Month: June 2012

University Trustee Investment Conflicts: When the Stumps Start Showing

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

University boards are great for mutual back-scratching

Deep water hides all stumps, as the saying goes, and while the endowments of rich universities were piling up cash during the investment-friendly period before 2008, nobody questioned the universities’ choices of which companies and funds to invest in. Then came the meltdown, and endowments of over a billion dollars lost an average of 20% or more. That kind of hit has consequences, and among them were that a lot of programs got cut and a lot pf people lost their jobs.

That, in turn, provokes scrutiny: the deep water had receded, and the stumps were out to see in all their ugliness. As an article in Inside Higher Ed explains, among the stumps on display was the fact that many prominent universities invested their funds in places where their trustees had financial interests: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Fashion Model Melissa Stetten

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Hideous.

We have covered this territory before: the unethical conduct of the cruel and arrogant conversant or correspondent who publicizes private communication over the internet in order to embarrass someone whose only offense was social awkwardness or a moment of bad judgment, and whose biggest mistake was trusting a heartless jerk.  It is the Golden Rule breach of breaches, and is social misconduct that shows a serious deficit in kindness, fairness and decency.

Model Melissa Stetten, however, takes the cake, except that models aren’t allowed to have cake. Flying in First Class  from New York to Los Angeles, Stetten found herself next to actor Brian Presley, who was apparently rendered weak-kneed and stupid in the proximity of such beauty, plus he was a little drunk. His flirtatious chit-chat was both awkward and  pompous, so Stetten, who, like most models, undoubtedly has the conversational skills of Dorothy Parker, decided to  live-tweet their conversation to her 30,000 followers.

Brian Presley, naturally, was humilated. His wife was probably furious with him. His fans now know him as a dork who trots out the lamest pick-up lines ever devised. He also, apparently, was in the midst of an alcoholic relapse, so naturally Stetten mocked him for that too in her tweets. (Her entire performance is available on the web; I’m not going to circulate it. Unlike the New York Timse, jI don’t believe that just because I have access to information  I should magnify the harm it can do by helping to circulate it.) Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: You’re the Prosecutor!

/ Jack Marshall / 88 Comments

The facts are simple. The ethics are not.

Near Shiner, Texas, a father arrived home to find a 47-year old man sexually molesting his 4-year-old daughter. So the father beat him to death, apparently in the process of stopping him.

Assuming that the father has no criminal record or history of violence, and that this is really what happened—and ignoring the fact that the incident occurred in Texas—your Ethics Quiz is this: If you were the local prosecutor, would you seek to prosecute the father? Continue reading →

The Importance of American Culture

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Pericles delivering his famous funeral oration

By necessity, Ethics Alarms often ventures into the realm of culture, because ethics defines a culture as surely as culture determines ethical standards. This, unfortunately, make politics unavoidable as well, because politics are the means by which laws, primary tools of culture as well as the products of it, get made.

In The New Criterion, Roger Kimball has written a thoughtful essay about the current stakes in America as our culture evolves. He discusses politics and Pericles, and makes his own orientation (classic conservative) clear, and proudly clear at that. It is also an essay with great relevance to ethics. I recommend it highly. Here are some excerpts. The link to the whole article is at the end. Continue reading →

Supreme Court Integrity and the Useless Times-CBS Poll

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

If you dislike these people,but haven’t read their actual opinions, don’t know their names and are basing your opinion on what other people say, I don’t care what you think, and neither should anyone else.

I suppose there may be could be some uses for the recent New York Times-CBS poll measuring public attitudes about the Supreme Court. It could be used to launch, for example, a discussion about how little the public understands about the Court and how it operates. It might prompt a discussion about the recklessness of the two parties, which regularly attack the integrity of the Court every time it arrives at a decision that one of them doesn’t like. It might even prompt a refresher course on what went on during the 2000 Florida vote recount, and why that case required the Supreme Court to play a unique role that had nothing to do with helping George Bush “steal the election.” All of these would require an unformed and responsible newsmedia. however, so what the poll is prompting instead  misleading debates among talking heads about what the Court needs to do differently.

