Law & Law Enforcement

Why I Just Billed A Client For My Dog’s Evening Walk….

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

In “The Firm,” the corrupt lawyer played by Gene Hackman tells new associate Tim Cruise that he is supposed to bill for every second he is thinking about a client’s work, in the shower, on the toilet, at the movies. Inflating fees is one of the most flagrant and common of all lawyer misconduct, and it is almost impossible to prove unless a lawyer does something stupid like billing more than 24 hours a day (and an amazing number of lawyers have tried that). In the film version of “The Firm,” in fact (though not in the novel) Cruise’s character uses proof that the mobbed-up firm he worked for was over-billing clients to wiggle out of his own legal and ethical dilemma.

As a general rule, I think it’s generally dishonest to bill clients for every thought.

I am preparing an ethics report, and doing so with a famous, legendary, super-credentialed lawyer who charges four times what I do as my ethical adversary. His experience and credentials make me look like comparative piker, but 1) I’m on the right side of this issue 2) his ethics report was pathetic and 3) this case is in my wheelhouse, not his.

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This Is So Stupid I Can’t Even Come Up With A Headline That Does It Justice…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

However, I did summon George Costanza…

CTV News in Calvary, Canada blithely reported this as if it made perfect sense…

“Calgary police have released a photo of a suspect wanted in connection with a fire in the community of Riverbend that damaged multiple homes. Emergency crews were called to a home in the 100 block of Riverglen Crescent S.E. at 12:40 a.m. on Thursday, Aug. 22 for reports of a blaze. The fire gutted a garage and caused damage to two homes. No injuries were reported.”

And here’s the photo police posted:

Yup, it was that infamous Dick Tracy villain, Blur-Face! “Because police think the suspect is a teen, they blurred the face in the photo that was released,” the CTV says. Oh. Makes perfect sense—in Canada, maybe. “The identity of young offenders is protected under the Youth Criminal Justice Act,” we are told.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but if young offenders’ identities are protected, why are police asking people to identify this one? Officers are hoping someone may recognize the teen’s clothing, you see. My brain hurts: so they can publicize aspects of a “young offender’s identity” as long as it’s…what, not sufficient to be likely to identify him?

How does it advance respect for law enforcement to have police do something this pointless without out their appearing to acknowledge it’s probably futile? How does news media justify reporting the senseless as if it makes perfect sense?

Oh Yeah, This Is a Great System….

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

I guess it’s a bit ungrateful to post this after being paid to do an ethics training for a federal agency, but still: anyone who expects governments to solve more problems than they create just isn’t paying attention. The problem, or course, isn’t the nature of government itself, but rather the human beings that operate them. And the brains that operate the human beings.

I present for your edification Craig Adams’ nightmare…

Adams recently learned that his 8,300-square-foot Raleigh, North Carolina home where he lives with his wife is no longer registered in his name. Oh, his mortgage and property taxes are up to date, but never mind—the deed to his home is now belongs to a stranger. Adams said one day he learned that a woman and probable grifter named Dawn Magnum had the deed to his home transferred into a trust she managed. He only learned about this when the property management company for his HOA asked him if he had sold his home after Mangum contacted it to get access to the private gated community where Adams’ property is.

Magnum initially said she thought Adams’ property was in foreclosure so she managed to get the deed to the home into her trust. “She filed a false warranty claim deed against this house and basically tried to steal it,” Adams told the news media.

Dawn Mangum has been arrested and charged with is obtaining property by false pretense.

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From the “Ethics Corrupters” File: “Law and Order SVU,” “Part 33.”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I got sick of “Law and Order: SVU” long ago, so this 2019 episode, from the 20th season (and it’s still going!) escaped my ethics radar until I reached it by accident this morning and had to watch the whole thing as an obligation to Ethics Alarms.

The episode titled “Part 33” is a perfect example of how popular culture is corrupting American values and ethics problem-solving skills with Hollywood’s constant propaganda opposing personal responsibility, the Rule of Law, and promoting emotion-based judgement rather than decisions based on fact and logic.

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‘OK, Maybe He Beats His Kid, But What Matters Is That He’s A Great Mayor’

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I’m paraphrasing there, just to be clear. The actual statement, from Atlantic City Mayor Marty Small’s lawyer referring to his client and his client’s wife being charged with child abuse, was this head-blower:

“In fact, since elected mayor, Mayor Small has faithfully discharged all the duties, responsibilities and obligations of his office. So there is no public element to this indictment. It is all about private family affairs within the Small household.”

You are wrong, Zealous Representation Breath, but nice try anyway. Small’s lawyer, Edwin Jacobs, was stressing that the indictment did not accuse Small of official misconduct in his role as mayor, as he tried to assist his client in avoiding the political backlash from the charges (which Small denies, of course). This is arguably justifiable nit-picking in defense of a client, but it is also the kind of technical lawyer-speak that makes the whole profession look slimy.

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Gee, I Wonder Why the Public Is Losing Trust In The Justice System….

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I am heading to Richmond to do a three hour legal ethics seminar, and in my preparation, I ran across this depressing story. The seminar is called “Legal Ethics Unmasked,” and man oh man, has watching lawyers, prosecutors and judges reveal the creeps beneath been disillusioning.

The ABA headline was certainly clickbait: “Judge settles suit accusing lawyer of threatening to release her intimate photos in bid to scuttle deposition.”

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Supporting Abortion Is the Most Unethical Reason To Vote For a U.S. Presidential Candidate Since the Dixiecrats, and Maybe Worse

/ Jack Marshall / 57 Comments

Were it not for the apparently huge number of women willing to make a radical incompetent, Kamala Harris, the leader of the nation because she favors allowing mothers to kill their unborn children at will, the Democrats would be facing the prospect of a landslide loss come November. Almost every other major demographic group has moved toward Trump and for a very obvious reason: the Biden Presidency has been a disaster, and the Democratic Party has abandoned any fealty to American values, principles and democracy in pursuit of unbridled power. Yet a growing number of voters now say abortion is their top issue in 2024. Amazing. Amazing and indefensible morally and ethically.

