Law & Law Enforcement

“Mostly Peaceful” Bullshit

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Guest Post by Mrs. Q

From your host: Ok, this is technically a Comment of the Day on the post, “Let Us Call the George Floyd Freakout What It Was.” I decided that it warrants guest post status for several good reasons. 1) We haven’t had a guest post for a while, and I am still seeking submissions. 2) The George Floyd aftermath disaster is one of the signature ethics outrages of my life, and is certainly worthy of more than one post saying so on its 5th anniversary. 3) I’m slyly trying to entice Mrs. Q to revive her featured column on Ethics Alarms, and 4) not for the first time, I like her take on a current ethics topic better than my own.—JM.

If anyone hasn’t had a chance to see this documentary, I’ll link it here: The Fall of Minneapolis | A Crowdfunded Documentary.

As some longtime readers here may remember, I am from Minneapolis and grew up literally at ground zero, where the Third Precinct, Auto Zone, and Minnehaha Lake Wine and Spirits were burned to a crisp. For three days and nights I watched others livestream on multiple cameras everything I knew from 4-14 years old go from vandalized to looted to burned from May 25th-28th. The first building they burned, was ironically, the last place I ever saw my black father work (it was a Snyders Drug Store then). I’d wait for him on the sidewalk in front of our four-plex, watching as he would step out the door of the building and head a half block home. Now that memory is infused with flames.

Then the riots went global.

What so many forget is that it was quite literally a war zone in Minneapolis. The documentary linked above illustrates what I witnessed. Areas were under siege and neighbors were trapped in their homes for days. It wasn’t just that crime increased, it was that the police could not help anyone. There were neighbor reports of rioters putting accelerants around neighborhoods, so people had to patrol their areas while putting themselves at risk for being attacked physically. I spoke with friends who had to flee in the early morning to get their families safe. And those who thought their BLM or Biden yard signs would save them were met with the same violence as everyone else.

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Incompetent Elected Official of the Week: Porto Alegre, Brazil City Councilman Ramiro Rosário

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

A city in southern Brazil just enacted the country’s first legislation entirely written by AI bot ChatGPT. Normally the misadventures of a Brazilian local pol wouldn’t turn up on the EA radar, but you know—you know—that this story’s eqivilent is coming soon to our shores, if it isn’t here already

The Associated Press reports that Porto Alegre city councilman Ramiro Rosário admitted to having ChatGPT to write a proposed law aimed at preventing the city from forcing locals to pay for replacing stolen water consumption meters. He didn’t make a single change to the AI generated bill, and didn’t even tell the city council that he didn’t write it. “If I had revealed it before, the proposal certainly wouldn’t even have been taken to a vote,” Rosarío told the AP. “It would be unfair to the population to run the risk of the project not being approved simply because it was written by artificial intelligence.”

It’s unfair to let the public know that they are being governed by machines, or that their elected officials are too lazy or dumb to compose their own bills. Got it.

Porto Alegre’s council president Hamilton Sossmeier extolled the new law on social media and was embarrassed when its true author was revealed. He then called letting bots write legislation a “dangerous precedent.” Ya think? Massachusetts state senator Barry Finegold says that he has used AI to draft bills, but that he wants “work that is ChatGPT generated to be watermarked….I’m in favor of people using ChatGPT to write bills as long as it’s clear.” I think he means “clear that a bot was involved.” It’s ambiguous language like Barry’s sentence that makes it seem like ChatGPT is an improvement over human public servants.

These AI bots continue to make stuff up, cite imaginary sources, and lie…you know, just like real politicians. For his part, Rosario sees nothing wrong with letting a bot do the work he was elected to do. “All the tools we have developed as a civilization can be used for evil and good,” he told the AP. “That’s why we have to show how it can be used for good.”

Secretly employing a machine to do your work and not disclosing that fact is called “cheating.” Somebody explain to the councilman that cheating is not “good.”

“The Case of the Cut-Short Crucible”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

That’s what this unholy mess of a high school play ethics train wreck would be called if it were an old “Perry Mason” episode.

The run of a student production of “The Crucible” at Fannin County High School in Blue Ridge Georgia was cut from two performances to one for reasons unknown. Understandably, the students and their parents were upset. The administration explained that the reason was a licensing agreement violation, and the school was afraid of having to pay damages, or something. It said in a statement,

“After Friday night’s performance of “The Crucible,” we received several complaints as to an unauthorized change in the script of the play. Upon investigation, we learned that the performance did not reflect the original script. These alterations were not approved by the licensing company or administration. The performance contract for The Crucible does not allow modifications without prior written approval. Failing to follow the proper licensing approval process for additions led to a breach in our contract with the play’s publisher. The infraction resulted in an automatic termination of the licensing agreement. The second performance of The Crucible could not occur because we were no longer covered by a copyright agreement.”

