Law & Law Enforcement

A Horror Story From The Law vs. Ethics Files: The Mario Hernandez Saga [UPDATED and BACKDATED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments
Mr. Hernandez? Mr. Unger would like a word with you...

Mr. Hernandez? Mr. Unger would like a word with you…

This is complicated.

Occasionally a trusted source sends me to a link or a news item that turns out to be old, sometimes many years old. I assume it is current (I need to learn to check the dates), write the post, and then find out that what I wrote about took place in 1978. I usually trash the post. There have been a few like this. Now this story came to me from a trusted source, and linked to a current story, or so I thought. The post, on a site called “America Now,” is dated August 25, 2016. But WordPress pointed out, right at the bottom, that I had in fact written about Mario Hernandez’s citizenship problems two years ago. What? For a second I thought there were TWO Marios (Mario brothers?), who had the same problem, but no, they are the same guy.

The story  I was given today, based on this New York Times story from May of 2014, led to the post below. There is an ending to the story, which was explicated by me in the post of two years ago. However my two posts were on two different ethics issues, and today’s though inspired by a stale story, is still ethically useful. Pretend Mario plight isn’t two years old: that doesn’t alter the principles involved, or my analysis. I’ll tell you what happened at the end of the post..

***

Continue reading →

France’s Unethical—And Really, Really Stupid— “Burkini” Ban

/ Jack Marshall / 104 Comments

burkinis

I’ve received several inquiries requesting an  Ethics Alarms analysis of the current controversy roiling France, namely the so-called Burkini Ban.  Muslim women had been wading into the French Riviera surf wearing “burkinis,”  body-covering swimsuits designed to be compliant with the Islamic faith , and one resort  town after another, fifteen in all including Cannes and Nice, declared them illegal. The women entering the water wearing such attire have been ticketed for not “wearing an outfit respecting good morals and secularism.”

Well, I try not to spend much time here writing about the obvious. The ban is unethical. In the U.S., such laws would be over-turned before the arrested women’s bathing suits were dry, since the meaures violate both the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. It should be obvious that the ban is unfair, as it is sexist, directed against one religion, and makes no sense whatsoever.

Sometimes I wonder if the French quite get this ethics thing. This is an example.

Both conservatives and many liberals in France support the ban. The conservatives, in addition to wanting to punish Muslims for recent Islamic terrorist attacks, claim  to be upholding France’s core principle of “secularity,” enshrined in the nation’s constitution. Liberals argue that the Islamic strictures against women exposing any part of their bodies in public are misogynist, patriarchal, and “regressive,” so the bans defend the rights of women…by preventing women from wearing what they choose to, observing their own religion, and taking a swim.

You see what I mean about not quite grasping the whole “ethics” thing? The equivalent argument in the U.S. would be if feminists argued that sexy bathing suits be banned because they objectified women, even when the women wearing them felt like being objectified. The Burkini Ban is, to be blunt, idiotic. Continue reading →

Stupid Cops Matter

/ Jack Marshall / 72 Comments
Perfect match.

Perfect match.

In a case where Hanlon’s Razor (“Never assume malice is the explanation if stupidity will suffice”) applies but one can’t really blame a mother for thinking otherwise, police in Newark  inexplicably mistook an innocent pre-teen black boy for an adult robbery suspect and chased him through a Newark neighborhood with guns drawn. This is stupidity, not racism. Well, who knows: there could be racism mixed in there too, but what jumps out is the jaw-dropping incompetence.

Legend Preston, just ten years old, was fetching a basketball that had rolled into the street when he looked up and saw armed cops running towards him as if they meant business. So he ran.

“I was scared for my life,” Legend told reporters. “I was thinking that they were going to shoot me.” Good thinking, kid. If these cope were inept enough to get a ten-year-old  confused with Casey Joseph Robinson, a 20-year-old, dreadlocks-sporting perp with facial hair (he was arrested in the next block), who knows what they might do?

