Fani Wallis Scandal Footnote: A ‘Bias Makes Legal Ethicists Stupid’ Moment

This is disheartening, though not unexpected.

I have written about how thoroughly my colleagues in the legal ethics field are politicized, biased and frequently rendered unable to see the ethical issues through the fog of their peer-reinforced distortions. Yesterday, as my legal ethics expert listserv was buzzing with commentary on the judge’s “split the baby” response to Fulton County Fani Willis’s screaming conflict of interest, prosecutorial misconduct, race-baiting and stunning arrogance. One prominent lawyer in the field, a woman whose commentary is usually perceptive, wrote this in part…

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Speaking of Conflicts of Interest and To Prove I’m Occasionally Right: Let’s Revisit “‘Baseball Super-Agent Scott Boras Has Another Super-Conflict And There Is No Excuse For It,’ the Sequel”

I have never recycled a post so soon (this one was was featured in January) but these are special circumstances:

  • After my analysis of the Fani Willis conflicts scandal did not jibe with the judge’s decision, my self-esteem is at a low ebb, and I feel the need to point out my prescience in this matter
  • This, like Willis’s self-made disgrace, is a conflict of interest, and one involving law as well…but also baseball.
  • The conflict of interest I flagged in January has now had some of the adverse results I predicted, and attention should be paid.
  • Baseball is one of the few things that has a chance of cheering me up right now, having gone through my first two weeks without Grace’s companionship and support. We followed the seasons (and the Red Sox) together since before we were married, as I taught her the game by taking her to watch the Orioles play Boston in old Memorial Stadium.

Two months after I wrote the post that follows, Spring Training is almost over and the season is less that two weeks away. Yet the two star pitchers I flagged as the victims of their agent’s greed and unethical conduct remain unsigned. I strongly believe that the reason they are unsigned is that the agent/lawyer they foolishly employ has been pitting teams against each other while using each pitcher as leverage to benefit the other, or so Scott Boras would argue. There is no question in my mind that if Blake Snell (above, right) and Jordan Montgomery (above, left), both talented left-handed starting pitchers that fill the same niche, were represented by different agents, both would have signed rich, long-term contracts by now. Because they have allowed themselves to be marketed by the same agent–an unconscionable conflict that baseball should prohibit and Boras’s bar association should sanction—they will not be ready to start the season even if both signed tomorrow. Pitchers who have had to miss large portions of Spring Training have frequently had off-years as a result: Boras’s greedy practice of representing competing talents may result in off seasons and even damage to their careers.

All of this could have and should have been avoided, and would have been, if baseball’s agents were subjected to any genuine ethical regulation.

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Update: I Was Wrong! The Fulton Superior Court Judge ‘Split the Baby’…

Judge Scott McAfee ruled that either District Attorney Fani Willis has to step down or her boyfriend David Wade has to leave the prosecution team. You can read the opinion here. Given the circumstances, this is the best outcome Willis could have reasonably hoped for, and yet I think it also is a gift to Trump. I doubt that Willis will step down, and if she remains, the stench of her conduct, arrogance and likely perjured testimony will cripple her case.

I thought that the judge would have to sever Willis from the case, but he did not. The decision is widely being seen as a political one, preserving the judge’s chances of re-election (which would have been harmed if he was tarred a racist, which Willis’s fans would undoubtedly set out to do), avoiding the accusations of partisanship and corruption if he did nothing, and appearing to be measured and fair. I’ve seen many analysts compare McAfee’s opinion to Robert Hur’s schizophrenic report on Biden’s misuse of classified documents, and James Comey’s wrist slap on Hillary Clinton for her secret server shenanigans, being sharply critical of Willis and then letting her off the metaphorical hook.

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: The Nebraska Gas Heist

HEY EVERYBODY, FREE GAS!

Weeeell, not exactly free, but close enough, apparently, for a previously law-abiding, 45-year-old Lincoln, Nebraska woman, Dawn Thompson, to embark on a life of crime. I would love to hear what rationalizations she used to convince herself that what she did was okay. I’d bet anything that she employed a bunch of them.

Her gas-stealing rampage began to unravel when Lincoln Police got a call from Bosselman Enterprise’s loss prevention manager on Oct. 20, 2023. A Pump and Pantry had reported that someone was ripping them off. An investigation revealed that the convenience store’s gas pumps had received a faulty software update a year earlier in November of 2022. The update managed orders and reward cards, but it also allowed anyone who swiped a rewards card twice to shift a pump into its “demo mode.” Once it was set in that sequence, gas was free as far as the pump was concerned. One rewards card had been repeatedly used to fool the pumps, and police traced it to Thompson.

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Friday Open Forum: Waiting to See If I’m Right…

Judge Scott McAfee confirmed yesterday that he will announce the fate of Fulton County’s designated “Stop Trump!” agent Fani Willis some time today. From the moment your friendly neighborhood ethicist heard the basic facts in this annoying story I was convinced that one way or the other she would have to leave the Trump case. One of my legal ethics colleagues emphatically disagrees, arguing that whatever conflicts of interest she created by hiring her illicit boyfriend to help prosecute Trump were matters of legal ethics discipline but irrelevant to the defendants. He also pooh-poohed the “appearance of impropriety” issue, echoing the American Bar Association’s logic when it took that category out of the ethics rules: actual impropriety matters, the mere appearance doesn’t.

Yet Willis is a government attorney, and employees of the state are required to avoid the appearance of impropriety because it erodes the public trust. If there was ever a prosecution that mandated a squeaky clean leader beyond suspicion or reproach, this is it. Instead, Willis has left an odoriferous trail of conflicts, arrogance, hypocrisy, dubious explanations and likely lies, all supported by her obnoxious reliance on race-baiting. I have been certain that she would eventually go down for all of this, and that my learned friend–who is apolitical— as well as the my myriad partisan-biased colleagues in the legal ethics association I belong to are wrong.