The Supreme Court needs to do nothing at all differently. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Ronan High School Principal Tom Stack

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This is a dream Gerald Molen had about Tom Stack. Stack is the one on the toilet.

Gerald Molen is a major Hollywood producer, and one of the best; among his accomplishments are “Rain Man,” “Schindler’s List,” “Jurassic Park,” and “Twister.” He was invited to deliver a speech to graduating seniors at Ronan High School in Ronan, Montana, and out of the graciousness of his heart,  agreed. Molen prepared a speech evoking the heroism of Oskar Schindler, and planned to ask the students to “imagine your future is a movie. Forty years from now, you’re writing a script about your accomplishments. What would that script look like?”

When Molen arrived to give his speech ( the high school is a 90 minute drive from his Montana home) the school  principal, Tom Stack, informed him that he had  decided to disinvite Moler. Apparently some parents had complained that Moler was a “right winger,” and objected to him speaking to the seniors. Stack didn’t care what the actual speech was about; mustn’t upset those progressive parents! Molen wasn’t welcome because of his political beliefs, and not even any specific belief. He was just one of those cruel and mean conservatives—you know, the ones Nancy Pelosi, Ed Schultz and Lawrence O’Donnell are always condemning—and his contagion couldn’t be allowed to spread. Molen, understandably insulted,  told the story to the Hollywood reporter.  Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Wellesley High School Teacher David McCullough

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“Exercise free will and creative, independent thought not for the satisfactions they will bring you, but for the good they will do others, the rest of the 6.8 billion–and those who will follow them.  And then you too will discover the great and curious truth of the human experience is that selflessness is the best thing you can do for yourself.  The sweetest joys of life, then, come only with the recognition that you’re not special. Because everyone is.”

———-Wellesley High School Teacher David McCullough, in his commencement speech to graduating seniors. McCullough annoyed some parents by basing his speech on the fact that students today are encouraged to believe that they are more “special” than they are, leading to selfishness, narcissism and delusion.

Yes, the parents apparently wanted something more conventionally inspirational, like a speech telling their children how special they are.

The speech, in text and in video, has gone viral on the web; obviously it struck a chord that needed to be struck. I wasn’t going to post about it, I must confess; I think it McCullough’s speech is being over-praised. It is disorganized. It includes false information (50% of all marriages do not end in divorce, but that fake, unsubstantiated statistic  is harder to kill than the Hydra), and I don’t think teachers should be disseminating bad facts. It contradicts itself: “Don’t bother with work you don’t believe in” is dangerous and confounding advice for narcissists who one is trying to convince to think of the needs of others. And throbs with the smug contrariness of someone who set out to be controversial. Continue reading →

Just What We Needed—An Ethically Clueless Prosecutor In The George Zimmerman Case

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The monkey wrench in the gears of justice is named “Angel Corey”

It was evident from her initial statement on the case, however, that an ethically clueless prosecutor is what we, and Florida, and George Zimmerman got when Angela Corey was chosen for the job. Prof. Alan Dershowitz made a quick and accurate diagnosis of her problem on cable TV, and it apparently prompted Corey, ethically clueless as she is, to settle the matter by leaving no doubt. Dershowitz reports that Corey was so enraged by his calling her unethical and incompetent affidavit of probable cause to indict Zimmerman for murder as unethical and incompetent as it was that she has threatened to sue him and Harvard University. Dershowitz reports:

“State Attorney Angela Corey, the prosecutor in the George Zimmerman case, recently called the Dean of Harvard Law School to complain about my criticism of some of her actions. She was transferred to the Office of Communications and proceeded to engage in a 40-minute rant, during which she threatened to sue Harvard Law School, to try to get me disciplined by the Bar Association and to file charges against me for libel and slander.

“She said that because I work for Harvard and am identified as a professor she had the right to sue Harvard. When the communications official explained to her that I have a right to express my opinion as “a matter of academic freedom,” and that Harvard has no control over what I say, she did not seem to understand….”

