Month: March 2016

Now THAT’S The Unauthorized Practice Of Law!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments
The fake lawyer with her husband, if it really IS her husband....

The fake lawyer with her husband, if it really IS her husband….

Usually lawyers get sanctioned for engaging in the “unauthorized practice of law” when the unwittingly fail to pay their bar dues, or handle a matter from the comfort of their office involving a client in a state they can’t practice in. It’s a serious ethics violation and a crime as well in some cases, but seldom do you see an example of UPL, as it’s called, like this.

For ten years, Kimberly Kitchen worked as an estate planning lawyer at BMZ Law in Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania, and thrived.  She even served as president of the county bar.  She was never a lawyer, however; never went to law school, never took the bar exam. Prosecutors said she forged documents to show she graduated from law school at Duquesne University, passed the bar and was licensed to practice. Everything was a fake, and she was a fraud. Now she is facing jail time. Continue reading →

An Ethics Alarms Audit: Who Or What Is At Fault For The Rise Of Donald Trump?

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

I have intentionally avoided most of the many articles that have used the unsettling rise of Donald Trump as a Presidential contender to attack their favorite targets—talk radio, Republicans, Obama, the Tea Party, the “elites,” the news media, reality TV…it’s a long list. One of the few I did read was this one, by Peggy Noonan. Its main thesis:

“The unprotected came to think they owed the establishment—another word for the protected—nothing, no particular loyalty, no old allegiance. Mr. Trump came from that…What marks this political moment, in Europe and the U.S., is the rise of the unprotected. It is the rise of people who don’t have all that much against those who’ve been given many blessings and seem to believe they have them not because they’re fortunate but because they’re better….This is a terrible feature of our age—that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens. And a country really can’t continue this way.”

Yup. That’s how populist uprisings always start, and Noonan properly diagnosed this one. Still, it was neither pre-ordained nor necessary that the individual such a movement would unite around had to be such a dangerous, unstable and unworthy one, or that the citizens supporting him would display such complete absence of logic and responsibility.

Reading the debates between Trump supporters and detractors on various websites, I am reminded of the classic “Simpsons” episode where Springfield split into two warring factions, the Mensa group, and the anti-Mensa group. The latter was characterized by angry stupidity, and if a member made a logical and coherent argument against the astute and educated opposition, he would be instantly ejected with the cry, “You’re one of them!”

Herman Kahn, the futurist, used to say that even the best plans, organizations, and systems could be unsettled by “the 2% contingency of bad management or bad luck.” The United States has been very fortunate in its approximately 250 years’ experiment. Bismarck famously said that “There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America,” and at times it has seemed that way. When the nation’s management failed, the U.S. has been astoundingly lucky. When it has been unlucky, brilliant leaders have been on hand to manage the problem. The Trump phenomenon illustrates the fact of existence that luck eventually runs out: so far, bad luck and bad management have joined forces to produce the threat of a Donald Trump presidency.

There are many people, groups and institutions responsible for Trump getting this far, and it is dishonest, incompetent and unfair to blame one without identifying the rest. Each was arguably essential to the chaotic mix, and thus nothing and no one deserves to be cited as “the” cause.

Here, in rough but not definitive particular order, are the main miscreants. I’ve limited myself to eleven, but the list could easily be longer.
 Continue reading →

Twitter Makes Us Stupid, Twitter Makes Neil deGrasse Tyson Look Stupid, Twitter Allows Neil deGrasse Tyson To Make His Fans Stupid

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

bats

Great.

Twitter is a wonderful medium for people who can only digest simple thoughts, as well as for those whose full powers of observation and analysis can be expressed in 140 characters. For everyone else, the social media device is an invitation to emote with inadequate thought, and to demonstrate undesirable character traits like arrogance, carelessness, recklessness and poor judgment.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, for better or worse, currently fills the niche of Pop Culture Smart Person, or PCSP. This is a role that has genuine cultural value, and has fallen in the past to such figures as Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, Bill Nye and Stephen Jay Gould, among others. Smart people accepted by the broader culture can do more to help banish bad ideas, myths and biases than years of formal education, but they must wield their power with care, guard their credibility and appearance of integrity, and most of all, not abuse the trust of their fans.

