Law & Law Enforcement

Ethics Quiz: Dignity For Arrested Lawbreakers!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

OK, maybe I just telegraphed my personal bias in reaction to this quiz, so I’ll keep my opinion to myself until the commentariat weighs in. I’ll try, anyway.

New York City has agreed to pay $17.5 million to settle a lawsuit filed in a 2018 class-action lawsuit by Jamilla Clark and Arwa Aziz, two Muslim women who claimed their rights were violated when police forced them to remove their hijabs for the police to take their “mug shots.”

The financial settlement requires approval by Judge Analisa Torres of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and I fervently hope…never mind! My mouth is zipped!

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A Real Life “Jumbo” of a Different, Indeed Fatal Kind

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

In the Zambia’s Kafue National Park, at 8,600 square miles one of Africa’s largest animal reserves, an 80-year-old American woman, doubtlessly filling out her bucket list, was killed when a bull elephant charged the truck containing her and five other tourists on a morning tour to see wild game up close. They got close, all right: That relative of Ethics Alarms favorite Jumbo upended the truck (above) and precipitated the woman’s demise. The other tourist were injured but survived.

The story was sent to me by commenter JutGory, who pronounced it an assumption of the risk by the deceased woman and the others, which it is provide the safari company was crystal clear about what the risks were. I wonder. This has been an obsession with me lately, as lawyers require consent and waivers from clients after what is supposed to be full disclosure and I am convinced that most of the time the supposedly “informed consent” and “knowing waivers” are anything but.

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A Tragedy in the Czech Republic Reveals the Pro-Abortion Hypocrisy

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

This is a terrible story, but from an ethical enlightenment and focus perspective, I am grateful for it.

A four months pregnant patient at a Prague’s Bulovka University Hospital received an unwanted abortion procedure when doctors got her confused with another woman. (Both patients were not native Czech speakers.) The woman who lost her baby was at the hospital for a routine check-up, but nurses, doctors, a gynecologist and an anesthesiologist all became convinced she was another patient seeking an abortion. They subjected their victim to a surgical cleaning of the uterus without her consent consent or knowledge. She miscarried following the procedure.

Prague police are treating the matter as a case of negligent “bodily harm.” Is that what it is? A woman losing her unborn child is the equivalent of her losing a kidney? Is the unwanted invasion of her body is the issue here, and not the death of whatever that thing is that their outrageous mistake killed?

One of the clearest pieces of evidence that the entire pro-abortion case is built on intellectual dishonesty is the weird and mystical convention that if a mother wants her unborn child to be regarded as a nascent human being, it is in the eyes of the law, in most states. Someone ripping the unborn baby out of the womb of its mother will be usually charged with a crime against two human beings, not one. But if a woman has been taught to regard a gestating fetus as a wart, a tumor or a “mass of cells,” killing it is no crime at all…just a “choice,” or “reproductive care.”

I want to read or hear an abortion activist, or anyone screaming about how the Supreme Court removed a woman’s “right” to control her own body when her body includes a genetically distinct human being, explain how the law should treat a situation like the atrocity in the Czech Republic. Was a child involved or not? Were two human beings harmed, or one?

Were the doctors and the hospital guilty of a negligent tort, as if they had amputated the wrong leg, or was this negligent homicide?

Ethics Hero: J.K. Rowling, or “Now THAT’S How to Practice Civil Disobedience!”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Scotland’s has passed a bonkers hate crime law that went into effect this week. It makes it a crime potentially punishable by up to seven years in prison to “stir up hatred” regarding age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and “variations in sex characteristics.” The law would be such a flagrant violation of the First Amendment in the U.S. that even Democrats would be embarrassed to vote for it, but Scotland, like the rest of the United Kingdom, has been hit particularly hard by The Great Stupid. (This would be a propitious time to say a silent but heartfelt “Thanks, guys!” to Tom, Ben, George, John and the rest of the much maligned Founders.)

