Month: November 2021

Ethics Snacks Between Making The Stuffing And The Traditional Cranberry Salad, 11/24/2021: Trials, Pots, Pariahs And Cheapening Citizenship

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

stock-photo-cooking-food-vegetable-salad-potato-veggies-thanksgiving-food

Have a wonderful, ethical Thanksgiving tomorrow, everyone!

1. Trials and tribulations: All three of the men involved in the vigilante murder of Ahmaud Arbery were found guilty of murder. Given the facts of the case, I don’t see how, and never could see how, any other result was possible even without the ever-present threat of rioting if even one of the men was acquitted. I also don’t understand why the defense lawyers couldn’t talk the men into pleading guilty. Maybe they tried. It is unethical for a lawyer to pressure a client into pleading guilty, so the “You can plead guilty or find yourself another lawyer” tactic is sanctionable.

The Post story includes this passage:

For many, the trial took on even more weight after the acquittal last week of Kyle Rittenhouse. The White teenager successfully argued that he shot three people — killing two — in self-defense, after driving to Kenosha, Wis., to help protect businesses and property when protests over the police shooting of a Black man turned violent.

“Many” ignoramuses. perhaps? There is no legitimate comparison between the two cases, and anyone who claims there is has slapped a neon-bright “I don’t know what I’m talking about” sticker on his or her forehead.

2. More trials and tribulations. I don’t understand this one at all. Jurors found organizers of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 liable under state law for the injuries to counter protesters when the two groups clashed and a riot ensued The defendants were hit with more than $25 million in damages. The rally had a permit, the counter-protesters did not. The authorities did not adequately protect the “Unite the Right” marchers or do enough to keep the groups apart.

A rogue demonstrator, James Fields, used his car to kill counter-protestor Heather Heyer, 32, and is serving a life sentence for the crime. Yet the group, which was marching legally, is somehow liable for what he did. As far as I can see, the jury’s decision was based on the theory that the organizers’ rhetoric around the march was “hate speech” and that they should have known that it would incite violence.

The organizers’ rhetoric around the march was protected political speech, and this case is punishing ideas and words that the jury doesn’t like. It’s a dangerous, terrible precedent resulting from a political show trial, and should be overturned on appeal. (Read Simple Justice’s commentary here.) [Pointer: johnberger2013]

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The New York Times Has An Outbreak Of Integrity In The Midst Of Its Progressive Bias Fever!

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

books

The Times has compiled its list of the “best books of the last 125 years” as part of the celebration of the 125th anniversary of its Book Review Sunday supplement. Readers are invited to vote for their favorite on the list of twenty-five.

Here is the list:

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Thanks, Professor: We Needed That

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Professor Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr. is criminal law specialist who trains Harvard Law students and practices law. He has just issued a superb explanation and analysis of the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict—fair, objective, and best of all, readable by those whose eyes usually glaze over at legal scholarship.

It should, in a just and sane society, permanently shut up—embarrass, even— the politicians, celebrities, and social media dolts who are still calling the jury’s verdict “racist” or an indictment of the legal system. Of course, it won’t. If there is a more annoying example of people loudly braying uninformed opinions about a technically complex matter that they know little or nothing about, I can’t think of it right now.

On “The View,” ABC’s depressingly popular “gullible idiots watching progressive idiots” news show, panel leader Whoopi Goldberg (because in the land of the blind…well, you know the metaphor), declared that Rittenhouse was a murderer. People will take that as authority, you know. She played a video of Anthony Huber’s father on CNN holding an urn containing his son’s ashes and emoting bitterly against Rittenhouse going free, as if the lament of a parent in such situations ever is anything but an irrelevant appeal to emotion. Then, armed with this irrefutable “evidence,” Whoopi gave her verdict on Rittenhouse, saying of Huber (who was shot while beating the teen with a skateboard), “He saw someone get shot. He thought he was doing the right thing. So … even all the excuses in the world does not change the fact that three people got shot. Two people were murdered. To me it’s murder. I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry too, Whoopi. I’m sorry you lack the sense of responsibility to keep your opinions on issues you don’t have the knowledge and background to understand to yourself, and instead wield them to make the public stupid. I’m sorry you believe “thinking you are doing the right thing” is ever a justification for doing the wrong thing (and you don’t believe that yourself: were the men who lynched Emmett Till blameless because they thought they were doing the right thing?). You have no way of knowing what Huber thought anyway. I’m sorry you are so ignorant that you can say something like “if he shot them and they died, then he’s a murderer,” which is redolent of your failure to take the initiative over the years to fill the gaps in your high school dropout education. Mostly I’m sorry that you’re not getting enough work as an actress and comic, both occupations you’re brilliantly qualified to do, so you’re stuck with being an incompetent pundit for a living.

