Updates

The Chronicle reports that Dean of Undergraduate Education Steve Nowicki has named a special committee to look into the due process-unfriendly student judicial system. The committee membership suggests that the group could produce meaningful change--it includes Jim Coleman, Craig Henriquez, and Thomas Nechyba. No member of the Group of 88--professors who, if nothing else, distinguished themselves for their disdain for due process--was appointed to the committee.

Remarkably, another publication (Sports Illustrated) has hired Selena Roberts, who embarrassed her profession with her performance on the Duke case.

On the Liestoppers board, Michael Gaynor continues his peculiar defense of Dr. Brian Meehan, whose failure to produce a report that listed all his test results (as he was required to do under both North Carolina law and his own lab's protocols) was concealed for seven months. Writes Gaynor, "I see a scientist who had not been prepared by a lawyer or a legal team to testify being precise and a lawyer proceeding with his questions in a clever, but hardly straightforward, way." What I saw, in the courtroom on Dec. 15, was an arrogant scientist (at least for the first 15 minutes or so of the questioning, after which he increasingly slumped forward and desperately looked at Nifong to object) attempting to bluff his way through an examination without revealing what he had done; and a defense team that--even though they had not expected Meehan to appear for the hearing--eventually obtaining from the lab director an admission of the full scope of the results and of what he had agreed with Nifong not to report.

Meanwhile, Liestoppers has "discovered" the Gottlieb dry eraser board from April 10, 2006.