Being is an especially good position to do so, J.K. Rowling, the “Harry Potter” author, has decided to lead the principled opposition to the unethical law. Yesterday, as the crime of “stirring up hatred” went into force, Rowling publicly defied it by listing a convicted rapist, several ex abusers and trans activists in a post on Twitter/”X,” asserting that they were all, in her view, men.

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Clueless or Dishonest? Another Questionable Judicial Pick Appears Headed to a Senate Rejection. Good.

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

President Joe Biden’s apparently radical nominee to the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Pakistani-American lawyer Adeel Abdullah Mangi, looks doomed after Senator Jacky Rosen of Nevada became the latest Democrat to publicly announce that she could not support him. Earlier, the other Nevada Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto had joined lame duck maverick Joe Manchin of West Virginia in opposing the nomination, a DEI pick if there ever was one.

In addition to having no judicial experience, Mangi supports two radical organizations that have signaled some rather alarming values, indeed he helps lead them, by serving on the advisory boards of Rutgers Law School’s Center for Security, Race, and Rights and the Alliance of Families for Justice.

The Rutgers center, which Mangi has contributed thousands to support, is under investigation by the Senate Judiciary Committee for hosting an event on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks featuring pro-terrorist Sami Al-Arian, who was convicted of providing material support to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The Center’s director, law professor Sahar Aziz, regularly enlivens his Twitter/”X” feed anti-Semitic rhetoric. Now, these issues could be addressed, explained and defended (though perhaps not successfully), but the aspiring judge used the excuse that he had no knowledge that either of these had occurred in the organization he serves in an advisory capacity when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) asked him about the group’s programming and Aziz’s anti-Semitism.

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Does Justice Merchan Have Conflict of Interest?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

In August, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan M. Merchan, tasked with presiding over the criminal case against Donald Trump in Manhattan for 2016 “hush money payments” in violation of election laws, rejected Trump’s lawyers’ claims that the judge had disqualifying conflicts of interest and should recuse himself. The reasons for the recusal seemed a stretch at the time, easily the weakest being that, during the 2020 presidential campaign, Justice Merchan had donated the grand total of $15 to Joe Biden. Another was that the judge’s daughter, the president and chief operating officer of a digital marketing agency that has clients who are Democratic candidates, was obviously going to benefit financially Merchan’s decisions in the case.

Justice Merchan ruled, relying, he said, on the guidance of a state advisory committee on judicial ethics, that his impartiality could not “reasonably be questioned” based on “de minimus political contributions made more than two years ago” or his daughter’s business. The latter, he said, could not be substantially affected by the trial. Trump’s attorneys had “failed to demonstrate that there exists concrete, or even realistic reasons for recusal to be appropriate, much less required” because of his daughter’s activities.

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Ethics Dunces: 18 Democratic Senators (and Bernie Sanders)

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

For the record, the 18 are U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and Border Safety, and U.S. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Senators Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Laphonza Butler (D-Calif.), Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

They all signed a letter urging the Biden Administration “to take all available actions to streamline pathways to lawful status for undocumented immigrants.” “Undocumented immigrants” are illegal immigrants, and that is all you need to know to assess the unethical and irresponsible nature of the letter, as well as all the signatories to it, which is pretty much a Rogues Gallery of the most radical and destructive Senators in the upper House, with a few surprising exceptions.

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Oh Look, What a Surprise…California is Considering Another Law Sticking the State’s Nose Where It Doesn’t Belong

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I don’t understand why anyone continues to live or work in California, a state with a culture that lurches between stupid, irresponsible and deluded.

The headline above does not refer to the recent, bone-headed decision to give fast-food workers up to a 25% raise, with cooking Big Macs the minimum wage jumping to $20 an hour in that sector next week. “It’s a big win for cooks, cashiers and other fast-food workers ” says taxpayer-funded progressive propaganda organ NPR. Right. Fast food wages have been growing at a faster clip than almost any other sector since the pandemic, with the result that more outlets are moving to automation, which means, as has happened every time the minimum wage jumps, lower-paid workers—whose skills often aren’t worth the minimum wage— will lose their jobs. Meanwhile, fewer people with strained budgets will buy fast food because of the duel problems that it’s no longer fast, and is absurdly expensive, and California is already one of the most expensive states.