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Thanksgiving Week Dead Zone Ethics Whispers, 11/23/21: The ABA, Kevin Spacey, BLM, Huma, And The Times Doesn’t Think All The News Is Fit To Print

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

emptiness2

This week is always the deadest of the year as far as EA traffic is concerned, and therefore doubly depressing. This year the anniversary of JFK’s assassination, an ongoing trauma, along with my wedding anniversary (41 years!) today, making me unpleasantly conscious of the rapid passage of time and opportunities, and Thanksgiving, which is an annual pageant of loved ones lost forever, was stuffed into four days. Along with all that, there is the shopping, the cleaning, the cooking and the other annoying preparations for judgemental guests—and the duty of getting ethics posts up that few bother to read.

But hey, I’m thankful! I am!

1. That’ll teach him! (Well, possibly not…) An arbitrator ordered actor Kevin Spacey to pay nearly $31 million to MRC, the production company that owned “House of Cards,” afterconcuding that Spacey breached his contract by violating the company’s sexual harassment policy. Spacey’s sexual harassment scandal, which began with a now withdrawn accusation and poor response by the actor, and then quickly mushroomed into multiple allegations of sexual assault and misconduct. MRC severed its relationship with Spacey and the successful political drama he dominated, and cancelled the 2017 season after members of the production people came forward to allege a pattern of sexually predatory conduct.

This is an extreme example of what having dead ethics alarms can do to one’s career and life.

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Was Nixon Brought Down By A Prosecutors’ Conspiracy?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

watergate

Geoff Shepard‘s intriguing new book, The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President , is out today. Shepard, a Nixon aide who turned against his former boss during the Watergate hearings after hearing some of the Oval Office tapes, has assembled a large amount of what he calls “irrefutable” evidence that President Nixon was victimized by extreme prosecutorial misconduct in a “deep state” effort to bring him down. He has even set up a website where those documents can be reviewed.

Shepard, who has been obsessed with Watergate for decades and has written three previous books about the scandal, forced the release of a secret prosecutors’ “road map” used to convince a grand jury to indict key Watergate figures and spur the impeachment inquiry. He also claims his research shows that Watergate prosecutors were coordinating with Judge Sirica, which was one reason many of them, included the sainted Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, improperly took documents with them when they left the case. Amusingly (I guess), the Washington Examiner calls this “a big legal no-no.” That’s one way of putting it, I guess—a stupid way. If true, it’s grounds for disbarment for the lawyers and impeachment for the judge.

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Comment Of The Day: “Comment Of The Day: A Rittenhouse Verdict Inventory…Part III: Facts Don’t Matter”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

jojo

Russian dolls-style Comments of the Day can be the best feature of Ethics Alarms, when erudite commenters do a tag-team job on complex issues. So it is in this case, with Humble Talent taking off from Steve-O’s astute chain reaction observation.

What is remarkable to me is that the conversations about Rittenhouse’s travails somehow never explored the fact that all three of those he shot were felons with significant criminal records. The first I realized this was when I was directed to Ann Coulter’s piece.

