To get to the main point right up front: I believe that the gag order Judge Juan Merchan has imposed on Donald Trump during the contrived “hush money” trial is election interference to the core, and unconstitutional when applied to a Presidential candidate in an election year. The ACLU l declared another judge’s gag order on Trump as unconstitutional last fall, and you know what it takes to make the ACLU side with the “bad guys” in the 21st Century. Nonetheless, I believe any and all gag orders that could be enforced on Trump would benefit the nation, Trump supporters and Donald Trump himself.
If he could just keep his big trap shut and stop the ALL CAPS Truth Social posts he would breeze to victory. The man has no filters, wretched judgment, and the mastery of the English language of a Brooklyn street urchin on the autism spectrum. Who knows what he’ll say between now and November that will be either misreported as an admission of evil intent, or will in fact be so awful that it loses him millions of votes overnight? Continue reading →
Several things led me to re-posting this Ethics Alarms entry from 2017.
First of all, the MLB network showed a documentary on the career of George Brett today, and scene above, with Brett erupting in fury at the umpire’s call voiding his clutch, 9th inning home run, is one of the classic recorded moments in baseball history. There was also a recent baseball ethics event that had reminded me of Brett’s meltdown: Yankees manager Aaron Boone was thrown out of a game because a fan behind the Yankees dugout yelled an insult at the home plate umpire, and the umpire ejected Boone thinking the comments came from him.. When Boone vigorously protested that he hadn’t said anything and that it was the fan,Umpire Hunter Wendelstedt said, “I don’t care who said it. You’re gone!”
Wait, what? How can he not care if he’s punishing the wrong guy?
“What do you mean you don’t care?” Boone screamed rushing onto the field a la Brett. “I did not say a word. It was up above our dugout. Bullshit! Bullshit! I didn’t say anything. I did not say anything, Hunter. I did not say a fucking thing!” This erudite exchange was picked up by the field mics.
There was another baseball ethics development this week as well, one involving baseball lore and another controversial home run. On June 9, 1946, Ted Williams hit a ball that traveled a reported 502 feet, the longest he ever hit, and one of the longest anyone has hit. The seat was was painted red in 1984 (I’ve sat in it!), and many players have opined over the years that the story and the seat are hogwash, a lie. This report, assembling new data about the controversy, arrives at an amazing conclusion: the home run probably traveled farther than 502 feet.
But I digress. Here, lightly edited and updated, is the ethics analysis of the famous pine tar game and its aftermath:
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I have come to believe that the lesson learned from the pine tar incident is increasingly the wrong one, and the consequences of this extend well beyond baseball.
On July 24, 1983, the Kansas City Royals were battling the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium. With two outs and a runner on first in the top of the ninth inning, Royals third baseman George Brett hit a two-run home run off Yankee closer Goose Gossage to give his team a 5-4 lead. Yankee manager Billy Martin, however, had been waiting like a spider for this moment.
Long ago, he had noticed that perennial batting champ Brett used a bat that had pine tar (used to allow a batter to grip the bat better) on the handle beyond what the rules allowed. MLB Rule 1.10(c) states: “The bat handle, for not more than 18 inches from the end, may be covered or treated with any material or substance to improve the grip. Any such material or substance, which extends past the 18-inch limitation, shall cause the bat to be removed from the game.” At the time, such a hit was defined in the rules as an illegally batted ball, and the penalty for hitting “an illegally batted ball” was that the batter was to be declared out, under the explicit terms of the then-existing provisions of Rule 6.06.
That made Brett’s bat illegal, and any hit made using the bat an out. But Billy Martin, being diabolical as well as a ruthless competitor, didn’t want the bat to cause just any out. He had waited for a hit that would make the difference between victory or defeat for his team, and finally, at long last, this was it. Martin came out of the dugout carrying a rule book, and arguing that the home run shouldn’t count. After examining the rules and the bat, home-plate umpire Tim McLelland ruled that Brett used indeed used excessive pine tar and called him out, overturning the home run and ending the game.
Brett’s resulting charge from the dugout (above) is video for the ages. Continue reading →
Thinking about that last post and the issues it raises as I was walking Spuds in the rain just now took me to an epiphany, and an embarrassingly late one.
Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon was more important and crucial than I realized then. It was only one gutsy and maybe prescient act in an otherwise short and undistinguished Presidency, but it delayed the current crisis for half a century.
