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Politics : Canadian Political Free-for-All
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To: Land Shark who wrote (15534)3/2/2012 11:14:45 AM
From: average joe  Read Replies (1) of 37500
 
Supreme Court denies Cuccinelli's bid for UVa records By Michael Sluss | The Roanoke Times

RICHMOND -- Virginia’s highest court has ruled that Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli cannot force the University of Virginia to turn over records dealing with the work of a former university climate scientist.

In an opinion released this morning, the state Supreme Court ruled that the university cannot be the subject of a “civil investigative demand” issued by the state attorney general under the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act.

“We remain unconvinced that this statute of general applicability was intended to apply to corporate bodies that are arms of the Commonwealth,” Justice LeRoy Millette Jr. wrote in his opinion for the court.

Just three months after Cuccinelli took over as attorney general in 2010, his office began investigating “possible violations” of the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act by former university professor Michael Mann. Cuccinelli issued a “civil investigative demand” -- similar to a subpoena -- seeking emails and other documents related to five research grants Mann obtained at UVa, where the scientist worked from 1999 to 2005.

Albemarle Circuit Court Judge Paul Peatross ruled that summer that Cuccinelli failed to show why he suspects Mann may have violated the fraud statute. Peatross also ruled that Cuccinelli had to confine his inquiry to grants made with state funds. Four of the five grants Cuccinelli initially targeted were federally funded awards.

UVa lawyers also have challenged a more narrowly targeted demand for documents that Cuccinelli issued after Peatross' ruling. But an Albemarle judge stayed proceedings in that case to await the Supreme Court’s ruling on Cuccinelli's appeal.

Cuccinelli tied his demand for documents to a controversy that erupted in 2009, when emails stolen from a British university were used by global warming skeptics to argue that climate change research had been manipulated.

Mann is one of the authors of the so-called "hockey stick" graph which illustrates how global temperatures rose in the last century as industrialization and fossil fuel consumption increased. Global warming skeptics targeted Mann for criticism, partly because one of the stolen emails referred to a "statistical trick" in his research. But multiple inquiries have produced no findings that Mann manipulated data.

UVa attorneys argued that there is no connection between the stolen emails and the grants that are the focus of Cuccinelli's probe. University lawyers and academics have decried Cuccinelli's pursuit as an assault on academic freedom.

roanoke.com
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