Month: April 2012

Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.)

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Rep. Jim McGovern is the champion of the People’s Rights Amendment, which shows that some people are so violently opposed to the Citizens United ruling that they would be willing to give the government sweeping power to censor speech, political or otherwise. This Pandora’s box of an amendment states:

Section 1.  We the people who ordain and establish this Constitution intend the rights protected by this Constitution to be the rights of natural persons.

Section 2.  People, person, or persons as used in this Constitution does not include corporations, limited liability companies or other corporate entities established by the laws of any state, the United States, or any foreign state, and such corporate entities are subject to such regulation as the people, through their elected state and federal representatives, deem reasonable and are otherwise consistent with the powers of Congress and the States under this Constitution.

Section 3.  Nothing contained herein shall be construed to limit the people’s rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free exercise of religion, and such other rights of the people, which rights are inalienable.

This is playing with Constitutional fire, designed to appeal to gullible citizens who don’t understand how the Constitution limits government power and the danger of  making simple-minded fixes. Prof. Eugene Volokh, an expert on Constitutional law, writes, Continue reading →

The Kevin Coffay Tragedy Revisited: Not Vengeance…Survival

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Kevin Coffay took the wheel with four of his teenaged friends as passengers. All four were drunk, and by the end of the evening only Coffay and another were alive, three young people having perished when Coffay’s intoxicated driving caused the car to go airborn into a bloody crash. He was convicted by a Montgomery County (Maryland) court of involuntary manslaughter in January and sentenced to 20 years, not in small part because he had fled the scene of the accident, running and hiding in the woods as his friends bled and died in the wreck.

Today he is in court arguing, through his lawyers, that his sentence is too long. I didn’t think it was too long when I first wrote about the tragedy in January, but after reading his arguments and those of his defenders, I have come to believe that the sentence may not be long enough. Continue reading →

The Los Angeles Times, War, and the Reckless, Arrogant News Media

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

The Los Angeles Times feels that you need to see this photo, and sensationalism has nothing to do with it. No, really.

Our national news media, which is as biased as ever, more untrustworthy than ever, and less professional than ever, is also more self-righteous than ever, which, I suppose, figures. The most recent display of self-righteousness, along with gratuitous recklessness and arrogance, is the Los Angeles Times’ decision to publish photos of American soldiers posing happily next to the bloody mess that had been the bodies of Afghan suicide bombers. The Pentagon asked the Times not to run the photos, for obvious reasons. The mission in Afghanistan is hanging by a thread as it is, our relationship with the government and the populace serially wounded by a series of unnecessary events that placed the U.S. in a terrible light: in January, a video of Marines urinating on dead Taliban soldiers; in February, the botched disposal of copies of the Quaran, and shortly thereafter, the rampage of a deranged U.S. soldier, who went door to door killing Afghan civilians. Such episodes, and the publicity they receive, jeopardize American interests and cost lives, as Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta explained while condemning the Times’ irresponsible decision. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Jennifer Porter Gore, Rep. Keith Ellison’s Communications Director

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

“As with all Twitter accounts a re-tweet is not an endorsement.  The congressman removed the tweet because it appeared to endorse use of a nasty term, which is not what we wanted.”

—-Rep. Keith Ellison’s (D-Minn) Communications Director, Jennifer Porter Gore, making a ridiculous and incredible defense of a re-tweet by the Congressman on Twitter, sending out a message from a supporter referring to Mitt Romney as ” a heartless douchebag.” Ellison has been among the most vocal of Congressional advocates for civility in public and political discourse.

Various media noted that the crude and uncivil tweet was an odd thing for the Congressman to adopt as his own, since he had repeatedly spoken on the need for civility, called for a tolerance pledge, and strongly supported the civility pledge promoted by the Jewish Council on Public Affairs. Yet Ellison, or someone whom he entrusted to run a Twitter account in his name, sent the “heartless douchebag” tweet around the Twittersphere.  When reporters started asking uncomfortable questions using words like “hypocritical”  Ellison’s office took the tweet down.  Continue reading →

Joke Ethics: The Obama Dog Jokes Dilemma and The Gut Test

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

The question: how should fair and ethical people regard the viral “the President eats dogs” jokes? This depends on the standards we choose to apply—and remember, double standards are banned.

  • Is it a humor standard? Political jokes don’t have to be fair; most of them aren’t. They have to be funny. If they are funny, they don’t have to be especially tasteful, either.
  • Is it a motive standard? If the real motive for the flood of jokes is to undermine the President in an election year by using absurd images to make him look ridiculous, should that be condemned? Continue reading →

Teacher Manuael Ernest Dillow: An Ethics Dunce, But, Of Course, An Aberration

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“THIS will teach you lousy kids not to disrupt class….KIDDING!!!”