Legend was quickly surrounded by neighbors  who emphatically pointed out to the police that they were chasing a child, as the officers stammered that he “fit the description” of the criminal. Well, sort of. Okay, okay, now that we’re up close, we see that he’s under five feet tall, dressed like a kid, doesn’t have dreadlocks or facial hair, and looks nothing like the guy, except that he’s black, which means we also could also mistake him for Bill Cosby, Jesse Jackson, Morgan Freeman, or LeBron James. Continue reading →

From James Carville, The Epitome Of The Saint’s Excuse

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments
Now, you might think I'm violating my promise not to use unattractive photos of unethical people to make them look bad, but I'm not. James Carville looks like snake no matter what photo you use. Condign justice.

Now, you might think I’m violating my promise not to use unattractive photos of unethical people to make them look bad, but I’m not. James Carville looks like a snake no matter what photo you use. Condign justice.

Veteran Clinton hired minion (I think that’s fair) James Carville’s reaction to the latest news about how Hillary used the State Department to reward Clinton Foundation donors (that’s a fair description too, and illegal) is wonderful in its way, as it comes as close to a perfect example of one of the most sinister and historically destructive rationalizations on the list, the Saint’s Excuse, as one is likely to see in a lifetime. It’s also useful, because if you find yourself finding his logic persuasive, then you are as devoid of ethics as James Carville is.

Trust me: you don’t want that.

[For various views on the emerging proof that, as honest journalists and analysts concluded many months ago, Hillary traded State favors for cash that went to Clinton Foundation initiatives and, incidentally, into her family members’ bank accounts, see these links: Fox News, Guardian, New York Times, Lawyers, Guns & Money, Washington Monthly, Washington Times,Politico, Power Line, Associated Press,  Mediaite, BizPac Review and the Wall Street Journal]

 Carville said this morning on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that if the Clinton Foundation had decided not to accept foreign donations while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State —as the Obama Administration swore to Congress that it would not do, as government ethics rules and laws forbade it to do, and as anyone with the tiniest understanding of conflicts of interest knows it could not do,

“…you’d be out hundreds of millions of dollars that are doing good. What the Clinton Foundation does, it takes money from rich people and gives it to poor people. Most people think that’s a pretty good idea.”

Most people? If so, those “most people” are also the ones who are completely ignorant of what corruption is, and exactly the kind of people that Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Carville, happily recruit to prey upon the rest of us. Continue reading →

Hillary Gets Caught In A (nother) Whopper

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments
Why yes, this IS the thanks you get, General!

Why yes, this IS the thanks you get, General!

From the New York Times (Aug. 18):

Pressed by the F.B.I. about her email practices at the State Department, Hillary Clinton told investigators that former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had advised her to use a personal email account.The account is included in the notes the Federal Bureau of Investigation handed over to Congress on Tuesday, relaying in detail the three-and-a-half-hour interview with Mrs. Clinton in early July that led to the decision by James B. Comey, the bureau’s director, not to pursue criminal charges against her.

From Page Six:

Colin Powell has broken his silence about his alleged involvement in the Hillary Clinton email scandal, saying her team is falsely trying to blame him.When asked by the FBI about her email use at the State Department, Clinton reportedly told investigators that former Secretary of State Powell had advised her to use a personal email account at a private dinner. But Powell, who had said last week in a statement that he had no recollection of the conversation, told Page Six at Saturday’s Apollo in the Hamptons event, “The truth is she was using it (her personal email) for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did [during my term as secretary of state]. “Her people have been trying to pin it on me.”

When asked why Clinton’s team were attempting to blame him, he responded, “Why do you think?”

Conclusion: Hillary Clinton lied to the F.B.I.

Ethics musings: Continue reading →

Wait…WHAT? What Are You Implying, CNN?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

CNN tweet

 

So let me get this straight: Donald Trump is a fool for trying to court black voters without understanding that they equate themselves with felons? Really sensitive people like journalists realize that “blacks” and “felons” are synonymous?