The conventional wisdom is that Nixon would have been prosecuted for his Watergate involvement, and that the event would have been a divisive and traumatic spectacle that a nation just getting past the Vietnam debacle could ill afford. That wasn’t what was going to happen, though, I now realize. (And I have never read or heard anyone acknowledge this.)
Had he been charged with any crime, Nixon would have immediately claimed immunity just as Trump is now. For the rest of his life, Nixon routinely said that “if the President does it, it’s not illegal.” What would the Supreme Court have ruled in 1975? Here is the Court then:
Chief Justice Warren Burger William J. Brennan Potter Stewart Byron White Thurgood Marshall Harry Blackmun Lewis F. Powell William H. Rehnquist
The only two reliable liberals on the Court were Marshall and Brennan, but the conservatives were more moderate and less doctrinaire than today’s SCOTUS majority. I have no idea what that group would have done with the immunity issue, and I’m glad we didn’t have to find out.
The New York Court of Appeals overturned the felony sex crimes conviction of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein yesterday. The 4-to-3 decision held that the trial judge deprived him of his right to a fair trial in 2020 when he allowed prosecutors to call witnesses who said Weinstein had sexually assaulted them despite the assaults having never been charged as crimes or proven to have occurred. Using allegations of past bad acts to prove guilt in a criminal trial is generally forbidden in New York and other U.S. jurisdictions with limited exceptions. Since Harvey is already serving a prison sentence for another set of crimes that will keep him locked away until he is almost 90, the decision is more symbolic than useful to Weinstein. But it still needed to be made.
Pikesville High School’s athletic director Dazhon Darien was arrested yesterday after an investigation revealed that he used AI technology to created the fake audio clip above of the school’s principal, Eric Eiswert, ranting about black students and Jews. Darien, who is black, has been charged with disrupting school activities: of course the audio clip using the principal’s voice “went viral”and Eiswert, who is white, was widely condemned by the Baltimore County community. The school had to add police personnel for security and additional counselors. Here is a typical reaction to the clip:
Darien has also charged been charged with theft, retaliating against a witness and stalking. Good.
The Dexter Taylor case raises interesting Second Amendment issues to be sure.
A New York jury found Taylor guilty of second-degree criminal possession of a loaded weapon, four counts of third-degree criminal possession of a weapon, five counts of criminal possession of a firearm, second-degree criminal possession of five or more firearms, unlawful possession of pistol ammunition, violation of certificate of registration, prohibition on unfinished frames or receivers. Now Taylor, a 52-year-old African-American software engineer, is on Rikers Island waiting to be sentenced. He became interested in gunsmithing as a hobby years ago, but a joint ATF/NYPD task force discovered he was legally buying gun parts from various companies and began investigating him, leading to a SWAT raid and his arrest. His legal team explains his side of the case here.
That’s not the focus of this post, however. This is: during his trial, Judge Abena Darkehallegedly said at one point, “Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York.” Darkeh was appointed by New York City’s crypto-communist Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2015.
A report released last week by Reprieve, a human rights group that opposes the death penalty apparently shows that the lethal injections of convicted murderers are botched more than twice as often as the executions of white convicts. Spinning, the New York Times says, “That finding builds on a wealth of research into racial disparities in how the U.S. judicial system administers the death penalty. The proportion of Black people on death rows is far higher than their share of the population as a whole.”
“We know that there’s racism in the criminal justice system,” said Maya Foa, an executive director of Reprieve. “We know it’s there in the capital punishment system, from who gets arrested, who gets sentenced, all of it. This is, though, the first time that it’s been looked at in the context of the execution itself.”
To start with, they don’t “know” that at all. It is a self-perpetuating theory built on other debatable assumptions, such as believing that the disproportionate number of blacks on Death Row, and in the U.S. prison system generally, is because a disproportionate number of blacks commit crimes that legitimately put them there. Second, how exactly does doing a bad job killing a condemned prisoner show racial bias?
The almost unanimous mainstream media mockery of former President Trump briefly snoozing during the kangaroo court “hush money” trial isn’t the most noxious example of biased, hostile news media coverage as the Axis attempts to, again, clothesline the American leader so many of them have pledged to destroy (Hi there, NPR!) , but it’s particularly contrived and ignorant. Attention should be paid: these are the people crippling democracy while claiming that they want to save it.
