Law & Law Enforcement

Regarding Biden’s Mass Mercy For Convicted Murderers

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

As was anticipated after reports that were issued over the weekend, “President Joe Biden announced” today that he has commuted the sentences of 37 convicted murderers, thus taking them off federal death row. They will now serve out life sentences in prison, being housed, fed, given medical attention and more at taxpayer expense. This was done deliberately to foil the announced intention of President-elect Donald Trump to carry out the verdicts of juries and the courts.

“Biden’s statement”—this is in quotation marks because he didn’t write it, probably doesn’t understand it and quite possibly never read it or approved it—reads,

“Today, I am commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on federal death row to life sentences without the possibility of parole. These commutations are consistent with the moratorium my Administration has imposed on federal executions, in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss. But guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Vice President, and now President, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level. In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”

Ethics observations:

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When Your Trump-Deranged, Slowly Metamorphosing Into Full Leftist Totalitarian Friends and Relatives Deny What Their “Movement” Has Become, Waive This In Their Smug, Red, Contorted Faces…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This must stop, here, there, and everywhere.

As frequent readers here know, Ethics Alarms has been referring to the Axis of Unethical Conduct (an Ethics Alarms term, and a fair one) as a totalitarianism-leaning, anti-American phenomenon for years now, as I have tracked the frightening progress on the 2016 Ethics Train Wreck and all of its many offshoots. I have used made this point frequently and, I recognize, emphatically to the point that many object to those and related labels as inflammatory and biased, which they are not because my assessment is objective and accurate. I could also say, with justification, “If the show fits, wear it,” and even “If the shoe fits wear it, you assholes.”

Today I was sent promotional spam by my old hometown newspaper, the lone surviving conservative #2 paper in Boston (The Dominating Axis representative is the always Democratic Boston Globe) after the slow amalgam of four newspapers with long histories of service to the people of New England: The Boston Herald, the Boston Traveler, the Boston Record and the Boston American. That headline above was all I needed to spark a head explosion with several subsequent explosions that left bits of brain and bone on my keyboard and computer screen after I read the entire report.

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The Liz Cheney Ethics Zugswang Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Now this is an ethics conflict.

It is increasingly clear that former Congresswoman Liz Cheney broke the law as well as several ethics rules while doing her utmost to incriminate President Trump during the all-Democrat/ Never-Trump Republican J-6 committee star chamber orchestrated by Nancy Pelosi. It is wrong to break the law. It is especially wrong to break the law when you are an elected official and law-maker. Such officials should not only be held to a higher standard, but should be role models for the public that elected them. It follows, then, that when they break the law—it seems that Cheney participated in the destruction of evidence as well as coaching a witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, to lie under oath while unethically meeting with her, a represented witness, without her lawyer being present—they should be treated like anyone else who breaks the law.

If elected officials are not prosecuted and held to account when they violate the law, it is the worst manifestation of the King’s Pass, the insidious and pervasive rationalization (#11 on the list) in which individuals who are famous, popular, powerful, accomplished, productive or successful are allowed to escape the earned consequences of their own misconduct when a less powerful or popular individual would face the full penalties of the law. Such episodes seriously erode public trust in our legal system and power structure. The cliche is “No one is above the law,” but except for the case of indisputable bribery or violent felonies, elected officials are seldom prosecuted, and sometimes not even for those crimes.

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A Federal Judge Gets Benchslapped For An Unethical Times Column

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

On May 24, 2024, while Supreme Court Justice Jackson was dreaming of playing “Medea,” The New York Times published an op-ed entitled, “A Federal Judge Wonders: How Could Alito Have Been So Foolish?” by Senior Judge Michael A. Ponsor of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts.  Judge Ponsor addressed the flying of an upside-down American flag and the “Appeal to Heaven” flags outside homes owned by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a controversy covered thoroughly on Ethics Alarms.

The ethics verdict here was that the controversy was contrived, and that the attack on Alito was politically motivated, biased, and wrong. Judge Ponsor, however, opined that “any judge with reasonable ethical instincts would have” recognized that the flag displays were improper because they could be perceived as “a banner of allegiance on partisan issues that are or could be before the court.”

Let me inject here, “Sure, by an idiot!” “The appearance of impropriety is a reason-based standard. “Hey, this SCOTUS judge’s wife flew the same flag that began the HBO John Adams series: that must mean that her husband is in the bag for President Trump!” is not a reasonable perception.

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On the ABC $16 Million Libel Settlement

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

ABC News agreed last week to pay $16 million to settle Donald Trump’s libel case over George Stephanopoulos’s “This Week” broadcast in March, in which he repeatedly said, while interviewing Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace, that Donald Trump had been “found liable for rape.” He had, in fact, been found liable for sexual assault but not rape, and this had been well-publicized at the time.

Trump sued ABC, and I assumed it was a nuisance suit made for effect rather than in expectation of winning. In fact, I regarded it as this close to being frivolous. That it wasn’t was proven by the settlement.

News media fans (I am not one) and journalism advocates are apoplectic over the settlement, believing that it weakens the “power of the press” to distort, lie and manipulate public opinion as the news media has been doing increasingly and shamelessly in one direction on the ideological scale for more than two decades. Good. The news media is careless, reckless, arrogant and unprofessional, as well as unaccountable. If the ABC defeat makes them a little bit more wary and careful to be sure of their facts, it is to everyone’s benefit, including journalists.