Ah, but woke theater Fury Howard Sherman, the same guy who thinks that it’s okay for actors to boycott performances they are contractually obligated to perform because they don’t like the political views of particular audience members (like, say, the President of the United States), is muckraking again. He writes on his website that he’s sure that the show was really cancelled because “the play about witch hunts, about the persecution of people out of hysteria, despite being an acknowledge American classic widely taught in high school classrooms and performed frequently on high school stages, had provoked the same moral persecution it portrayed as unjust.” See, somebody’s mother told a student that the principle had said “that somebody in the audience didn’t like the context of the play and said that it was demonic and disgusting” so the final performance was cancelled.

Does Sherman produce any evidence that isn’t double hearsay that such a sequence occurred? Nope. Do we hear a quote or see a message from the alleged illiterate lunatic who registered such a complaint? No again. But never mind: Sherman is a progressive (to be fair, most theater types are progressives…welcome to my world) with an agenda.

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Ethics Hero: Hugo Monteiro

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Who is Hugo? He’s a 31-year-old naturalized American citizen born in Brazil who was arrested outside Cambridge District Court in Medford, Massachusetts last week. Four plainclothes officers approached him as he was leaving the courthouse, escorted him to a Jeep Cherokee and placed him in handcuffs. ” I was calm because I knew I didn’t do anything wrong,” Monteiro said later. “They were just, like, telling me I was under arrest, that I was in trouble. I was confused.”

So were they, as it turned out. When the officers tried to confirm that they had arrested the the right person, they discovered their mistake. “I showed them my ID, my passport and my picture, and they confirmed that it was not me,” Hugo said. So the officers returned Monteiro to the courthouse. The whole episode took less than 20 minutes.

Hugo didn’t scream police brutality or run to the press to condemn “people being scooped off the street and disappeared.” He said that he knew the officers were “doing their job” and supported their efforts.

“Unfortunately, they called the wrong person, but I still support whatever they’re doing,” Monteiro said. “I voted for Trump. There are a lot of bad people in this country, to be honest with you, [who] don’t deserve to be here. No hard feelings,” he added.

Spoken like a good citizen.

And Now For Something Completely Stupid and Unethical Too: Carmel-By-The-Sea

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I’m not sure why I never learned that the little California municipality of Carmel-by-the-Sea in Monterey has an illegal and unethical law against high-heeled shoes, since my brain is stuffed with even more useless trivia. I know now, however, and my conviction that California is hopelessly estranged from U.S. values and principles has been reinforced (again).

In 1963 the city passed a law, recommended by a City Attorney who was evidently an idiot, requiring visitors to get an official permit in order to legally walk around the place in heels higher than two inches. You can read the local ordinance here. If one wants to walk around wearing heels over two inches in height and less than one square inch of bearing surface, a permit from the city hall is required. The permits are issued free of charge, with the name of the individual making the request and the signature of a city clerk.

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Unabomber Memorial Ethics Explosions, 5/15-18/25 (PS: I’m Not Dead, but Thanks Neil, Ryan, Jon et al. for Worrying About Me…)

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Yes, it is I.

My internet went out right before midnight on the 14th, which means my office and home phones also haven’t worked since then until just a little while ago. Neither did my streaming services. Verizon, which I switched back to in November because Comcast was unreliable and cost too much, put me through the usual customer service Hell before I reached what I thought was a competent human being. It took me almost a half an hour of arguing with Verizon’s “automated assistant” to get to said CHB, who immediately contradicted hiscyber-colleague by confirming that yes, there had been an “incident” in my area (the bot had denied it) and a crew was working on the outage. That was the supposedly the good news; the bad news was that I might be trapped in the Stone Age (okay, I’m exaggerating: that statement would go into the Washington Post’s Trump Lie Database if the President said it) until as late as 4:45 pm on the 15th.

But you didn’t read this post on the 15th, did you? That would be because 4:45 pm. came and went, and still I couldn’t communicate with the outside world. Meanwhile, clients were screaming, Ethics Alarms was languishing, “fish is jumpin’” and I was reduced to singing “Summertime” from “Porgy and Bess” for some reason. In a 52 minute phone call with Verizon in which I listened to a very polite, pleasant, customer service representative who spoke relatively clear pidgin English in a high-pitched voice (I couldn’t place the accent), I discovered that the company couldn’t send a technician to my house until Friday afternoon. Next, my phone stopped receiving signals too, so I couldn’t even keep up with comments.

