Ethics Alarms Award Nominee

Comment of the Day: “A Failure To Understand Legal Ethics Kills”

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

armchair quarterback2

It shouldn’t shock anyone to see yet another Comment of the Day here authored by texaggo4. He has been the most prolific commenter—other than me, and he’s ahead of me so far in 2015— since the legendary tgt went into voluntary keyboard retirement, and has led all visitors in commentary the past two years. Last year, he contributed a staggering 3, 048 comments, more than twice as many as runner-up Steven Mark Pilling, who was hardly a piker with 1,082. (The rest of the top five: Ablativemeatshield/Scott Jacobs close behind at 1, 079—he would have finished #2 if he hadn’t quit the field in a pro-pot snit; Beth, with 881, and dragin-dragon at 809. Thanks, everyone, and all other commenters too. That’s a lot of quality content, some of the best on the web anywhere.)

The list is especially relevant to this COTD, as tex rebuts an accusation of “Armchair quarterbacking” against Beth from new commenter gokafilm. Beth had offered a comment to the post about Tampa lawyer Gienevee Torres, who called 911 to report a deranged client—he was wearing pajamas and thought she was God– who had just left her office with his 5-year-old daughter after making an ominous comment. The police decided that the man was harmless despite her warning, and the man eventually dropped the girl off a bridge. Beth wrote:

“I am furious at this lawyer — not the police. She should have said something like, “Yes, I am God. He commands you to give me your child and leave my office now and run to the nearest hospital.” I would have happily stood before the Bar Committee defending my actions if it meant that I had saved a child’s life.”

Gokafilm replied:

Easy to say Beth from the safety of your home/office/wherever. She had to be concerned for her safety and her staff as well. This most likely is a split second decision. Get the individual out and call the authorities…Did she not have a responsibility to herself and her staff to consider their safety as well? What’s to say he wouldn’t have harmed them if they forcibly tried to keep the girl. This lawyer did the right and only thing she could have. Got the individual out of her office, and contacted both 911 and DCF in order to protect the child. Any other conclusion is merely arm chair quarterbacking from the safety of your computer screen.

Another term for “armchair quarterbacking” is hindsight bias, the tendency to judge a difficult decision unreasonably harshly when it doesn’t work out well. “Obviously” conduct is “wrong” after the results are known. My response to Beth’s comment was that the whole, horrible incident was moral luck: if the lawyer had done the same thing and the girl had been rescued as a result of her violating client confidentiality, everyone would have said that her actions were appropriate and even heroic.

On the other hand, post-event analysis is invaluable; this website is based on it. The argument that nobody should criticize an individual’s conduct “unless he’s walked a mile in his shoes” is a lazy cop-out that impedes cultural wisdom and learning from the mistakes of others. I don’t completely agree with many, perhaps most, Comments of the Day, but I concur with this one.

Here is texaggo4’s Comment of the Day on the post, A Failure To Understand Legal Ethics Kills: Continue reading →

Ethics Hero Emeritus: Irena Sendler (1910-2008)

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Sendler

I missed learning about the death of Irena Sendler (Irena Sendlerowa) in 2008, and this occurred because the mass news media barely took note of it. Lots of celebrities died that year whose passing prompted extended mourning in the press and examinations of their legacies: Paul Newman, Heath Ledger, Sir Edmund Hillary (a member of the Ethics Alarms Heroes Hall of Honor), Charlton Heston, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and many others. There was no room for a final appreciation of the life of Irena Sendler, apparently. Today, the website Bio.com doesn’t list her among the notable deaths of that year, though it finds room for Fifties stunt singer Yma Sumac—remember her? She had a four octave range! And Arthur Showcross: he murdered 11 women from 1988 to 1990 in upstate New York, earning the nickname “The Genessee River Killer.”

