The jury did what juries do. They simpered and whimpered and gave him a buck-a downpayment on a latte. Nothing more.
American Spectator offers a commentary on the verdict:
Churchill and Eichmann Redux
Sure, only one juror drove the $1 award. She should be immortalized as a single individual who has a clue in that courtroom. But, read to the second half of the article and get a feel for the sort of folks we are dealing with and the way they view authority:
And this juror, she was like. So I goes and then she goes
How anyone could conclude that this perversion of an American, native or otherwise, deserved anything but a boot in the butt escapes me.
What always amazed me about the Ward Churchill saga is his rise to academic royalty at UC Boulder. He did not and still does not have a PhD. He was hired to teach one course as an adjunct. Within a matter of months he was offered a full professorship sans doctorate. Then within the year, tenure. In a span of 18 months he was Department chair. That simply defies logic.
He clearly did get to speak freely, so the First Amendment argument is specious at best. His speech, like yelling "fire" in that ubiquitous theater, bore consequences. That should be the end of the story. The First Amendment doesn't guarantee against a punch in the nose or an ass-kicking.
What remains to be seen is whether this will have any impact at all on his dismissal which was on grounds of his plagiarism and academic fraud, not his immature free speechifying.
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