Who is Angela Corey?

I was astounded Sunday night when I heard Alan Dershowitz state to Mike Huckabee on Huckabee’s Fox News Channel show that, after he had criticized Zimmerman special prosecutor for filing a highly misleading affidavit supporting the second degree murder charge against Zimmerman, Corey called the Dean of the Harvard Law School and demanded that Dershowitz be disciplined. Video of the interview is posted here.

In an extremely interesting column posted at NRO, Ian Tuttle expands on Dershowitz’s account of the incident Sunday night:

In June 2012, Alan Dershowitz, a well-known defense attorney who has been a professor at Harvard Law School for nearly half a century, criticized Corey for her affidavit in the Zimmerman case. Making use of a quirk of Florida law that gives prosecutors, for any case except first-degree murder, the option of filing an affidavit with the judge instead of going to a grand jury, Corey filed an affidavit that, according to Dershowitz, “willfully and deliberately omitted” crucial exculpatory evidence: namely, that Trayvon Martin was beating George Zimmerman bloody at the time of the fatal gunshot. So Corey avoided a grand jury, where her case likely would not have held water, and then withheld evidence in her affidavit to the judge. “It was a perjurious affidavit,” Dershowitz tells me, and that comes with serious consequences: “Submitting a false affidavit is grounds for disbarment.”

Shortly after Dershowitz’s criticisms, Harvard Law School’s dean’s office received a phone call. When the dean refused to pick up, Angela Corey spent a half hour demanding of an office-of-communications employee that Dershowitz be fired. According to Dershowitz, Corey threatened to sue Harvard, to try to get him disbarred, and also to sue him for slander and libel. Corey also told the communications employee that she had assigned a state investigator — an employee of the State of Florida, that is — to investigate Dershowitz. “That’s an abuse of office right there,” Dershowitz says.

Tuttle doesn’t belabor Corey’s apparent lack of judgment. This woman is a serious nutter.

What’s wrong with her alleged demand of Harvard? Well, for starters, Dershowitz is a tenured professor at the law school. Then consider that, even if he weren’t, her threats provided no ground for discipline, let alone termination. Further, it’s Harvard that she was attempting to stare down from her cubby in Florida. She’s a little lacking in leverage.

Corey couldn’t exactly make Dershowitz quake in his boots either. Any lawsuit against him for his statement would be frivolous. He doesn’t shy from the limelight and I’m sure he’d enjoy the discovery to boot. At last word, moreover, truth is still a defense to defamation.

A bully like Corey really has to confine her threats to someone more her size, someone like the pitiful defendant in her failed persecution. You have to think this woman is in need of an intervention, or is riding for a fall.

UPDATE: Ian Tuttle follows up with “Politics and justice in Florida.”

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