We don’t have to belabor this one. Manuael Ernest Dillow, a welding teacher at a vocational school in Abingdon, Virginia, wanted to get the attention of his students, so he lined up twelve of them against a wall, took out a pistol, and fired at them multiple times. The gun was loaded with blanks.

Oh! Well that’s all right, then!

This idiot was arrested, and it looks like there is a good chance he’ll get serious jail time. Obviously he is an aberration in the great, essential and honored field of teaching. Continue reading →

In Brooklyn, Another Nightmare Prosecution

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Prosecutors intentionally robbed Darrell Dula of a year out of his life. What should happen to them?

We continue Unethical Prosecutors Week with this jaw-dropping horror story from Brooklyn, New York.

In June 0f 2011, the accusations of a 22-year-old prostitute led to Damien Crooks and Jamali Brockett being arrested on charges of forcing the woman  into prostitution when she was a 13-year-old girl, and then raping, assaulting and sexually trafficking her for the next 8 years. She also accused  Jawara Brockett and Darrell Dula of raping her. They were also arrested and charged.

The day after she fingered Brockett and Dula, however, the 22-year-old prostitute confessed to detectives that she concocted the accusations against them.  “I once again asked [her] if she was raped,” a detective wrote in a police report after the interview. “She told me ‘no’…”   Then she signed a recantation.

Never mind. Even though they knew a conviction would be impossible after the alleged victim and accuser had recanted her own account, prosecutors continued to pursue the case. Continue reading →

Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck Update: The Special Prosecutor Buys a Ticket!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Don’t tell me Angela Corey is unethical too! Hey…I told you not to tell me!

Here, almost in its entirety, is noted legal ethicist Monroe Freedman’s post on the The Legal Ethics Forum, regarding Special Prosecutor Angela Corey’s outrageously unethical press conference. I was going to post on this myself, but I could not improve on Prof. Freedman, which should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with his career and contributions to legal ethics theory. His title was “Trayvon Martin, Angela Corey, and Prosecutors’ Ethics.”  When I read it, the only thing I could say was “Bingo!”  From here on, it is all Monroe:

“Special Prosecutor Angela Corey used her press conference to establish three things.

“First, her investigative team… “worked tirelessly” in a “never-ending search for the truth and a quest to always do the right thing for the right reason.”  We are “not only ministers of justice,” we are “seekers of the truth,” and we “stay true to that mission.” Continue reading →

Tit For Tat Ethics, Canine Division

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Rugby For President!

There has been entirely too much written about this topic already, but I do have a pedigree here. I wrote disapprovingly about Mitt Romney’s now infamous episode of dog cruelty way back in 2007, concluding…

“For me personally, the incident is enough to convince me that I don’t like the man, and probably never will. And my feelings as I look at the sweet-tempered and loyal Jack Russell terrier now sleeping on my desk, with his small head resting on my forearm, tell me that me that I would write Rugby’s name on a ballot before I would give Mitt Romney my vote for President of the United States. But that’s not an ethical decision, only an emotional one.”

My feelings about Romney strapping the pen containing his Irish Setter on the roof of his car from Boston to Canada haven’t changed much. Now as then, I think his callousness to the animal who loved him is relevant to his fitness to be President but not dispositive of it. Again from 2007: Continue reading →

The Criminal Justice Ethics Breakdown: Unforgivable, Incomprehensible, and Horrifying

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

"Yeah, that's bad, but can you believe those gas prices?"

There is no longer any way for the defenders of the criminal justice system, or indeed American democracy and its ideals, to deny that thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, of Americans languish in prison for crimes they did not commit. This fact is so terrible in its implications for the nation, the system, the public and the legal profession that I feel incapable of grasping it all, still, though this has been slowly dawning on me for a long time. Right now, it is all I can manage to escape denial, for the deprivation of so many innocent people of their liberty is my responsibility, as well as yours, and that of everyone else. Even in the midst of serious policy debates over so much else that is vital to our future, how can anyone argue that this isn’t the highest priority of all?

Yesterday, the Washington Post revealed that

“Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people, but prosecutors failed to notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled. Officials started reviewing the cases in the 1990s after reports that sloppy work by examiners at the FBI lab was producing unreliable forensic evidence in court trials. Instead of releasing those findings, they made them available only to the prosecutors in the affected cases, according to documents and interviews with dozens of officials. Continue reading →