Chapter 35
When Stacy had been excused, the chair was ready to adjourn. On the advice of her attorney, Diana requested that it be on the record that, Anuse, one of the panel members had acted throughout the hearing in a manner prejudicial and threatening to Diana and to her witnesses.
Henry was livid with anger. "You are out of order. You are making statements about people on the committee that has nothing to do with this. Your comment will not be entered and the committee will disregard it."
How typical of that woman to state the obvious, he fumed inwardly. Always before, while ruling, he had kept his cool and at least glanced at the panel members for assent or dissent. This time he ably demonstrated that the show of democratic procedure was only that—a show. Damn her. She had unglued him that time.
In any event, Diana was refused permission to enter the evidence she had that would have shown that Anuse was biased.
Next, Diana reviewed the poor performance given by the document examiner. "He testified that he could not make a decision on the first set of exemplars sent him. Then when he was sent twenty years' worth of documents containing the handwriting of multiple individuals, he claimed that he disregarded most of it." She went over all of the individual letters in the 'suspect' evaluations that Avery had not been able to match with anything in the writing he used as standards. "This shows that there were as many non-matches as matches in his presentation."
The panel listened passively, then Henry asked if that was her final statement.
"No," she answered. "I shall read that now." She picked up the paper which had been written mostly by her attorney and edited by her. It was designed to get the legal points on the record so that they could be presented later in a court of law.
"We are at the end of another hearing and it is a grim page in the rights of faculty members of this university. I have been tried by a committee which is chaired by the prosecuting official. He has reopened proceedings, engaged in ex parte communications, received legal advice from the prosecution's lawyer and denied me the opportunity to even examine the evidence against me.