All Irena Sendler did was save 2500 children from the Treblinka death camp. Continue reading →

So A Guy Goes Into A Bakery And Wants A Cake That Says “God Hates Gays.” The Baker Says, “I Won’t Do It: You’re A Bigot,” And The Guy Says, “I Want A Second Opinion: I’m Filing A Discrimination Complaint.” The Baker Says, “Here’s A Second Opinion…You’re An Idiot!”

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

cake2

And indeed he is.

We don’t know the name of this sad, fearful, obsessed fool that thinks he is making a grand point by harassing the Azucar Bakery in Denver. [ Update 1: His name is Bill Jack.] We do know that he understands neither law, ethics, common sense nor analogies, and that any lawyer who assists him will have some explaining to do, because if ever there was a frivolous discrimination claim, this is it.

Obviously less interested in a cake than in making a point,  the unnamed meathead demanded that the bakery provide a cake decorated with anti-gay sentiments, making the lame analogy between the baker’s refusal to do that and the various bakeries, including one last year in Colorado, held to be unlawfully discriminating when they refused to bake wedding cakes for same-sex  couples.

“We never refused service. We only refused to write and draw what we felt was discriminatory against gays. In the same manner we would not … make a discriminatory cake against Christians, we will not make one that discriminates against gays,” said Marjorie Silva, owner of Azucar Bakery, in a statement submitted to the state’s Department of Regulatory Agencies in response to the complaint. Continue reading →

QVC Shows Us Why We Are Becoming Stupid, Ignorant And Helpless

/ Jack Marshall / 51 Comments

Cable shopping channel QVC just had an episode that should call a lot into question, but won’t.

In the segment above, QVC host Shawn Killinger demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that she possesses nothing resembling a grade school understanding of astronomy. She is obviously not ashamed or embarrassed by this, as she is willing to expose it in horrible vividness on nationwide television. Launched with a statement that itself should never be uttered within earshot by any adult of normal intelligence who isn’t tripping or doing a cruel imitation of the late Anna Nicole Smith—“it almost kind of looks like what the Earth looks like when you’re a bazillion miles away from the planet moon”–Killinger engages in a debate over whether the moon is a planet, a star, or something else she doesn’t understand.

Over at Slate, astronomer/author Phil Plait provides a really smug and obnoxious explication of the issues involved, designed to make him look and feel superior: you see, the astronomic definitions of “moon” and “planet” are more complicated than the non-scientists mocking Killinger think they are, so he’s as much smarter than them as they think they are smarter than her! Wow, Phil, I’m in awe. And you are one of the reasons we are stupid: you make being educated look like a character flaw. Continue reading →

Whose Ethics Alarms Are Ringing Over “Truthy”?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments
Colbert

Sad but true; the NSF spent a million dollars of a project named after a Stephen Colbert gag. But that’s not the worst part…

It certainly seems that most of the ringing over Truthy, the disturbing University of Indiana internet speech monitoring project funded by the National Science Foundation, is occurring in the brains of conservatives. Does that mean that one is a biased right-winger to think that the government has no business deciding what is “misuse” or “abuse” of social media—social media meaning “the communication of opinions, statements and ideas over the web”?

I don’t think so. I think it means that a troubling number of progressives, including a large constituency in the Obama administration, are convinced that the only way for their ideology to prevail is to marginalize opinions they don’t like as “hate speech,” restrict the First Amendment by demonizing opponents, and engaging in de facto censorship though harassment. Being opposed to that doesn’t make anyone right wing. It means that they reject the unethical theory that the ends justify the means, which at this point in our history seems to be flourishing primarily on the Left.

Did you miss the news about Truthy when it first provoked a flurry of news reports last fall, almost exclusively from conservative media? That’s because the mainstream media—surprise!—saw nothing at all alarming or even newsworthy about a government-funded project to “study how memes spread on social media,” to identify what it considers “false and misleading ideas,” with a major focus on political activity online,  to “detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution” —in other words—mine—-to track down opinions and assertions on the internet that argue against Obama administration policies, progressive movements and the agendas of liberal-biased researchers.

