Your buddy got a buck.
DENVER — The University of Colorado unlawfully fired Ward Churchill for expressing his political beliefs, a Denver jury decided Thursday.
But in what legal experts labeled a “compromise verdict,” the four women and two men on the jury only awarded the former ethnic studies professor $1 in damages.
Chief Denver District Judge Larry Naves will decide at a separate hearing whether Churchill, 61, gets his job back at CU or is given a lump sum of money instead. CU will also have to pay Churchill’s legal costs.
Churchill, wearing an American Indian design jacket and donning his trademark sunglasses, held up a dollar bill in the courtroom in a celebratory gesture and hugged his attorneys, friends and family members after the verdict was read.
“I didn’t ask for money,” Churchill told a mass of reporters in the hallway of the Denver City & County Building. “What was asked for and what was delivered was justice.”
Churchill sued CU after he was fired in July 2007 for allegedly engaging in a severe and deliberate pattern of academic misconduct, including plagiarism, fabrication and falsification in his scholarship.
The former ethnic studies professor maintains that the university really fired him for writing a controversial essay about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, in which he lambasted American foreign policy and called some of the victims “little Eichmanns” — a reference to the infamous Nazi bureaucrat.
The essay, which sparked a firestorm across the country when it was widely disseminated in January 2005, prompted heated debates in the media and on college campuses on the limits of academic freedom and free expression.
“There are few defining moments that give the First Amendment this kind of life,” said Churchill’s attorney, David Lane, who took to the microphone after Churchill told the dozens of reporters and cameramen that his next move was to seek “silence and repose.”
Ken McConnellogue, spokesman for the CU system, said the nominal award decided upon by the jury — which took about 10 hours to arrive at its verdict — offered “some vindication” for the university.
“Mr. Lane told the jury to send a message with a monetary award, and I believe they sent a message with that $1 award,” he said.
Juror speaks out
Members of the jury declined to talk to reporters after the verdict Thursday, and were escorted from the courthouse by sheriff’s deputies.
But a woman identifying herself as juror Bethany Newill called the Caplis and Silverman show on Denver’s KHOW radio Thursday evening, and said the $1 award wasn’t intended to send a message that Churchill was a fraud.
She told the lawyers-turned-radio hosts that five of the six jurors were intent on awarding Churchill money but that one was insistent he get nothing.
Newill said they ultimately agreed on the nominal figure because Churchill’s attorneys didn’t provide them with a clear formula for determining damages for lost income or non-economic losses, like harm to reputation.
“We sat there for pretty much hours debating this,” she said.
Silverman asked if Newill thought the jury would have landed on a higher figure if Lane had called an economist to the stand to quantify Churchill’s losses.
“Definitely, I do,” she said.
Martin Katz, an associate professor at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law who specializes in employment and constitutional law, said he still sees the verdict as a compromise.
“If you had enough jurors dead set on sending a message that Churchill is a victim and CU did something terrible and needed to be punished, they would have figured out a way to do that,” Katz said. “If they thought Churchill was blameless, they wouldn’t have given him just a dollar.”
Newill told Caplis and Silverman that she and her colleagues had a “vast different opinion” on whether Churchill had committed academic misconduct, but they didn’t feel those allegations were at the heart of the case.
“The university was not vindicated, and I’m not certain Ward Churchill was exonerated,” said Scott Robinson, a Denver defense attorney and legal analyst.
Churchill back on campus?
Katz, the DU professor, said he “would be surprised” if the judge ordered Churchill reinstated in his job at CU.
Judges, he said, typically favor giving monetary damage awards over reinstatement in cases like this because they don’t want to create antagonism by forcing someone back into an environment poisoned by strained relations.
But Churchill’s attorney disagreed, saying reinstatement is the “preferred remedy” in wrongful-termination cases.
And if Naves orders it, Lane said CU needs to give Churchill back his old job with the same responsibilities, hours and scheduling.
Any attempt to relegate him to the basement and strip him of class time would mean a “brand new lawsuit,” Lane said.
Robinson agreed that Churchill will likely be reinstated on the Boulder campus.
“The judge almost has to order reinstatement,” he said.
Robinson guessed that CU would also owe Churchill somewhere in the “mid six-figures” for legal fees.
The verdict came after a 3½-week trial that saw testimony from 45 witnesses, including dozens of professors, a handful of regents, two past CU presidents, the former Colorado governor, and Churchill himself.
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