Boy, this racism thing is a lot more complicated than I thought…

File this one under: “Bias makes you stupid,” and I’m not referring to Donald Trump

_______________________

Pointer: Instapundit

A Plague Of Misleading Headlines

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Fake headline

The mad quest for clicks appears to be leading websites that should know better to sink to misleading or outright dishonest headlines on the web. For someone like me, who has to scan these looking for possible ethics issues, it is an increasingly annoying phenomenon. Readers need to speak up. The practice is unethical, and moreover, suggests that the source itself isn’t trustworthy.

Here are three current examples;

1. The Daily Beast: “Idiocracy’ Director Mike Judge: Fox Killed Our Anti-Trump Camacho Ads”

Boy, isn’t it just like that conservative, Trump-promoting Faux News to help The Donald by using its power, influence, lawyers, something to stop the makers of “Idiocracy,” that comic classic, from being used to save the country from American Hitler?

That’s sure how the Daily Beast wanted its largely Democratic readership to react to its headline over the story about a fizzled effort to use the the film’s character  of ex-porn star future U.S. President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Drew Herbert Camacho, played by Terry Crews, in a series of comic spots ridiculing Trump’s candidacy. The story, however, never quotes Judge as saying Fox—that would be the movie side of Twentieth Century Fox, not Fox News, which had no say in the matter: the company produced the film and owns the right to it and all of its characters—killed the project.  All Judge says is that the idea of doing a series of such ads didn’t come to fruition, for a whole list of reasons which might have included Fox’s distaste for the project.. Of  Fox, he says this..

“I think also Fox… yeah, they… even though they’ve probably forgotten they still own it…”

The writer then suggests that company owner Rupert Murdoch might not like the idea, and thus prompted, Judge replies,

“Yeah. That’s the other thing. I think there was a roadblock there, too…I just heard that [the proposed ads] were put on the shelf, so it looks like they’re not going to happen.”

Based on this, the author, typical Daily Beast hack Marlow Stern, writes, “It looks like Fox refused—and the ads are now dead.” Stern never says that Fox refused; it is the “reporter” who says it. Meanwhile, when the Daily Beast writes about “Fox,” it is referring to Fox News 99.9% of the time, and knows that’s what its readers will think when they read “Fox.”

The headline is intentionally misleading, and a lie.

(Incidentally, the movie is a great concept that under-delivers on its premise and potential, and should be a lot funnier than it is) Continue reading →

From The Ethics Alarms Mail Bag: “Does It Matter If A Lawyer Is A Neo-Nazi?”

/ Jack Marshall / 70 Comments
"Anyone who would hire this lawyer is evil! EVIL!!!"

“Anyone who would hire this lawyer is evil! EVIL!!!”

“…What if he’s hired for a government job?”

This is a great question, and I’m going to bedevil the lawyers in my upcoming ethics seminars with it. It’s not a hard question, though.

The answer is, “No, it doesn’t matter, just as it doesn’t matter if the lawyer is a Republican, a vegan, a libertarian, a creationist, a global warming denier, an Adam Sandler fan, a Donald Trump loyalist, a Muslim, an ISIS sympathizer, a Druid, a Celine Dion worshiper, a New York Yankee fan or anything else. Lawyers have First Amendment rights. Lawyers can think what they want to, believe what they want to, donate where they want to and spout whatever unpopular or offensive opinions they want to, as long as it doesn’t interfere with their representation of their clients.

What prompted the question was this post on the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) website, which attempts to use guilt by association and classic McCarthyism tactics to smear the City of Baltimore because of what the lawyer defending it in a law suit believes. The SPLC—which itself often resembles a hate group–writes, Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Wonkette Writer Rebecca Schoenkopf

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

juanita

I can absolutely see Bill Clinton doing this (then, not now) and not even thinking of it as rape, but thinking of it as dominant, alpha sex. I can see a LOT of men doing that during that time period, before we started telling them in the ’80s, “hey, that is rape, do not do that.” I can see YOUR NICE GRANDPA doing that, back then…I think good men can rape, and be sorry, and not do it again. This is very bad feminism…To sum up, I think Bill Clinton could very well have raped Juanita Broaddrick; that it doesn’t make him an evil man, or irredeemable (I’m Catholic; we’re all forgiven, if we’re sorry, and Broaddrick says Bill Clinton personally called her up to apologize). It doesn’t even necessarily make him a bad feminist — you know, later, once he stops doing that.