Well, we shall see . If you see Fredo (“I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everybody says!”) leading off a post today, you’ll know I was right.

Meanwhile, talk about whatever interests you in the Wonderful World of Ethics.

Ethics Alarms Points Out How Terrible RFK Jr.’s VP “Short List” is; Kamala Harris says “Hold My Beer!”

What a shameless demagogue.

I am immediately torn, because every Kamala Harris head-exploding utterance raises a Julie Principle issue: OK, an elected official who has conclusively proven herself to be dumb, irresponsible and ethically inert says something that is dumb, irresponsible and ethically alert. Why is that worth complaining about or criticizing? Nevertheless, some of Harris’s outbursts are just too despicable to be ignored. Like this one, today, as she visited abortion providers and staff members at a clinic in St. Paul, Minnesota to cheer on women putting the unborn to death for the crime of complicating their mothers’ lives:

“These attacks against an individual’s right to make decisions about their own body are outrageous and, in many instances, just plain old immoral,” she thundered. “How dare these elected leaders believe they are in a better position to tell women what they need, to tell women what is in their best interest. We have to be a nation that trusts women.”

Nice. Kamala had previously used the “How dare they!” stunt to condemn the U.S. Supreme Court for daring to do their jobs, which includes striking down bad decisions that made up constitutional rights that didn’t exist. The abortion-fanatic’s dishonest defense has always relied on pretending that only one life is involved in an abortion, though the state has a valid interest in protecting all lives, including unborn humans who their mothers want to kill. When does an abortion in Harris’s world suddenly involve more than just the woman’s body? Six weeks? 15 weeks? 9 months? Never, if her words mean what they appear to mean. “Plain old immoral” has always included “Thou shalt not kill”: what weird definition of “immoral” is Harris alluding to? It must be really old; Sumarian, maybe? Ancient Aztec?

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Announcing the First “Imagine” Award! And the Winner Is…Marxist British Solicitor Ghuffar Usman

Hit it, John!

(Yecchh.)

The “Imagine” Award will be periodically bestowed here upon the public figure, pundit , journalist or academic whose pronouncements most reflect the fatuous and infantile virtue-signaling of the late John Lennon, who also wrote “Give Peace a Chance.” This is the category where aging Sixties veterans, fact-challenged pacifists, incompetent progressive activists and the historically ignorant will cluster, advocating policies that are literally impossible and have been proven so over centuries. An Ethics Alarms principle is that advocating or promoting some ideal solution to a problem is unethical when that solution is delusional: the aspiration only wastes time and misleads the gullible. Right now, the political Left is addicted to such fantasies. No, we cannot end hate, racism, hunger, war, greed and criminal punishment, among other natural consequences of human existence.

Grow the hell up.

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Ah! I See That RFK Jr. Is Going After the Idiot Vote…

In case anyone serious had concluded that senile Joe Biden and untrustworthy Donald Trump were so bad that it justifies considering the Presidential option of Robert Kennedy Jr, the latter’s “short list” of running mates he claims he’s considering ought to end that alternative forever.

Kennedy told CNN this week that he had “made up his mind” on his VP, who would come from this motley crew: NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers, former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Republican Senator Rand Paul, former television host Mike Rowe, motivational speaker Tony Robbins, civil rights attorney Tricia Lindsay, Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang.

“We wanted somebody who was aligned with my values, optimistic about our country and its potential and able to run the country at a moment’s notice,” Kennedy explained.

Oh. That list is not nearly short enough. Any group in which Jesse Ventura is arguably the most qualified to be President by definition is ridiculous. Any list of potential VPs that includes Aaron Rodgers and Tony Robbins can only be taken seriously in the sense that its creator has outed himself as a dangerous wacko, though everyone should have known that about Kennedy already. Mike Rowe is “able to run the country at a moment’s notice”? Jesse, who is 71 and has been dabbling in nonsense since his quixotic run as governor of Minnesota ended, is the only one on that list who has any government executive experience. Kennedy outed himself as irresponsible and incompetent by mentioning such a list.

If George Costanza Was in a Rock Band…

I’m assuming there is nobody reading this post who believes the following conduct is ethical, or that it isn’t justification for being fired.

The Nashville-based hardcore band Llorona ( named after a ghost in Mexican folklore who is said to roam near bodies of water mourning the children she drowned in a jealous rage) announced that it had fired its lead singer Diego after he admitted putting estrogen in the protein powder used by the band’s bass-player Sixx before his work-outs. This caused him to begin suffering various physical problems such as stomach ulcers, weight loss, muscle weakness and fatigue, as well as “notable mental changes” and other developments that Sixx described as too disgusting to describe. Worst of all, he began annoying his band mates by describing himself as “they.”

Okay, I made up that last part. Actually, the band members already used “they” to describe the bassplayer.

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Oh-Oh. Another Ethically Obtuse Question for “The Ethicist”

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but it sure seems to me that the questions being asked of the New York Times “The Ethicist” column (or the ones he’s choosing to answer) are increasingly obtuse. This suggests a dangerous trend. Are most Americans really that ethically incompetent? Or are the increasingly frequent (it seems to me) instances of blatantly unethical conduct modeled by our elected leaders and shrugged off by our news media causing galloping ethics rot?

The latest query for “The Ethicist” was, in my estimation, steeped in grade school-level ethics ignorance. A female designer who used to work for a sexually harassing boss when she was just getting started eventually told the bastard off and was fired in retaliation. Now she asks,

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