When the conservative news service Washington Free Beacon blew the whistle on this under the radar and misbegotten project—a project that could only scratch the surface of being ethical if it was absolutely non-partisan and neutral in all respects, which in 21st century U.S. academia is impossible—the reaction at the University tells us everything we need to know. Continue reading →

Ethics Poll: Target Practice For The North Miami Police

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

mug shot targets

From the BBC:

[P]olice officers have been…using mug shots of black suspects for target practice in Florida. The images used by North Miami Beach Police were discovered by a female soldier who used the firing range after a police training session…Police Chief J Scott Dennis said that his officers had used poor judgment but denied racial profiling.He told NBC that using real suspect images was an important part of training for his sniper team and that his officers had not violated any policies.

“There is no discipline forthcoming from the individuals who were involved with this,” he said.

A police spokeswoman added on Friday that officers use targets of all races and genders in their training sessions.

Embarrassing. A public relations nightmare for the department. But was using the mugshots unethical? Why?

Let’s vote:

 

Jumbo! The Substitute Teacher’s Defense

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

girl-elephant-clip-art

Presenting the first Jumbo* of 2015, and it’s a lulu.

A jury convicted Sheila Kearns, a former substitute teacher in Columbus, Ohio, of four felony counts of disseminating matter harmful to juveniles. For some inexplicable reason—she reportedly told a colleague that “those kids see worse” at home— had shown the film “The ABCs of Death” during five periods of a Spanish class at East High School  in April 2013.The movie consists of 26 chapters, each representing a graphic death and representing a letter of the alphabet:  “E is for Exterminate,” “L is for Libido,” ”O is for Orgasm,” “T is for Toilet,” and so on. You know, perfect classroom fare.

Kearns earned her Jumbo for swearing in court that she had no idea what the movie—titled “The ABCs of Death,” remember—was about.  Her attorney said she never would have knowingly showed it. One of her students. however, testified that Kearns watched the 129-minute movie, which presumably would have given her a pretty good idea that it was about, uh, death. And ABC’s….

After watching the movie the jury became convinced, its foreman told reporters, that Kearns might not have been aware of the movie’s content the first time she showed it, but she would have figured it out by by the second, third, fourth and fifth showings.

Can’t slip anything by these twelve!

*Jumbo: a Jumbo is a special Ethics Alarms award for conduct that emulates the gag from the Broadway musical and film “Jumbo,” in which Jimmy Durante, as a circus clown trying to steal an elephant, is caught red-handed by a sheriff, and asked, “Where are you going with that elephant?” “Elephant? What elephant?,” Jimmy replied.

_______________________

Facts: Seattle PI

Now THIS Is Hypocrisy: Steven Soderbergh’s Copyright Exemption

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Raiders_B and W

Few ethical concepts are as misidentified as hypocrisy, which is the opposite of integrity. The judge who secretly engages in crimes by night that he harshly sentences poor defendants for committing when he wears his black robe by day is a hypocrite; the parent who punishes his child for conduct she defiantly engaged in when she was the same age is not. The anti-hate speech zealot who uses what she would call hate speech in attacking others is a hypocrite; the closeted gay Baptist who opposes same-sex marriage is not. There is no danger of confusion where director Stephen Soderbergh’s copyright militancy is concerned, however. He’s a perfect hypocrite, one who distinguishes  right and wrong this way: if anyone other than  Soderbergh does it, it’s wrong.

Soderbergh is an outspoken copyright infringement hun who has testified  before Congress on behalf of the Director’s Guild of America, calling for tough legal penalties against online copyright infringers. He was also the lead plaintiff in the 2006 case of Soderbergh et al v. Clean Flicks of Colorado et al., seeking to shut down a company called Clean Flicks  that distributed versions of previously-released films edited by them to be more “family friendly.”