While it is irrefutable that this information should not have been brought to the jury’s attention because it was inherently prejudicial, it is also irrefutable that the fact that the three men were 1) violent lawbreakers and 2) white fatally undercuts much of the Left’s narrative, as mapped out by the news media. It is particularly weird that now, after the verdict and when the proclivities of the three men have finally been widely revealed, the Rittenhouse-Deranged are still talking about them like they were peaceful demonstrators who wanted nothing more than to ensure racial justice, social equity, rainbows and moonbeams for all humankind. Actor-activist (good actor, fatuous activist) Mark Ruffalo’s tweet was a classic of the genre: “We come together to mourn the lives lost to the same racist system that devalues Black lives and devalued the lives of Anthony and JoJo.”

Huh? “Jo-Jo” raped five boys. It’s awfully hard to “devalue” the life of someone like that, who has had negative value to society. If Ruffalo knows this, then his tweet is demented. If he doesn’t, then it’s irresponsible. Either way, shut up and act, Mark.

Here is Humble Talent’s Comment of the Day on the post (by Steve-O-in NJ), “Comment Of The Day: A Rittenhouse Verdict Inventory…Part III: Facts Don’t Matter”

***

I don’t know if it makes any difference, but I was thinking about the left’s newly beloved “JoJo” and the narrative that Kyle didn’t have any business being on scene.

We knew, previous to this, that “JoJo” Rosenbaum had just been released from a mental health institution. We knew that he was off his meds. We knew that he had several prior convictions for molesting children. We knew that the bag that he threw at Kyle was filled with toiletries that he took home from the mental institution, and that he had that in part because he hadn’t even gone home to change. He was released the night of the riot and immediately went on about the business of rioting. We know that he appeared hyper-aggressive all night, we know that he called some of the people in Kyle’s group, quote, “niggers”.

Aside from that last sentence, Kyle knew none of this, so it really shouldn’t factor into the actions of Rittenhouse on that fateful August night. But if we’re going to armchair quarterback the plays that Kyle was making, maybe it makes sense to ask questions like “What was “JoJo” doing there?” Because there are a whole lot of reasons to believe that he wasn’t even aware the Blake shooting had occurred.

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A “Hard Cases Make Bad Law” Classic: The School Board President’s Kid’s Social Media “Hate Speech”

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Cullman City

I’d make this an ethics quiz, but I think it’s too potentially important to treat as a jump ball. This is the kind of extreme mess that threatens free speech, especially when on entire political party is searching for an excuse to ban “hate speech,” once they have defined it just well enough to constrain political opponents.

In Cullman City, Alabama, the school board’s president’s son, who attends the school district’s high school, posted a video to SnapChat in which he could be seen and heard chanting “White power!” and “Kill all the niggers!” The video has been widely circulated among students. The parent of a black student who saw the video has demanded the resignation of Amy Carter (no, not THAT Amy Carter; don’t be silly), the school board’s president. The parent is also demanding that the school take action against the student. “Cullman City Schools would clearly punish our son if he made a video threatening the white students of Cullman High School,” she wrote in an email. “My son is one of a handful of black children in the school. Tell me how he wouldn’t be threatened by KILL ALL THE Ns?! Explain to me how this is not a threat.”

Well, I can answer that last part. Under First Amendment case law, the “true threats” doctrine holds that allegedly threatening speech cannot be punished unless the government can prove that the speaker meant to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual. A chant on a video posted on social media that mentions no specific student will not qualify as an actionable threat. Her previous question is tougher. The school and the town itself has a reputation for racial hostility toward blacks. The mother of the black student says her son has repeatedly been subjected to racist remarks during his four years as a student in the district. I see good reason for the video to be unsettling in that context.

On the other hand, I’m getting awfully tired of the “they wouldn’t treat a black adult/child this way if he/she did X” argument, which is almost never challenged even when it’s bigoted nonsense, as in the race-based attacks on the Rittenhouse verdict. It’s more presumed racism, and a cheat, a device to avoid making a solid argument.