A very nice technician showed up at 1:30 pm and was fooling around with things for an hour. He replaced “the box” and then told me that he had been informed that the problem couldn’t be resolved by him, and that his supervisor told him to tell me that the outage wouldn’t be corrected until 6:45 am yesterday, Saturday the 17th. It wasn’t. Verizon promised to have another technician come by between 11am and 3pm on Sunday. That actually came to pass, and it turned out the previous technician had inserted the wrong thingy in the wrong plug, or something.

Ol’ Crazy Ted, the Harvard grad terrorist, has again been proven right: it’s ridiculous what I (you, we) can’t do without key technology, and one of them is maintaining an ethics blog.

Well, I still could prepare a post on Word and have it ready to go up when civilization reappears, so that’s what I started to do Friday morning and am revising now, as I try to forget that I have God only knows (I switched to singing the Beach Boys because I can’t remember all the words to “Summertime” right now) how many emails to answer that I haven’t seen yet. I don’t have email on my cell phone, you see, because I tell my ethics classes that the less confidential, client-related stuff you have on your phone, the better.

Meanwhile,

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Ethics Dunces: “More Than 150 Former State and Federal Judges”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

One aspect of the legal community that has become (disturbingly) clear to me since I entered the weird field of legal ethics full time about 25 years ago is that judges stick together even when it is obviously unethical to do so. I don’t know why this is so—lawyers certainly don’t have this proclivity—but it doesn’t matter why judges close ranks and circle their metaphorical wagons any time one of them is being held accountable for unethical conduct. It matters that it is unethical, and they know it. But in these situations they are like cops erecting the “blue line.”

I have written about the case of a lawyer in Seattle, Washington whose client revealed to him that a state judge was accepting bribes. The lawyer felt it was his duty to report the judge to authorities (especially after the judge ruled against another client after one such bribe), and indeed the judge, who was corrupt, ended up being removed from the bench and prosecuted. But the colleagues of that judge made sure that the lawyer was disbarred, because the evidence he had acted upon was a client confidence. The message sent by the action, however, was clear: don’t mess with judges, even the crooked ones.

I recalled that ugly episode when I read that “More than 150 former state and federal judges have signed a letter to Pam Bondi, the attorney general, condemning the Trump administration’s escalating battles with the judiciary and calling the recent arrest of a sitting state court judge in Milwaukee an attempt to intimidate.” That was the Times version; most news sources just emphasized the last part: How dare the Trump administration arrest a judge?

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Yes, My Conservative Facebook Friends Can Be Just As Irrational As the Progressives…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

A usually wise and measured conservative Facebook friend posted with approval a tweet by conservative pundit Matt Walsh, complaining about the father of a 15-year-old school shooter who killed two people and injured six others being charged after the tragedy. The killings (the girl shot herself as well, and died) occurred at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, in December.

“Let’s just be honest about the pattern here,” Walsh wrote. “This is the third time that a parent has been charged for violence committed by their child. In every case, the parent has been white. There is violence committed in the streets of every major city every single day. You could blame the crappy, neglectful parents in literally all of those cases. And yet none of them have ever been charged.”

Wow, talk about the wrong hill to die on! Both of those other cases involved criminally negligent parents, and the father of the late shooter in Wisconsin may have been the worst of the three.

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So….the Cardinals Couldn’t Find a Pope Who WASN’T Part of the Predator Priest Scandal? [UPDATED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Good to know, don’t you think?

I’m stunned that Robert Prevost, who just became became the American pontiff, had been accused by Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) of failing to act upon allegations of abuse in the U.S. and Peru. The group says that Prevost ignored allegations of sexual abuse by predator priests in Chicago after Augustinian priest Father James Ray was allowed to live at the St. John Stone Friary in Hyde Park despite being removed from ministering to the public over credible evidence that he had sexually abusing children. SNAP says Provost didn’t notify the heads of St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic school, an elementary school half a block from the friary on the grounds that Ray was being “closely monitored.”

You know, like the Church closely monitored all of its priests to make sure they weren’t molesting altar boys.

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Bleeding Heart Test: Who Feels Sorry For These “Good Illegal Immigrants”? (I Don’t.)

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

The New York Post has a tale that is guaranteed to make “Think of the Children!” fans and “They just want a better life!” defenders of illegal immigration swim in a lake of tears like shrunken Alice in “Alice in Wonderland.”

Ximena Arias-Cristobal, 19, was a Dalton State Community College ( in Dalton, Georgia) student driving without a driver’s license when she failed to obey to a “no turn on red” sign. After police pulled her vehicle over, she claimed to have an “international driver’s license” (Nice try, kid!). One thing led to another, and eventually it was determined that she was not a citizen, having been brought here illegally by her Mexican parents when she was four, that they were here illegally too and had been for 15 years.

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