Soderbergh suit was successful, with the court ruling that the edited versions prepared by Clean Flicks violated his rights under sec 106(2) of the Copyright Act  by creating derivative versions of the films – defined as “works based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted”—and held that that Clean Flicks was responsible for “irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movies.”

But what’s this? Now Soderbergh is posting his own specially-edited versions of the classics “Psycho,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and “2001: A Space Odyssey” on his own website. Want to see how good Raiders looks as a black-and-white film for example? Soderbergh’s color-free edit will show you. And how is editing the color out of the Lucas-Spielberg film ethically and legally distinct from editing out the naughty words and images from Soderbergh’s “Sex, Lies, and Videotape?”

I have no idea. Ask Soderbergh, whose answer, I suspect, will be “because I did it, not someone else.”

Hypocrisy.

______________________

Pointer: Volokh

Holder Does The Right Thing. Finally.

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

forfeiture pictureFrom the Washington Post:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without proving that a crime occurred.Holder’s action represents the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal property since the seizures began three decades ago as part of the war on drugs.Since 2008, thousands of local and state police agencies have made more than 55,000 seizures of cash and property worth $3 billion under a civil asset forfeiture program at the Justice Department called Equitable Sharing.The program has enabled local and state police to make seizures and then have them “adopted” by federal agencies, which share in the proceeds. The program allowed police departments and drug task forces to keep up to 80 percent of the proceeds of the adopted seizures, with the rest going to federal agencies.

I wrote about this outrageous abuse of government and police power in 2012. It is an ethics disgrace of long-standing; why Holder was moved to take this action now (and not his first day on the job), I can’t imagine: maybe he wanted to finally do something as he leaves Justice that makes up in some small measure for his atrocious leadership. It doesn’t matter: seldom has the phrase better late than never been more apt. I’ll attempt to overlook the millions of dollars worth of property stolen from innocent citizens by the government over the last six years and give Holder his due now. He did the right thing.

Finally.

Ethics Dunces: Voters in Virginia’s 74th District

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Virginia’s 74th District, made up of Charles City County and parts of Henrico and Prince George Counties and the cities of Hopewell and Richmond, used a special election this week to return to the state House of Delegates the illustrious Joseph D. Morrissey, who ran as an independent because his previous party, the Democrats, wanted no part of him. Morrissey ran from his jail cell thanks to his conviction (he pleaded guilty, but maintained his innocence) following a sex scandal involving his 17-year-old secretary, whose nude photo was found on his cellphone and was  shared with a friend. Morrissey professed his innocence, and claimed that his phone was hacked. Yet Morrissey’s friend was prepared to testify that  he had received a text from Morrissey saying, “Hey, buddy I just fucked her on my conference table and again on the floor for good measure!” The young woman denies they had sex, but she texted her friend saying, “OMG so much I have to tell you but the most important thing is!!! I just fucked my boss tonight in our office on the desk and on the floor.”  Coincidentally, she is now pregnant. It’s a miracle!!!

Of course, any decent public servant who embarrassed his district, state, party and the democratic system by ending up in jail for breaking laws when he was elected to make them would have resigned—but then, a decent, ethical public servant wouldn’t be in such a fix. He certainly found the right place to run: in  four previous elections, Morrisey’s history of fistfights, contempt-of-court citations and disbarment didn’t dim his appeal, nor did the fact that the 57-year-old bachelor has sired three children out of wedlock with three different women. Before his latest victory, Morrissey always won at least 70 percent of the vote as a Democrat.

Morrissey told reporters that his constituents aren’t interested in all of that trivial stuff, just what he does in the General Assembly. He is apparently correct. His constituents also seem to believe that an individual lacking character, respect for the law and the requisite trustworthiness to be a lawyer is an appropriate individual to entrust with running their state. They are morons, exactly the kind of people that have led despots and tyrants throughout history to insist that the common folk lack the intellect and ability to govern themselves.

Based on the acumen and respect for the law demonstrated by the voters of 74th District, those tyrants had a point.