come to light on this situation. I noted on Monday that Shallit had not testified, despite being deposed, because after Dembski withdrew the TMLC had objected to allowing him to testify and the attorneys reached an agreement that he would not do so unless they used Dembski's work in their defense case. There was some doubt, however, as to whether there had actually been a motion filed by the defense to prevent Shallit from testifying. As it turns out, there was. I've uploaded that motion and it can be viewed here (pdf file). All of this makes Dembski's claims the other…
stcynic | November 1, 2005Doug Theobald managed to correct the problems in a couple of the testimony transcripts we've had difficulties with and it showed some previously mangled text that is quite fascinating. There is this fascinating bit from the Day 12 PM transcript of Behe's cross-examination. The plaintiff's attorney questioned Behe about the testability of his claims about irreducibly complex systems. Behe has claimed that his IC claims are testable, all one has to do is show a step-by-step explanation of the development of those systems he deems to be IC. The attorney wondered why, if his ideas are testable,…
stcynic | November 1, 2005Mike Argento has been sort of the HL Mencken of the Dover trial, making pithy comments daily about the trial. And you knew he wasn't going to let Bonsell's testimony go unscathed. This is pretty funny stuff, but it's long so I'll put it below the fold.
It was remarkable. Judge John E. Jones III asked for a copy of Bonsell's deposition and started asking him questions about why he felt the need to cover up where the money came from to buy the 60 copies of "Of Pandas and People" that wound up in the Dover high school library.
Bonsell didn't explain very well.
At one point, he replied to the…
stcynic | November 1, 2005It seems that Judge Jones is getting a little miffed by the constant lying of the defense witnesses who served on the Dover school board. Buckingham was caught in several lies on the stand, one of which implicated board president Alan Bonsell as well. That $850 check that Buckingham gave to Bonsell to give to his father for the purchase of the book appears not to have been mentioned by Bonsell in his deposition despite being asked rather directly about those transactions. In an unusual move, the judge took over and began questioning Bonsell on the witness stand yesterday himself, demanding to…
stcynic | October 31, 2005William Dembski has this odd habit when someone publishes a criticism of his writings. Rather than engage in substantive refutation of those criticisms, he often claims either to be the victim of some cosmic unfairness by the Darwinian Inquisition, or he claims that the person criticizing him is obsessed with him. As an example of the first, I point you to his frantic complaints of copyright violation and ethical mistreatment by my friend Rob Pennock in early 2002, after Pennock had included a couple of essays of his in an anthology he edited called Intelligent Design Creationism and its…
stcynic | October 31, 2005The ACLU-PA blog has a report on yet another defense witness in the Dover case contradicting their sworn deposition under cross examination. But there's another aspect of this that I find really interesting and that is the type of people we tend to put on school boards. The ignorance of the Dover school board is staggering, and they apparently just didn't think it mattered much whether what they did was justified or not. Here's the report on school board member Heather Geesey's testimony:
Ms. Geesey followed the reporters on the stand. Parts of her testimony bore a strikingly similarity to…
stcynic | October 31, 2005Both the York Daily Record and the Harrisburg Patriot-News have articles up on the growing friction between the Discovery Institute and the Thomas More Law Center. Richard Thompson of the TMLC accuses the Discovery Institute of undermining their case and says that the Dover school board is a "victim" of their compromises. I'm with Ken Miller; I'm enjoying this.
stcynic | October 30, 2005In addition to the first documented lie by former Dover school board member William Buckingham, there was another huge contradiction between his deposition answers and his testimony during the trial. This one involves the question of where the 60 copies of the book Of Pandas and People that were donated to the school actually came from. I'm going to post first Buckingham's answers during his January 3, 2005 deposition on this subject. Then I'll show you what he said during cross examination during the trial. When asked where those books came from in his deposition, Buckingham said that he…
stcynic | October 27, 2005I said I was baffled by why the defense, of all people, would call former Dover school board member William Buckingham to the stand in the case, and here's why: he was in a no-win situation. He was the one quoted multiple times about wanting to balance out evolution with creationism in Dover's science classes, but he denied in his deposition that he had ever said such a thing:
School board members Bill Buckingham, Sheila Harkins and Alan Bonsell and Supt. Richard Nilsen have, under oath, either said they have no memory of making the remarks related to creationism or denied making them.
But…
stcynic | October 27, 2005Last week I wrote about the fact that Michael Behe claimed under oath in the Dover case that his book, Darwin's Black Box, received even more thorough peer review than a scholarly article in a refereed journal. Now more and more facts are coming to light. We only know the names of 3 of the 5 reviewers - Michael Atchison, Robert Shapiro and K. John Morrow. Atchison, I've already documented, did not review the book at all. He had a 10 minute conversation about the book over the phone, without ever seeing the text, with an editor who was concerned about whether it would sell, not whether the…
stcynic | October 25, 2005Yet another expert witness has pulled out from testifying in the Dover trial. Warren Nord, a philosopher from the University of North Carolina, has been withdrawn as a witness. Out of the 8 experts that the defense lined up for this trial, 5 of them have pulled out. Of the three left, Behe and Fuller did at least as much for the plaintiff's case as for the defense. That leaves only Scott Minnich yet to go, assuming he doesn't pull out as well. And tomorrow the infamous William Buckingham is going to testify. And he's being called by the defense, believe it or not. That should be fun.
stcynic | October 25, 2005A major development in the Dover trial yesterday. The Discovery Institute had submitted a brief in the case last week and Judge Jones issued an order denying that brief's use in the case. Our attorneys had filed a motion to strike that brief from the proceedings on the grounds that it was an attempt to get the expert testimony of Stephen Meyer and William Dembski on the record in the case after they had pulled out as expert witnesses, thus avoiding being cross examined on their claims. The judge agreed, ruling:
As all parties and amici filers are well aware, both Mr. Dembski and Mr. Meyer are…
stcynic | October 24, 2005I've said many times that there are clearly problems between the Discovery Institute, the primary thinktank of the ID movement, and the Thomas More Law Center, the legal group defending the school board in Dover (and involved in the Gull Lake situation here in Michigan as well). Three DI fellows pulled out as expert witnesses from the trial, and even before that it was clear that the DI did not want the Dover case to go to trial. As I've explained before, they know that this case could be the legal end of ID in terms of access to public school science classrooms and they also know that the…
stcynic | October 24, 2005During his testimony, Michael Behe continually brought up the big bang as being comparable to intelligent design. His intent was to show that some people objected to the big bang because it had religious implications as well, but that didn't mean that the big bang theory wasn't a genuine scientific theory. And that's true, as far as it goes. But the analogy fails for a number of reasons and I want to focus on the key reason, which I think also shows why ID hasn't contributed anything to our understanding of the natural history of life on earth.
It's true that the big bang theory was…
stcynic | October 22, 2005In his testimony, Behe repeated over and over again that the evidence for ID is the "purposeful arrangement of parts." Early in his direct testimony, he made it clear that this was going to be the recurring theme in his testimony. He said that he disagree with the definition of intelligent design given in Of Pandas and People ("Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency with their distinctive features already intact: Fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks and wings, et cetera." - the same definition that the earlier drafts…