This incident indicates that Corey also does not seem to understand the First Amendment and the Constitution, which  is a serious, indeed fatal, handicap for a prosecutor. It turns out that this ridiculous conduct—-a prosecutor trying to intimidate pundits by threatening to sue a legal analyst and law professor for criticizing her handling of a high-profile case—wasn’t even an aberration for Corey. Reporter Ron Littlepage writes:

Last December when I wrote a column critical of how she handled the Cristian Fernandez case, she fired off a two-page, single-spaced letter on official state attorney letterhead hinting at lawsuits for libel.…Then there’s Corey’s spat with Sandy D’Alemberte.

D’Alemberte is a former president of the American Bar Association, a former president of Florida State University and a law professor — not too shabby in the legal credentials department. When Corey was appointed to head up the investigation into the shooting death of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, D’Alemberte had this to say: “I cannot imagine a worse choice for a prosecutor to serve in the Sanford case. There is nothing in Angela Corey’s background that suits her for the task, and she cannot command the respect of people who care about justice.” Earlier, D’Alemberte had criticized Corey in the Fernandez case. The reaction then: A public records request from her office to FSU seeking all emails, text messages and phone messages involving D’Alemberte related to Fernandez….”

This is beyond unprofessional, and reaches a level of shocking incompetence, arrogance, abuse of power and stupidity.

But wait! There’s more!  Law professor William Jacobson makes the perceptive legal ethics observation that Corey has created a conflict of interest for herself that raises the question of whether she should be removed from the case. He writes:

“Will she conduct the prosecution in such a way as to achieve justice, or to set herself up for a personal lawsuit against Dershowitz and Harvard?….  By threatening suit against a critic in the middle of the case, Corey has put her own financial interests at stake in the outcome and conduct of the prosecution. Florida has adopted American Bar Association Standards of Criminal Justice Relating to Prosecution Function.  ABA Standard 3-1.3 Conflicts of Interest provides in pertinent part:

(f) A prosecutor should not permit his or her professional judgment or obligations to be affected by his or her own political, financial, business, property, or personal interests.

I don’t think the question of Angela Corey having to step down as prosecutor in the case should even get to Prof. Jacobson’s issue, however. Her conduct in threatening critics, as well as her unethical probable cause affidavit and her blatant alliance with Trayvon Martin’s parents, trumpeted in her unethical press conference, makes it screamingly obvious that she shouldn’t be a prosecutor in this or any other case.

I’ll leave the final word to Prof. Dershowitz:

“…Her beef was that I criticized her for filing a misleading affidavit that willfully omitted all information about the injuries Zimmerman had sustained during the “struggle” it described. She denied that she had any obligation to include in the affidavit truthful material that was favorable to the defense. She insisted that she is entitled to submit what, in effect, were half truths in an affidavit of probable cause, so long as she subsequently provides the defense with exculpatory evidence.

“She should go back to law school, where she will learn that it is never appropriate to submit an affidavit that contains a half truth, because a half truth is regarded by the law as a lie, and anyone who submits an affidavit swears to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth….The judge deciding whether there is probable cause to charge the defendant with second degree murder should not have been kept in the dark about physical evidence that is so critical to determining whether a homicide occurred, and if so, a homicide of what degree. By omitting this crucial evidence, Corey deliberately misled the court.

“…That’s not the way the system is supposed to work and that’s not the way prosecutors are supposed to act. That a prosecutor would hide behind the claim that she did not have an obligation to tell the whole truth until after the judge ruled on probable cause displays a kind of gamesmanship in which prosecutors should not engage…

“Even if Angela Corey’s actions were debatable, which I believe they were not, I certainly have the right, as a professor who has taught and practiced criminal law nearly 50 years, to express a contrary view. The idea that a prosecutor would threaten to sue someone who disagrees with her for libel and slander, to sue the university for which he works, and to try to get him disbarred, is the epitome of unprofessionalism.