Oh, who knows: maybe all those vegans and health nuts in the Golden State want to wreck the fast food business. More likely, however, it’s just that legislators there—Suspense! Will they actually vote to make all Californians-of-the-right-color millionaires?—don’t understand economics, cause-and-effect and reality.

But I find the proposed law this post concerns more offensive from an ethics point of view if less destructive. California Assemblyman Matt Haney wants California to be the first in the country to give employees the legal right refuse to respond if their superior calls after hours. Then the law would permit workers to ignore emails, texts and other work-related communications until the next day after the work day has begun. “People now find themselves always on and never off,” the Nanny State fan said. “There’s an availability creep that has reached into many people’s lives, and I think it’s not a positive thing for people’s happiness, for their well-being, or even for work productivity.”

Oh, shut up. The law aims to give workers a legal right to be unprofessional. If you have a job and believe in ethical work values, you believe in diligence, responsibility and self-sacrifice. If you believe in personal autonomy and character, you believe that human beings need to be able to make intelligent choices about their life, including their careers, without being bolstered by the legal right to stand up to bullies, jerks and unreasonable supervisors.

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Ethics Hero: The Washington Post

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I know what many of you are going to say. The Washington Post is an unalloyed ethics villain. It has distorted facts and editorialized in news reports. It employs indefensible partisan propagandists like Philip Bump. It even “stood by” Bump’s false reporting when Prof. Turley exposed it.The paper played a substantial role in rigging the 2020 election by deliberately slanting its reporting against then-President Trump and in favor of Joe Biden. It is unquestionably an unethical, biased, partisan news source.

That, however, makes its editorial titled “Donald Trump deserves his day in appeals court” all the more remarkable and praiseworthy. The ridiculous and obviously politically-motivated New York civil case verdict against Trump that originally required him to post an unprecedented $464 million bond in order to appeal it has been mocked and condemned in the conservative media. It should have been, for it is transparent effort to cripple the putative GOP Presidential nominee financially so he is handicapped in his campaign against President Biden. Most of the Trump Deranged, in contrast, have cheered the result. As a certifiable Trump-detesting news organization, however, the Post’s call for fairness and due process for their frequent target carries more weight and persuasive power than any argument appearing in the New York Post, the Washington Free Beacon or Fox News.

Highlights from the editorial:

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Baseball Gets the Gambling Scandal It Deserves.

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Shohei Ohtani is, when healthy, the best baseball player alive as well as the most remarkable. No one since Babe Ruth (and no one before Babe either) managed to be a star slugger and an ace pitcher simultaneously, and Ruth never filled both roles in equal measure in the same seasons like Ohyani has. It may well be that the imported Japanese star isn’t as great a hitter as Babe or as overpowering a pitcher either, but never mind: he’s star quality on the mound and at the plate, and that is unprecedented.

The undisputed most valuable player in baseball signed a massive free agent contract with the best team in baseball (and, after the despicable Yankees, the best known), so Major League Baseball was confident that it had hit the metaphorical jackpot. And then…disaster struck.

During a Seoul, South Korea, series between the Dodgers and San Diego Padres, it was revealed that Ippei Mizuhara, Ohtani’s interpreter since 2013 who followed the star to the United States in 2018, had been illegally gambling on sports; a law enforcement investigation of a bookie uncovered his activities. Ohtani’s name was bank transfers to the bookie to cover Mizuhara’s gambling losses, but Mizuhara insisted that his boss and friend knew nothing about the gambling. The Dodgers fired Mizuhara and the official story coming from Ohtani’s lawyers was that Mizuhara had been stealing money from Ohtani.

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