In these matters, Tyson is a most irresponsible PCSP.  He ventures into partisan politics too frequently, is a media attention addict, and worst of all, he is addicted to Twitter, where he regularly tweets factoids barely worthy of a bubble gum wrapper and makes jokes that display his sophomoric sense of humor—for example, “If you removed all arteries, veins and capillaries from your body and laid them end to end, you’d die.” Steven Wright, he isn’t.

Those tweets are just embarrassing. However, it is affirmatively damaging when a man recognized as being educated and wise issues outright false scientific facts, like he did with a recent tweet announcing,

“If Batman wants so badly to be a bat, he might be more intriguing if (like Marvel’s Daredevil) he were also blind, like a Bat.”

Continue reading →

Documentary Ethics: Is Pulling An Anti-Vaxx Documentary A Freedom of Expression Breach Or Simply Responsible?

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

tribeca_film_festival_ny

Until yesterday, “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe” was an entry in the 2016  Tribeca Film Festival. It was directed and co-written by Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced doctor and researcher whose study purporting to show a link between vaccinations and autism was published in the British medical journal “The Lancet” in 2010 and then retracted. Wakefield subsequently lost his medical license because of undisclosed conflicts of interest and misrepresentations in his paper, and has been wandering the earth wearing the metaphorical sackcloth robe of the outcast ever since.

The decision by the festival and its founder Robert De Niro to screen the film was the focus of a furious controversy. Many consider Wakefield a murderer because his work has convinced parents to eschew vaccinations out of irrational fear sown by his false research conclusions. De Niro insisted that the film deserved a screening to provoke dialogue, but has had a change of heart, mind, or self-preservation instinct. He pulled the film yesterday, writing,

“My intent in screening this film was to provide an opportunity for conversation around an issue that is deeply personal to me and my family. But after reviewing it over the past few days with the Tribeca Film Festival team and others from the scientific community, we do not believe it contributes to or furthers the discussion I had hoped for.”

Translation: “When it comes to standing up for free expression, Andrew Wakefield and the anti-vaxxer delusion is not a hill worth dying for.” Continue reading →

Unethical Tweet Of The Month: Hillary Clinton

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

hedge funds

Among her almost infinite flaws, Hillary Clinton is stunningly lacking in self awareness, and her statements often—astoundingly often—point to her own misconduct and ethical bankruptcy without her comprehending the self-indictment. She has tweeted, more than once, this sentiment, for example:

“To every survivor of sexual assault…You have the right to be heard. You have the right to be believed. We’re with you.”

…though Hillary was emphatically not “with” the women who credibly accused her husband of sexual assault, and still do. She will make statements to one group that are the exact opposite of what she recently said to another group, without batting an eye. Hillary actually committed the meta-lie of saying she never has lied, which is manifestly unbelievable. Then there was this Titanic-style gaffe…

“There should be no bank too big to fail and no individual too big to jail.”

…coming from someone who is, many legal experts believe, not already under indictment purely because she is “too big to jail.” (and then there is hubby Bill, who engaged in flat-out illegal election conduct in Massachusetts that you or I would have been arrested for, and didn’t even get a rap on the wrists.) Neither Clinton has any integrity at all, or shame either. It’s really quite stunning.