“If Angela Corey doesn’t like the way freedom of expression operates in the United States, there are plenty of countries where truthful criticism of prosecutors and other government officials result in disbarment, defamation suits and even criminal charges.

“We do not want to become such a country.”

Indeed we don’t. But we seem to already be a country where a local incident is blown up into a racially-polarizing national event, with the assistance of race-hucksters, an inept and biased press, and irresponsible elected officials, including the President of the United States, who annoints the victim as his hypothetical offspring. Then, when the justice system is supposed to take over and sort out the facts and the law objectively, fairly and dispassionately, the case is placed in the hands of biased hack like Angela Corey.

That’s the kind of county we are, and that’s bad enough.

_______________________________________

Pointer: InstaPundit

Sources:

Graphic: Billerico

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

New York’s Stop and Frisk Ethical Dilemma

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The problem with racial profiling is that it is wrong and unfair, but it works.

Crime rates, especially gun-related killings, have dropped precipitously in New York City since Mayor Bloomberg approved an aggressive “stop and frisk” policy.  Stop and frisk, where police are allowed to stop, question and pat down an individual whom the officer has reasonable suspicion may be involved in the commission of a crime, was approved by the Supreme Court long ago. The rub is that, as documented by the ACLU, New York cops seem to automatically find blacks (54%) and Hispanics (31%)  suspicious, as they account for 85% of those stopped. Bloomberg is under fire to ease up on the program, which he says demonstrably saves lives, even though the vast majority of those stopped and frisked are innocent. Bloomberg, using statistics derived from pre-policy shooting deaths and the numbers of illegal guns the frisks have discovered, told the press that 5,600 New Yorkers live today because of police suspicions. Continue reading →

Unappreciated Ethics Hero: Facebook? Oh, Yes!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Unlike more primitive methods of mind control, Facebook is painless!

I think perhaps we have not been giving Facebook its due, and now, as the social networking monster is still reeling from its botched IPO, is a good time to right that wrong. We’ve been looking so hard at Facebook’s privacy settings, dadta collection, layouts and pointless games that we’ve missed the most important feature of it—magic. Like Wonder Woman’s golden lasso, but  a really, really big one, Facebook magically persuades people to not only tell the truth about the rotten things they are doing (like going dancing or golfing after persuading an employer to pay them disability because they are permanently unable to work), will do (like planning, in advance of the hearing the evidence, to vote guilty on a jury) or did (we’re getting to that), but to tell it to millions of people, potentially, so that they get punished.  Facebook’s power to compel confessions causes users to post videos or photographs of themselves in the process of doing incriminating things, so they can be then used as evidence in court. You have to admit, this is a wonderful thing. I don’t know how Mark Zuckerberg and his pals figured out how to do it, or what book of spells they stumbled across at Harvard, but they have performed a boon for humanity, and we ought to stop giving them grief.

Take the case of Michael Ruse, a charming Brit standing trial, accused of helping a friend beat up his father using a baseball bat. Micheal’s trial was going well for him, until Facebook took over his mind, such as it is, and flooded it with virtue. Suddenly, he was sending out a the message to his friends—and everyone else, for it was a public message—that he thought he would “get away with it.” An anonymous observer of the post—it could have been Wonder Woman, come to think of it, or at least Linda Carter— printed it his incriminating words and brought them to the court’s attention.

Under the advice of his barrister, Ruse changed his plea to guilty. The judge was not impressed, telling Ruse, “You pleaded guilty part way through the trial only really because you were stupid enough to put on Facebook what amounted to a full confession.” Well, yes, but as usual, he’s not giving Facebook credit for its uncanny ability to compel the truth. (Ruse’s lawyer replied to the judge, “He needs help with regards to thinking skills.” Perhaps. )

Ruse was  sentenced to 46 weeks in jail, another example of justice through Facebook magic. But apparently Zuckerberg’s magic lasso isn’t finished with him yet, for after sentencing Ruse got back on his Facebook account and insulted the judge.

Thank you, Facebook!

________________________________________

Pointer: Fark

Facts: Gawker

Graphic: Mind Control Blog

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.