This was all YOUR fault…
Prof. Jonathan Turley would make this an ethics quiz, but not me.
He is troubled that a law clerk ended up an ex-law clerk after publishing a gratuitously nasty post on Facebook expressing her unseemly lack of sympathy for a New Jersey state trooper who died when his car collided with a deer. (Another trooper traveling with him was injured.) Turley shares my concern regarding the trend of employers punishing employees for their comments on social media, but in this case, I don’t have any sympathy for the clerk at all.
Responding to other Facebook commenters who expressed sorrow for the dead trooper and called him a hero, Leslie Anderson, who clerked for a News Jersey judge, Middlesex County Superior Court Judge Travis L. Francis, expressed strenuous dissent, writing,
“Not that sad, and certainly not ‘tragic,’ Troopers were probably traveling at a dangerously high speed as per usual. Totally preventable. At least they didn’t take any of the citizens they were sworn to serve and protect with them…The ‘victim’s’ employment as a state trooper is irrelevant to the circumstances, other than the fact that he injured a fellow trooper and destroyed state property as a result of his recklessness. He wasn’t running into a burning building or otherwise acting within the course of his employment at the time of the accident. The outcry and ‘thank yous’ are absurd, nonsensical, and completely unwarranted. There are people in this country and around the world dying for much less. There is nothing ‘tragic’ about this. Get over yourselves and your sense of entitlement, people . . .
Nonetheless, I agree that it is sad and heart wrenching for the family members left to suffer the consequences of the Trooper’s recklessness — especially for the deer family who lost a mommy or daddy or baby deer.”
Jerk.
The post was acidic enough to prompt other Facebook users to circulate it, and when the judge learned of the post, he suspended Anderson with pay. After the police association and others demanded that she be removed permanently, Anderson resigned.
Correctly, too. She embarrassed her employer, and would be an ongoing problem as long as she remained in the job.
The question for me is whether she used her court association, which does not appear to be the case. If Anderson was simply engaging in a public discourse, I am concerned that she would be punished for it…. [ Police union] president Chris Burgos insisted that the comments showed that Anderson couldn’t be impartial, but she was merely a law clerk, not the judge.
Yes, but the objectivity of any judge who hired as a close aid a clerk showing this kind of mean-spirited bias against police officers would be suspect in the eyes of the police, law enforcement, and others, and so would the his judgment. I think Francis was overly kind (and wrong) not to fire Anderson immediately. “Don’t do that again” doesn’t work here. Once that kind of comment is out—open contempt and distrust for police, assumption of wrongdoing without reason, lack of compassion and sympathy for an officer’s death, holding a human being’s demise less worthy of pity than an animal’s—there is no going back. Anderson’s post might not be signature significance, but enough reasonable people will think it is that the law clerk had become a permanent, irredeemable liability to the judge, or any judge.
Crossing the line is one thing, charging across it screaming and pumping one’s fists is another. She had to go.
Ethics Alarms 
What a sorry thing to say regarding the death of a police officer. Large fauna, whether they be wildlife or livestock, are no joking matter. A lot of people have cashed in their chips this way. If this woman had a bone to pick with the state cops, this was hardly the way to express it. Troopers have families, too. And unlike their ruminant counterparts in the forest, the human ones can read. They don’t need arrogant junk like this when they have to bury a loved one.
More proof that not everything that pops into your head needs to wind up on social media. I sometimes think 90℅ of people think they are not as big of jerks as they really are, and social media just makes it that much more provable – boasting, posts that no one but the writer thinks are insightful, simplistic political memes, and generally discarding inhibitions against cruelty, mean-spiritedness, arrogance, and other bad qualities that keep us from saying things like this publicly.
Apparently, this person has never had a deer run out in front of her on an Interstate. I have, and I am VERY aware of how irrational the animals are. This idiot seems to have posted at some length about a subject on which she is woefully ignorant. So this becomes a pretty good cautionary tale. If you don’t know what you are talking about, don’t talk.
I deliver newspapers in the early morning and have had several close encounters with terrorist deer. They will go to any lengths to try and wreck my car and kill me.
Seriously, though, if you drive enough at night it is almost impossible to totally avoid the deer, no matter how careful you are. In addition, when you’re driving on a highway (as opposed to the regular rural roads) you simply are not looking for the deer. They are much less common on the Interstate, but in my experience catch you totally unaware when they do appear.
It’s darn near as scary as driving on icy roads. At least the deer usually stay home when the ground is ice covered.
I posted this, and lost 5 subscribers within 20 minutes. That almost never happens. Were they law clerks? Ungulates? Ungulate law clerk? I know I shouldn’t care about such fluctuations, but I would love to know what makes a reader say, “That’s the last straw! This guy is an idiot!” This post would not have been one from which I would have expected such a reaction…
I say good riddance. There are lots of people who do actually believe that an animal’s life is more important than a human’s, and every last one of them belongs in an outhouse.
Or with their head mounted over the fireplace.
Other than a reasonable acceptance of the tragedy involved in the death (accidental) of a police officer, and injury to another, there was nothing to run any body away. I don’t get it.
In order to justify such a post, I think the clerk would need to show:
1. That this officer had a long history of driving at excessive speed without justification.
2. That this officer had previously injured or killed others through such reckless behavior without sufficient punishment.
3. That this was another example of reckless behavior on the part of this officer that tragically resulted in his death and injury to another.
If the clerk could show that all three applied, I would consider the post an intentionally shocking ‘wake up call’ to the town to highlight a dangerous police culture. if the clerk can’t demonstrate that, then they have no grounds to complain about being fired.
I would understand the first part of the post if the three points here applied. I wouldn’t agree, but I would understand.
However, the final paragraph is damning. She built it up to sound as though she would express some sympathy for the family under the unfortunate, if not “tragic” conditions, but she sucker-punched them with her mommy-daddy “deery” screed.
That paragraph could not be justified, no matter how irresponsible behind the wheel the officers might have been.
When I read this, I just thought of an incident from my senior year in high school. One of my classmates was killed in a car wreck. His parents demanded an engineering study on the road. They demanded extra barriers, rerouting portions of the road through existing houses, they demanded a 20 mph reduction to the speed limit. They demanded an apology. The cost of their demands was estimated in the millions, but the city almost did it all.
Their son was driving home at 2 AM on a schoolnight. His BAC was three times the legal limit. He was driving over 90 mph in a 45 mph zone. He ran off the road, through a fence, over a cliff, clipped the top of a sign stretching over the interstate, crashed onto the interstate, and was hit by a semi. I think something as rude as the article above was used to finally shock the city government into realizing how ridiculous the situation was.
It occurs to me that this young man died seven times over in the course of a single misadventure! And in spite of all this, his parents had the gall to demand all this of a city government and those officials were so clueless and gutless as to spend taxpayers’ money to appease them? It’s no doubt tough for grieving parents to have to face a hard truth when a child dies through gross irresponsibility. But if they can’t handle it, they have no business demanding that their neighbors subsidize their fantasy. I’ll lay good odds they’re Democrats!