Last week, Hillary tweeted this howler:

Hillary Tweet 1

This is an example of a politician intentionally playing to class divisions, ignorance and bias, and worse, encouraging them. It is exactly like saying that it is “unacceptable” that Jimmy Fallon, who only hosts a silly late night show, makes more money than any cancer surgeon, special needs teacher or EMT alive. In some ways it is worse, because most people understand what those jobs are, and may  sort of comprehend the economic principles at work: if Jimmy Fallon drops dead, there is no replacement who will bring to the job exactly what Jimmy Fallon did. He is a unique commodity, and EMT’s are not. The statement is just an emotional attack on the fact that people value laughing over things that are objectively more practical, and entertainment salaries reflect that. Continue reading →

Indiana’s Unconstitutional, Unethical, Thoughtful, Subversive Abortion Law

/ Jack Marshall / 115 Comments
If you want to kill this no matter what, it's legal and ethical. If you just don't like its skin color or gender and want to kill it because of that, you're a monster....

If you want to kill this no matter what, it’s legal and ethical. If you just don’t like its skin color or gender and want to kill it because of that, you’re a monster….

Feminists, pro-abortion enthusiasts (They like it! They really like it!), the biased, brainless news media and kneejerk progressives who haven’t given abortion and its many ethical problems one-thousandth of the careful, objective thought it deserves are just dismissing the new Indiana law restricting abortion as one more “war on women” maneuver and yet another mindless attack on abortion rights. It is an attack on abortion rights, but hardly a mindless one, and Indiana deserves respect and some ethics points for aiming a law right at the fault line of dishonest pro–abortion logic.

Maybe the law will provoke some quality discussion before it goes down in flames, and maybe some abortion supporters will slap their heads and realize that the rhetorical and rational behind abortion is at its core intellectually dishonest. If so, it will have done some quantifiable good.

Maybe the law will be the tipping point that finally makes a significant number of ethical people who have blindly accepted the tortured logic behind the nation’s casual acceptance of millions upon millions of aborted human lives open their minds.

Maybe if I flap my arms really hard, can fly to the moon. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: Salon And Old Donald Trump Date Lucy Klebanow

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
Stop picking on this guy. He vanished long ago.

Stop picking on this guy. He vanished long ago.

I’m not even going to quote from the lower-than-low-blow kiss-and-tell article by Lucy Klebanow in in Salon titled “My awful date with Donald Trump: The real story of a nightmare evening with a callow but cash-less heir.” I couldn’t finish reading it, so quickly was it apparently that I, like you, didn’t need to start, so self-evidently unethical and inexcusable was its motive and topic.  There is nothing newsworthy within it, and while its unjustifiable incursion into the area of privacy that every human being, even celebrities, have a right to enjoy isn’t quite at the Hulk Hogan sex tape level, it is no less wrong.

This same, mean-spirited, essay could be written about me, or you, and definitely about Lucy Klebanow, by anyone who happened to have a one-time social encounter with us that didn’t show us at our best. What has Donald Trump done to exempt him from the basic human courtesy of keeping the details of such inevitable social disasters on the way to maturity and wisdom between the two participants? Nothing. Nothing, because nothing, not even Trump’s own indiscretions about others, can do this. The Golden Rule applies here like epoxy: we don’t do this disgusting thing, because nobody wants their own repulsed bad dates to do it to them. It’s a terrible thing to do. To anyone. Period. No exceptions. Continue reading →

Jury Rejects Damages Suit By Jefferson School Of Law Grad Who Claims She Was Defrauded. Good.

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

alaburda

A jury this week rejected a law suit by  Anna Alaburda (above), a 2008 graduate of Thomas Jefferson School of Law. seeking  damages on the grounds that the San Diego institution misled her by fraudulently enhancing  job-placement data concerning its alumni. The case had been hailed by supporters of the alleged “Lawscam” conspiracy theory that holds that students across the country have been gulled by promises of riches, firm partnerships and career success into paying for degree that only brought them debt and disappointment. Similar suits had been dismissed or abandoned, and this was supposed to be the lawsuit that broke the dam.