Think about that. Abortion—killing unborn human beings—is the most important issue for millions of voters. This isn’t a virtue or a process embraced by admirable cultures: the Soviet Union used abortion as a primary form of birth control, and so has China. These are nations that do not value human life as our founding documents declare that our unique society does. Abortion doesn’t make America stronger economically, or keep the world safe from ruthless foreign regimes, or help small businesses thrive, or make the nation energy independent; it doesn’t make our public education any better, reduce crime, drug addiction and disease. In the vast majority of cases, abortion accomplishes two objectives: it allows women an extra level of protection if their sexual activity results in an inconvenient pregnancy, and it lets mothers employ medical professionals to kill their unwanted children before the law protects those innocent lives.

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Accountability, Please. If or When Trump Loses the 2024 Election And Says It Was Rigged, Ethics Villain ABC Will Join In The Chorus That His Claim Is “Baseless” [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

During the (one hopes) final 2024 Presidential Debate, GOP nominee Donald Trump stated that “Crime here is up and through the roof, despite their fraudulent statements that they made. Crime in this country is through the roof.” Since Democratic appointee Kamala Harris was indicating disagreement, ABC moderator David Muir rushed to her aid, saying, “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”

As you know, Muir believed his role in the debate was to”factcheck” Trump while letting Harris declare outright falsehood if she chose to. This time, Trump tried to rebut Muir, saying “…the FBI — they were defrauding statements. They didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud. Just like their number of 818,000 jobs that they said they created turned out to be a fraud.”

Well, as usual Trump misused the word “fraud,”the FBI didn’t issue the jobs report, and if you think he is Satan, or Hitler, or Godzilla, you are not inclined to believe anything he says, but Trump was right and Muir was wrong in addition to being a biased and unethical debate moderator. Newly released data from the Dept. of Justice this week backed Trump. Okay, the crime didn’t literally break through any roofs, so I’m sure that characterization by Trump goes into the Washington Post’s Trump lies database, but still… This was DOJ’s survey from Bureau of Justice statistics  that includes crimes that may not have been reported to police. The annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) showed total instances of reported violent crime — including rape, robbery and aggravated assault — is up from 5.6 per 1,000 in 2020 to 8.7 per 1,000 in 2023.

The highest recent rate of violent crime during the Biden years was in 2022, when the survey counted 9.8 instances per 1,000 people over the age of 12 being victims, Rape increased from 1.2 incidents per 1,000 in 2020 to 1.7 in 2023. Robbery rose from 1.6 per 1,000 in 2020 to 2.6 per 1,000 in 2023. Aggravated assault rose from 2.9 per 1,000 in 2020 to 4.5 per 1,000 in 2023. As Crime Prevention Research Center president John Lott tried to explain in a piece published after Muir’s deliberately misleading “factcheck,”

Here’s the full report, and like so many statistics, one can spin and arrange the numbers to make various points, some contradictory. What you can’t do with them, at least ethically, if you are an alleged journalist is interrupt a Presidential debate to make one candidate look dishonest in front of a national audience because you and your employers want his opponent to win the election.

Muir and ABC should suffer serious consequences for their conduct, but they won’t. At very least, both should correct the false impression left by Muir and apologize to the public, and not just in a quiet tweet. That won’t happen either.

ABC is biased, corrupt and untrustworthy.

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Source: Legal Insurrection

A “NOW You Tell Us?” Classic

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Dr. Bruce Levy, a Nashville, Tennessee, medical examiner who testified under oath 24 years ago that Russell and Kaye Maze’s young son, Alex, had been shaken to death by his father now says, “Oopsie!”—he was wrong.

“I recant my trial testimony that Bryan Maze suffered from shaken baby syndrome,” he stated in a sworn affidavit. “If called to testify now, I would assert Bryan Maze’s brain, at the time of his death, showed no indication, to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, of prior trauma or abuse. Instead, the residual brain lesions viewed at autopsy more likely than not resulted from a natural disease process.” He swears that would now classify the child’s manner of death as “natural.”

Gee, that’s nice. The father, Russell Maze, was convicted of aggravated child abuse before Bryan’s death and of murder after the child’s death . He is now serving a life sentence, and has been in prison for more than two decades.

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Artificial Intelligence Raises a Lot of Ethics Issues, But This Isn’t One of Them…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

From An Experiment in Lust, Regret and Kissing (gift link!) in the Times by novelist Curtis Sittenfeld :

My editor fed ChatGPT the same prompts I was writing from and asked it to write a story of the same length “in the style of Curtis Sittenfeld.” (I’m one of the many fiction writers whose novels were used, without my permission and without my being compensated, to train ChatGPT. Groups of fiction writers, including people I’m friends with, have sued OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, for copyright infringement. The New York Times has sued Microsoft and OpenAI over the use of copyrighted work.)

The essay describes a contest between the bot and the human novelist, who also employed suggestions from readers. I do not see how an AI “writer” being programmed with another author’s work is any more of a copyright violation than a human writer reading a book or story for inspiration. Herman Melville wrote “Moby-Dick” after immersing himself in the works of William Shakespeare. Nor is imitating another author’s style unethical. All art involves borrowing, adopting, adapting and following the cues and lessons of those who came before. In “Follies,” Stephen Sondheim deliberately wrote songs that evoked the styles of specific earlier songwriters. He couldn’t have done this as effectively as he did without “programming” himself with their works. Continue reading →