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Monday Morning Ethics Warm-Up 2: More Rittenhouse, Because Attention Must Be Paid

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

KYLE-RITTENHOUSE-INTERVIEW-FOX-NEWS

1. Now THIS is an intellectually dishonest op-ed…even for the New York Times, and even for Charles M. Blow. “Rittenhouse and the Right’s White Vigilante Heroes” made my mind snap back decades to a Phillip Roth anti-Nixon satire called “Our Gang.” At one point, as Nixon tries to scapegoat the Boy Scouts of America for something (I can’t remember what, but it doesn’t matter), the White House issues a statement explaining that the Scouts carry scout knives in numbers exceeding “the entire population of Chevy Chase, Maryland” and leaps to announcing preventive measures against the BSA “in order to prevent the slaughter of the residents of Chevy Chase.” Blow condemns the verdict in the Rittenhouse trial as “another data point in the long history of some parts of the right valorizing white vigilantes who use violence against people of color and their white allies.”

On the way to that hysterical conclusion, he writes, “One can argue about the particulars of the case, about the strength of the defense and the ham-handedness of the prosecution,” which is a weasel-worded way of saying that Rittenhouse was acquitted because of the facts of the case. “One can argue” about the verdict, but only if “one” knows nothing about the law and has swallowed the Left’s false narratives. Next thing you know, Blow is drawing, Roth-like, an imaginary line from Rittenhouse defending himself against three attacks by white felons to Jim Crow lynchings. Then, of course, the line goes to the January 6 riot at the Capitol, because until Donald Trump gets a stake through his heart, this is all the Democrats have as they fight not to be swept out of office. “One could argue”—there’s that “one” again!—” that the entire Jan. 6 insurrection was one enormous act of vigilantism,” Blow intones. First, that riot was not an insurrection by any rational definition of the word. Second, all riots are “enormous act[s] of vigilantism,” especially the rioting that Rittenhouse foolishly and recklessly injected himself into.

2. One more reason Donald Trump has reason to feel that the election was stolen...The facts as they unfolded in the trial showed that Politifact, the flagrantly left-biased fact-checking group, wrongly called Trump’s statement “False” when he said during an August 31, 2020, news briefing that Rittenhouse had acted in self-defense. “You saw the same tape as I saw,” Trump said. “And he was trying to get away from them, I guess; it looks like. And he fell, and then they very violently attacked him. And it was something that we’re looking at right now and it’s under investigation.”

PolitiFact wrote that while Trump “correctly describes some minor details about that night,” it insisted that his comments “grossly mischaracterize what happened — leaving out that by the time of the events he described, prosecutors say Rittenhouse had already shot and killed a man.” Right—in self-defense. Since when is “what the prosecutors say” “fact” before a trial?

PolitiFact was working at linking Trump to a “white supremacist” as further advancement of Big Lie #4. It was wrong, Trump was correct. Now, neither Trump nor Politifact should have had anything to say about what happened before the trial; Trump, because Presidents should not comment regarding ongoing criminal investigations and prosecutions, PolitiFact because it cannot declare what “facts” are before the facts have been determined.

The factchecking operations, which dishonestly claim to be non-partisan, were used by the media to compile their biased “lies lists” on Trump and by social media to justify banning him as soon as he had been vanquished. In this instance, PolitiFact implied that Trump was distorting the truth to defend a “white supremacist” …who, in fact wasn’t, but the news media and pundits kept saying he was.

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Monday Morning Ethics Warm-Up 1: Rittenhouse-Free Zone Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

JFK assassination

President Kennedy was assassinated on this date in 1963, easily my most vivid memory of any national event in my lifetime. I am not an admirer of Jack Kennedy as a President or a human being, but it is hard to imagine a more wrenching disruption of the nation’s course, spirit, fate and future than what occurred that day in Dallas.

We watched everything unfold for the rest of the week on our black and white TVs, from Walter Cronkite’s somber announcement that the President of the United States was dead, to the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, through to the D.C. funeral procession and John-John’s salute.

The day still represents traumafor me, and I am sure to many others of my generation: when Grace and I were planning our wedding in 1980 and November 22 was suggested as the most convenient date, I insisted on the 23rd instead. This is also the date that kicks off the dreaded holiday season, stuffed with milestones good and bad (I count seven between now and New Years), periods of anxiety, nostalgia and anticipation in between, and too much longing and memories of loss to bear.