Alaburda’s sad tale was that she has been unable to find full-time work as a lawyer even though she graduated near the top of her class and she still has to pay $170,000 in educational debt. She sought $125,000 in damages: $92,000 in lost income and $32,000 for tuition and fees.  The San Diego Superior Court jury voted 9-3 to reject her fraud claim, however. A single fact in evidence explains why all by itself: she turned down a perfectly good career-starting offer (paying $60,000 a year) from a firm shortly after graduation, apparently on the grounds that she felt the firm was too hard on mortgage delinquents.  Well, the school didn’t promise nice legal jobs: that was her decision, her mistake, and her misfortune. The rejection of the kind of  job offer many young lawyers were desperate for  broke any chain of causality between the alleged fraud and her alleged damages. I’d like to know where Alaburda’s lawyer went to law school and learned that this pathetic case was a viable suit. Maybe that lawyer should sue for educational malpractice. Continue reading →

Justice vs. Process: The Case Of The Final, Mandatory, Unjust Sentence

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

African American in Prison

A full panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, fifteen judges in all, heard arguments this week  regarding whether they have the power to do anything about Raymond Surratt Jr.’s mandatory life sentence, which just about everybody—-the sentencing judge, Surratt’s defense lawyers and government prosecutors—agrees is unjust.

Until the Surratt case, no federal appellate court has faced the question of  whether a court it has a route to correcting a mistake of its own making when the error is as severe as a mandatory life sentence. The North Carolina father of two is incarcerated at a federal facility in Virginia for a 2005 cocaine conviction. If Surratt were sentenced today, he would face a mandatory minimum penalty of only ten years in prison. If he had been sentenced under current laws in 2005 rather than the laws then in effect, he would be out of jail by now.

Surratt pleaded guilty in 2005 to conspiring to distribute at least 50 grams of cocaine in western North Carolina. The judge said he had no choice under sentencing guidelines other than  to give him a mandatory life sentence because of Surratt’s earlier drug convictions. The judge called the penalty “undeserved and unjust.”

The conviction and sentence were upheld after Surratt’s  appeals. Now he has no appeals left. But in 2011, the 4th Circuit, which includes North Carolina, overruled past practice, meaning that it held that prior convictions as in Surratt’s case should not trigger a mandatory life term.

Now, I know that non-lawyers react to this by thinking, “So what’s the problem? Let him out!” That’s in line with the reaction they have when they hear about a defense lawyer who knows his mad-dog killer defendant is guilty of a heinous, bloody crime (“So tell the judge!”). However, the law can’t be changed on the fly, and the fact that a result may be obviously wrong doesn’t change the importance of addressing it within existing procedures, rules and laws. In this case, no more appeals means no more appeals.

The Surratt case involves the important judicial principle of finality. Prof. Steven H. Goldblatt, who runs Georgetown Law Center’s  appellate litigation clinic, told the court that finality is of vital importance to the legal system. Agreeing, a majority of the Fourth Circuit panel said last year that… Continue reading →

Pre-Unethical Conditions: Surrogate Mother Contracts And Making Babies With Jerks

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

womb-for-rent2Most surrogate mother arrangements work out exactly as intended by the participants. A couple or a single parent gets the biologically linked baby they bargained for, and the mother gets what she wanted, cash. To many the contracts seem unethical because the idea, only recently beyond the realm of science fiction, of a woman bearing another couple’s child, or allowing a stranger’s seed to impregnate her,  appears strange, unnatural and  icky, which it is. No, it is not unethical, but it is what we call a pre-unethical condition, a situation that lays a foundation for unethical conduct and results if care isn’t taken and one or more participants lack functioning ethics alarms. Three recent episodes demonstrate how icky can turn to unethical, especially when the wrong kind of people are involved.

I. The Unwanted Triplet, continued.

Earlier this year, Ethics Alarms hosted a spirited debate regarding Melissa Cook, a surrogate who fought against the man who owned her three unborn triplets, having rented out her womb to gestate them. He wanted to have one of them aborted, because two babies were all he felt he could support. She refused, and challenged the surrogacy contract in court. I asked… Continue reading →