Seattle Group Discovers Judge's Anti-ID Ruling Partly Plagiarized From ACLU
by Jim Brown
December 12, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A new study released by a leading intelligent design think tank based in Washington State charges a federal judge plagiarized his widely hailed ruling banning the teaching of intelligent design theory in a Pennsylvania school system. Nearly one year ago, federal Judge John Jones issued a ruling in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, declaring that intelligent design theory cannot be mentioned in biology classes in the Dover area schools. Now, however, the Seattle-based Discovery Institute has issued a report showing that the central part of Judge Jones's Kitzmiller ruling was copied almost word for word from a document prepared by lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Dr. John West, the Discovery Institute's vice president for public policy and legal affairs, says nearly 91 percent of Jones's 6,004-word section on whether intelligent design, or ID, is science was copied from the ACLU's proposed findings of fact submitted to the judge nearly a month before his ruling.
"TIME magazine put Judge Jones again on its cover this year with the '100 most influential people in the world,' and they listed him in the category of scientist and thinker," West notes. "Well, he's not a scientist, so I suspect they included him as a thinker," the Discovery Institute official says; however, "the thinking on this section was done by the ACLU attorneys."
According to Casey Luskin, another Discovery Institute spokesman, Jones claimed that biochemist Michael Behe, an expert witness for the defense in the Kitzmiller trial, responded when asked about articles purporting to explain the evolution of the immune system by saying the articles were "not good enough." But in fact, Luskin explains, "Behe actually said the exact opposite."
What Behe actually said, the Discovery official asserts, was that the issue was not that the articles are not good enough but "simply that they are addressed to a different subject." And, he contends, the judge's misquote of Michael Behe can be traced directly to the ACLU's supposed "findings of fact, which were essentially taken nearly verbatim and placed into the Kitzmiller ruling."
The Discovery Institute says it learned in September from Dr. Behe that Judge Jones had copied the ACLU document into his ruling without attribution. And since Jones's analysis of the scientific status of intelligent design contains virtually nothing written by the judge himself, Dr. John West observes, the heart of the judge's ruling in Kitzmiller is seriously undermined.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