I hate it.

1. Yes, it’s an unethical Christmas tree. In the town of Grimsby in North East Lincolnshire, the official Christmas tree has been taken down from the town center after a local uproar declaring the 10 foot, conical artificial tree a “national embarrassment.” It also cost a thousand pounds. The town’s explanation was, shall we say, confusing, with Councillor Callum Procter claiming,

There are great plans for celebrating the start of the Christmas period next week. Unfortunately, the Christmas Market tree was installed too early, and we understand that people were confused and thought this was our civic tree. The tree has been removed temporarily today and our contractors are reinstalling again, for free, ahead of the market next week. I’m looking forward to seeing people enjoying the illuminations, the market, and the revamped St James’ Square with the civic tree and the special lighting on the Minster as part of the Christmas experience.

Wait…the town is going to put the same tree back up, and everyone will like it because it won’t be “too early”? I am dubious. Here’s the tree:

bsd tree

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Comment Of The Day: A Rittenhouse Verdict Inventory…Part III: Facts Don’t Matter

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

dominos

I’m sorry about the apparent obsession here with the Rittenhouse case, but I believe that the episode has ethical significance on many levels, particularly in the way it demonstrates that toxic progressive bias has headed into end game territory, sort of like with rabies when a victim becomes afraid of water.

What we are seeing and hearing is ugly and would be frightening if it wasn’t so self-evidently irrational. I guess we have seen other examples where political fanaticism causes vast numbers of previously functional Americans to blow out their critical reasoning fuses for all to see, but right now I can’t think of one so striking. Groups that cease to be capable of reason tend not to do very well after a while.

Yes, Steve-O-in NJ has another Comment of the Day, and yes, it’s long, but it touches perceptively on too many important matters to let go by. I especially admire his description of the “chain reaction.” (I could not disagree with his last sentence more, however.)

Here it is, on the post, “A Rittenhouse Verdict Inventory Of Ethics Heroes, Dunces, Villains And Fools, Part III: Facts Don’t Matter”…

***

So, the verdict is in and Kyle Rittenhouse walks on all charges. I thought about it, and as an attorney who has occasionally worked civil rights cases I do not see any bases for federal civil rights charges against him. Most of the federal civil rights statute has to do with punishing those who act under color of law to deprive individuals of their constitutional rights. Those statues are generally designed to bring down law enforcement officers who abuse their authority for no good reason. There is also the question of a hate crime, however, there has been no allegation nor proof that anyone he killed was a member of a protected class killed because they were a member of protected class.

The Federal statutes are simply not designed to give the federal government a second bite at every state murder prosecution that fails to make. I suppose the Feds could try to cobble together gun charges or terrorism charges (but that’s a very long stretch). However, they would still have to draw a jury pool from Wisconsin, and all of Wisconsin has now seen this trial and knows this would be just an attempt to punish someone for a crime he was already acquitted of. Jerry Nadler should have known better then to suggest this, but he was simply pandering to his base and his party’s base.

This was another classic domino situation of one breach of the law leading to more as described by the Hon. Guido Calabresi, senior judge of the Second Circuit Court of appeals, in an address at my law school graduation. Things were already tense in this country because George Floyd decided he would break the law and pass fake money, then resist arrest while high as a kite, then Derek Chauvin decided he would break the law and press George Floyd against the ground with his knee until he was fatally injured, then a huge number of people decided they would break the law and riot, then a whole lot of public officials decided they would break the law and fail to do their sworn duty to protect the people. While the nation was still reeling from this, Jacob Blake decided he would break the law and resist a lawful arrest, officers got heavy handed, and still more people decided they would break the law and riot, set fires, and destroy and ransack property that was not theirs to destroy or ransack. Kyle Rittenhouse unwisely decided to get involved in this mess, while armed. Three individuals with lengthy criminal records decided they would break the law and violate common sense and attack Kyle and try to kill him while he was armed for the rifle. Finally Kyle found himself with no alternative but to open fire, killing two and wounding a third.

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