The idea, of course, is tit-for-tat: Republicans and conservatives (along with anyone with eyes and ears who isn’t so biased they can’t think) have been pointing out the obvious crisis that the man supposedly overseeing our government is failing mentally and physically, unable to keep a full schedule or speak coherently, almost certainly operating with a metaphorical hand shoved up into his suit and head to give the (barely credible illusion) that he is really calling the shots, in thrall to a dangerous far left cabal, and too old to be safely entrusted with the Presidency even if all of the forgoing weren’t true. Therefore the counter argument, juvenile as it is (“So’s your old man!”) is to default to “wahataboutism” (as well as the usual anti-Trump Big Lies). Trump’s too old! Trump’s no more able than Biden!
Last week Jonathan Turley issued a thorough indictment of the trial in Manhattan, which he described as “a clear example of the weaponization of the criminal justice system.” The George Washington University law professor has been saying this from the beginning about Alvin Bragg’s partisan prosecution, and it should be self-evident: a criminal case relying on the slimier-than-slime, convicted perjurer and disbarred lawyer Michael Cohen as an essential witness should never be pursued, and it is a violation of prosecutorial ethics to do so.
I was surfing between various news networks’ analyses of the case, and only the usually silly “Fox and Friends” crew stated the most important conclusion that the others carefully avoided. It’s a political prosecution, and the purpose is to get a conviction by any means possible, even one tainted and sure to be overturned, so the Democrats can run against Trump as a “convicted felon.” Justice has nothing to do with it, as Turley’s careful assessment makes clear.
The other purpose is to interfere with the certain Republican candidate’s ability to campaign, because he otherwise has the energy and ability to campaign, while his Democratic opposition does not. Yes, the Democrats are interfering with the 2024 election and attempting to rig it even as in other prosecutions and in campaign attacks, they claim Trump is an existential danger to democracy and that his claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” are “baseless.” The unethical conduct of the Democrats in prosecutions like the “hush money” trial is itself a rebuttal of that statement. If I had to define “hypocrisy,” I couldn’t come up with a better example than that.
The question this week was whether it is fair to try Donald Trump in New York City. That’s easy: no. All of the lawfare cases are calculated to go to trial in communities extremely hostile to Trump: New York, D.C., and Fulton County, Georgia, the solid Blue heart of a mostly conservative state. Given the stakes and the defendant, judges should move all of the cases, just as the trial of Derek Chuavin and the three other cops implicated in George Floyd’s death should have been moved out of the Twin Cities, if the objective had been a fair trial rather than to mollify Black Lives Matters.
One of the dumbest popular movies ever was 1989’s “Weekend at Bernie’s,” in which two guys haul around their dead boss pretending he’s alive—it isn’t worth my time to explain why they do this. I have a fertile dark sense of humor, but I couldn’t finish watching the thing. It’s a ridiculous premise (Terry Kiser, playing the dead Bernie, steals the movie, which should tell you something), but somehow this junk it clicked with audiences. (The sequel not so much, a perfect example of going to the well once too often). But who suspected that the movie would inspire a Brazilian scamster?
Police say that Erika de Souza Vieira Nunes wheeled a corpse into a Rio de Janeiro bank this month claiming that the late 68-year-old Paulo Roberto Braga was her uncle and in need of a bank loan. Nunes had to support Braga’s lolling head with her hand to keep it from tipping to the side as he showed no signs of life (I can’t find out if Paulo was wearing sunglasses). The staff expressed their concerns about him, but Nunes just said her uncle was quiet by nature.
“Uncle, are you listening? You need to sign. If you don’t sign it, there’s no way,” she was heard telling the wheelchair-bound corpse. “I can’t sign for you, what I can do I’ll do. Sign here, same as the document. Sign so you don’t give me any more headaches.” Then: “Uncle, are you feeling something? He doesn’t say anything, that’s just how he is…If you’re not okay, I’m going to take you to the hospital. Do you want to go to the Emergency Room again?” But one of the tellers had called the police, and the responding officers placed Nunes under arrest when they arrived. Sure enough, Brazilian Bernie was dead, and had been dead for hours, medical personnel determined. Using a body this way isn’t just unethical, it’s illegal. (But funny!… or at least funnier than the movie.)
Ethics Alarms 