Mark’s write up:
Day 2. Jury selection ongoing. Lots of last minute depositions piss off the judge. Go to 18:04 to hear the judge’s comments.
Verbal Commentary from Ann McElhinney and Phil McAleer
Free Speech Vs. Climate Alarmism
Welcome back to the Ann and Phelim Scoop! We bring you today’s episode all the way from Washington, DC, where the free speech trial of the century is taking place. You might remember that broadcaster Mark Steyn is in the middle of a twelve-year legal battle because he called out Michael Mann’s shoddy science in the hockey stick graph, which reveals the spike in global temperatures following the Industrial Revolution after having remained stable for a thousand years. Funny enough, there’s no consideration of the Medieval Warming period or the Little Ice Age, but Steyn targeted one of the Left’s favorite orthodoxies, so of course, he’s being dragged through the courts.
The trial between Professor Michael Mann and broadcaster Mark Steyn will determine whether climate alarmism or free speech is going to be the rule of the land. So we’ll be covering it through our new verbatim podcast – Climate Change: On Trial. We will have re-enactments of the day’s most dramatic testimony and you can get a taste of Day One of the trial on the Ann and Phelim Scoop today. This is an episode you won’t want to miss.
Find the first episode of Climate Change: On Trial here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast…
The Conservative Woman Blog has a write up.
From approximately June of 2013 until November of 2014, there were no steps taken in the action;
November 12, 2014, the plaintiff filed a notice of intention to proceed;
February 20, 2017, the matter was initially supposed to go to trial, but that trial date was adjourned;
July 20, 2017, the date of the last communication received from Mr Mann or his counsel by the defendant. No steps were taken in the matter until March 21, 2019 when the application to dismiss was filed.
As Mark wrote in 2019, a judge is capable of simple arithmetic – there were ‘at least two approximately year-and-a-half periods when plaintiff Mann did bugger all – not a solitary thing’. Whether or not he dared not put his money where his mouth was we don’t know. The point was that as a basic principle, a plaintiff has a legal duty to prosecute his case and Mann didn’t, year in, year out, for nigh on a decade. As the Court ruled:
This is a relatively straightforward defamation action and should have been resolved long before now. That it has not been resolved is because the plaintiff has not given it the priority that he should have. In the circumstances, justice requires that the action be dismissed.