It couldn’t have happened to a better target than Stephanopoulos. He is a partisan hack, and never should have been allowed to pretend to be a journalist after serving as one of Bill Clinton’s henchmen. The Times v. Sullivan case requires that a journalist must demonstrate actual malice toward a public figure before a defamation suit gets past the First Amendment, and in most cases miscreants like George are saved by their own incompetence. I was certain that he would be saved this time— ah, rape, sexual assault, tomato-tomahto, who cares, what’s the difference. Of course, everyone knows except maybe Ethics Alarms vigilante press defender “A Friend” that Stephanopoulos and about 90% of his colleagues are hostile to Donald Trump, but general antipathy is usually not enough to show malice.

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Justice Jackson’s Broadway Adventure: Double Ethics Standards…Again

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“Here come de judge!”

Above are some examples of SCOTUS Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson making a spectacle of herself in her Broadway turn last weekend in the musical “& Juliet,” a LGBTQ adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet.” Jackson portrayed Queen Mab, described as a “she/her” character on a production poster, in two scenes written especially for her. “I just also think it’s very important to remind people that justices are human beings, that we have dreams, and that we are public servants,” Jackson told“CBS Mornings” prior to the performance. One of her dreams was apparently to be an actress, long ago. (She made the right choice going into law.)

Except that judges, and especially Supreme Court justices, don’t have the option of doing whatever they feel like or dream about, as least if they are conservative justices. All of the criticism of the Roberts Court in the past few years has been over alleged ethical violations by the Justices making up the 6-3 conservative majority. The Justices appointed by Democrats Obama and Biden are, of course, as pure as Ivory Soap. And yet…

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Vanity Plate Ethics, 2024 Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It looks like this is going to be one of those topics that I have to revisit every couple of years or so. In 2018, Ethics Alarms challenged the ethics of a state denying permission for drivers to have whatever vanity plates on their cars that their egos, senses of humor, or general sophomorishness dictated. Then I wrote,

“Utah, for examples, bans vanity plates with profanity, “derogatory language,”  drug references,  sex talk, references to bodily functions, “hate speech,” targeting a particular group, or advocating violence advocates, as well as alcohol references and the number combo “69.” Ethics verdict: None of their business. These are words and numbers, and the state is declaring content and intent impermissible. When I see a car with an obnoxious vanity plate, I’m grateful. This is useful information. Racist or vulgar plates translate into ‘I am an asshole, and want you to know it!'”

The issue came up again in 2022. Illinois, in its infinite wisdom, had banned plates reading HATER, COVID, BYOB, and, perhaps on the theory that it meant “drooling basket case,” BIDEN. This time, it is that bastion of free speech repression (one way or another), California, that has decided certain combinations of numbers and letters should be censored as too painful for human beings to bear. The plate was issued and read LOLOCT7. I’ll give you a minute to figure out what the alleged offense was…

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At the University of Michigan, A Controversy Reveals Dishonesty and Hypocrisy Underlying the DEI Fad

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

If Donald Trump accomplishes nothing more in his next four years than ending the nation’s tolerance to open borders while fawning over “good illegal immigrants” and driving a metaphorical stake through The Great Stupid’s DEI fad, electing him will have been worth all chaos that will come along with it.

DEI thrives as a hypocritical way to discriminate against white men and shift to a society based on rewarding achievement, diligence and ability to one based on group membership. That makes it un-American to the core. At the University of Michigan, the “director of the university’s office of academic multicultural initiatives”—you know, DEI—spoke out at a conference of such officers the university to opine that her university was “controlled by wealthy Jews and that because Jewish students are “wealthy and privileged” the don’t need diversity services. “Jewish people have no genetic DNA that would connect them to the land of Israel,” Rachel Dawson was quoted as saying.

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To Defenders of the Biased Mainstream Media: Ethics Alarms Challenges You to Find An Innocent Explanation For Why the NYT and WaPo Don’t Regard This Story As News [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Heck, even CNN reported it (but not MSNBC). Crystal Mangum, the exotic dancer who in 2006 accused three Duke lacrosse players of rape launching an ethics train wreck that ended up costing the city of Durham damages, derailed the academic careers of the three students, got the lacrosse team coach fired, and resulted in a rare instance of a prosecutor being disbarred, finally admitted what everyone should have figured out by now.

“I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t, and that was wrong. And I betrayed the trust of a lot of other people who believed in me,” Mangum announced on the podcast “Let’s Talk with Kat.” “I made up a story that wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God.”

Oh.

What?

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files:

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The New York Post reports that wanted posters targeting CEOs of insurance and other health care companies are appearing in Manhattan. Some say “HEALTH CARE CEOS SHOULD NOT FEEL SAFE” and include the words “DENY,” “DEFEND,” and “DEPOSE,” which are the same words that the cute assassin who shot UnitedHealthcare’s CEO wrote on his bullets. The posters also feature each executive’s salary, and some have appeared with the photos of CEOs of non-health care companies, like Goldman Sachs. ABC reports some posters say “UnitedHealthcare killed everyday people for the sake of profit. As a result Brian Thompson was denied his claim to life. Who will be denied next?”

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