   —Rebecca Schoenkopf, writing in the progressive blog Wonkette, talking about Juanita Brodderick’s rape accusation against Bill Clinton

Broaddrick’s claims are back in the news, now that it was noticed that the Hillary Clinton website quietly pulled its statement about the victims of sexual assault having “the right to be believed,” Clinton’s jaw-dropping assertion—given her despicable role in silencing and discrediting Bill’s various victims—that Ethics Alarms discussed when it was first made.

I awoke to multiple rightish blogs, and Ann Althouse, who is dead center, going bonkers over this piece, and rightly so. My initial query is, why only right wing and moderate blogs? Is the left this corrupted by Bill and Hillary? (Okay, that’s rhetorical: the answer is “Damn right they are.”) When did it become progressive to argue that “good men can rape”?

I thought that was a misogynist pig position scrawled on the walls of a troglodyte’s cave.

Good men do NOT rape. Ever. Rape—do I really need to say this?—is signature significance. It was in the 80s, it was in the 60s, it has always been. If you rape (and if you defend rape), you’re not good, you’re not ethical, and you’re not trustworthy. And–do I really have to say THIS?–you’re not just a bad feminist, you’re a phony feminist. (By the by way, you gotcha-masters out there: I am not saying that there is anything wrong with a lawyer defending an accused rapist, like Hillary Clinton did. That is not defending rape itself.)

So why aren’t the indignant, politically correct, feminist, war-on-women-deriding left-leaning web sites, commentators and bloggers collectively retching at the Wonkette post? Explain that to me, someone. Explain why it isn’t evidence that integrity hasn’t died in their skulls, and is stinking up their ethics like a dead rat under the floor-boards. Continue reading →

Was It Ethical For Donald Trump’s Former Lawyer To Trash Him In The Huffington Post?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Backstabbed

That’s an easy question.

The answer is maybe, and no.

A couple of weeks ago, a real estate lawyer named Thomas M. Wells provoked a lively debate in the legal ethics community when he authored a Huffington Post piece titled “Donald Trump Hired Me As An Attorney. Please Don’t Support Him For President.” I’m proud to say that I flagged the issue for my colleagues first, in part because they unanimously detest Trump, even the tiny minority who aren’t full-blooded Democrats or progressives, and may have been blinded by that bias.

For me, the issue was crystallized by the headline. Wells’ headline (it doesn’t matter if it was really his or the site’s: as a lawyer, he is obligated to make sure that his article doesn’t breach legal ethics rules and principles, and the headline is part of his article) suggested that he had some special knowledge and authority regarding Trump because of what he had learned while representing him decades ago. The ethics rules prohibit lawyers from revealing client confidences, which are usually defined as what a lawyer learns about a client during the course of a representation that the client would not obviously want revealed to the world. Confidences can be revealed by actions, as well as words, and the headline comes very, very close to saying “I know things you don’t about Donald Trump because of what learned when I was his trusted lawyer.” What follows from that may be  a reader’s conclusion that the post reflects secret information. Thus the headline made my legal ethics alarms sound.

Wells has the same right as you or I to register a public opinion about his former (or current, for that matter ) client, as long as the opinion doesn’t interfere with his representation. Lawyers do not give up free speech right by being lawyers. That’s where the “maybe” comes from. There is strong disagreement in the profession about whether the answer to “Is this unethical?” should be an outright yes. The status of loyalty among the legal ethics values hierarchy is as hotly contested now as it ever has been. If a lawyer wants to attack a former client in a matter unrelated to the representation and no confidences are revealed in the process, is that a legal ethics breach? If it is, it would be a very tough one to prosecute. I think it’s a general ethics breach, as in wrong and unprofessional. It is disloyal, and clients should be able to trust their lawyers not to come back years later, after a client let the lawyer see all of his or her warts, and say, “This guy’s an asshole.” It undermines the strength of the public’s trust in the profession. Continue reading →