Ethics Alarms Award Nominee

Déjà Vu: In D.C., It’s The Brooklyn EMTs All Over Again. How Can This Happen Even Once?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments
"Hey, I'm ready! Just go through the proper channels, and I'm On it! You can count on me!"

“Hey, I’m ready! Just go through the proper channels, and I’m On it! You can count on me!”

I guess it’s a sign of longevity that some ethics stories are recurring so exactly that I can handle them with previous posts. I never wanted to see this one repeat, however.

In 2004, two EMT’s let a pregnant woman die in front of them without offering aid, because they were on a break and wouldn’t abandon their coffee and bagels to save a mother and her unborn child. (They were suspended and yet kept their jobs.) Over the weekend, in Washington, D.C., a 77-year-old man, Medric Cecil Mills, collapsed across the street from a fire station. The man’s daughter ran across the street to seek help, and the firefighter she spoke to explained that he couldn’t respond until being dispatched and instructed her to call 911. The man died.

[A black humor note: when 911 was called and a rescue vehicle dispatched, it went to the wrong address.] Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Former Brooklyn Judge Frank J. Barbaro (Zimmerman Furies: Is This Your Future?)

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

We can hope.

From the NY Times...

 The judge’s conscience gnawed at him a little more every year after he retired from the bench. With every news article he read about a wrongful conviction, Frank J. Barbaro, the former Brooklyn judge and assemblyman, would return to a particular murder case in 1999, and question whether he had made the right decision to send a man to prison for 15 years to life. Not long ago, Mr. Barbaro, 85, decided to contact the lawyer for the man, Donald Kagan. He got a transcript of the trial, during which Mr. Kagan had waived his right to a jury and put his fate in Judge Barbaro’s hands.

“As I read it, I couldn’t believe my eyes,” the former judge said in an interview. “It was so obvious I had made a mistake. I got sick. Physically sick.”

Mr. Barbaro’s change of heart led to a highly unusual spectacle this week in a Brooklyn courtroom: He took the witness stand in State Supreme Court to testify at a hearing that his own verdict should be set aside. His reason was even more unusual: As a die-hard liberal who had fought as a politician against racism in Brooklyn and weathered the race conflicts in Bensonhurst, he said he had been biased against Mr. Kagan because he was white and the shooting victim, Wavell Wint, was black.

“I believe now that I was seeing this young white fellow as a bigot, as someone who assassinated an African-American,” Mr. Barbaro testified on Wednesday before Justice ShawnDya L. Simpson. He added: “I was prejudiced during the trial.” Continue reading →