I have written about how thoroughly my colleagues in the legal ethics field are politicized, biased and frequently rendered unable to see the ethical issues through the fog of their peer-reinforced distortions. Yesterday, as my legal ethics expert listserv was buzzing with commentary on the judge’s “split the baby” response to Fulton County Fani Willis’s screaming conflict of interest, prosecutorial misconduct, race-baiting and stunning arrogance. One prominent lawyer in the field, a woman whose commentary is usually perceptive, wrote this in part…
I have never recycled a post so soon (this one was was featured in January) but these are special circumstances:
After my analysis of the Fani Willis conflicts scandal did not jibe with the judge’s decision, my self-esteem is at a low ebb, and I feel the need to point out my prescience in this matter
This, like Willis’s self-made disgrace, is a conflict of interest, and one involving law as well…but also baseball.
The conflict of interest I flagged in January has now had some of the adverse results I predicted, and attention should be paid.
Baseball is one of the few things that has a chance of cheering me up right now, having gone through my first two weeks without Grace’s companionship and support. We followed the seasons (and the Red Sox) together since before we were married, as I taught her the game by taking her to watch the Orioles play Boston in old Memorial Stadium.
Two months after I wrote the post that follows, Spring Training is almost over and the season is less that two weeks away. Yet the two star pitchers I flagged as the victims of their agent’s greed and unethical conduct remain unsigned. I strongly believe that the reason they are unsigned is that the agent/lawyer they foolishly employ has been pitting teams against each other while using each pitcher as leverage to benefit the other, or so Scott Boras would argue. There is no question in my mind that if Blake Snell (above, right) and Jordan Montgomery (above, left), both talented left-handed starting pitchers that fill the same niche, were represented by different agents, both would have signed rich, long-term contracts by now. Because they have allowed themselves to be marketed by the same agent–an unconscionable conflict that baseball should prohibit and Boras’s bar association should sanction—they will not be ready to start the season even if both signed tomorrow. Pitchers who have had to miss large portions of Spring Training have frequently had off-years as a result: Boras’s greedy practice of representing competing talents may result in off seasons and even damage to their careers.
All of this could have and should have been avoided, and would have been, if baseball’s agents were subjected to any genuine ethical regulation.
Weeeell, not exactly free, but close enough, apparently, for a previously law-abiding, 45-year-old Lincoln, Nebraska woman, Dawn Thompson, to embark on a life of crime. I would love to hear what rationalizations she used to convince herself that what she did was okay. I’d bet anything that she employed a bunch of them.
Her gas-stealing rampage began to unravel when Lincoln Police got a call from Bosselman Enterprise’s loss prevention manager on Oct. 20, 2023. A Pump and Pantry had reported that someone was ripping them off. An investigation revealed that the convenience store’s gas pumps had received a faulty software update a year earlier in November of 2022. The update managed orders and reward cards, but it also allowed anyone who swiped a rewards card twice to shift a pump into its “demo mode.” Once it was set in that sequence, gas was free as far as the pump was concerned. One rewards card had been repeatedly used to fool the pumps, and police traced it to Thompson.
Judge Scott McAfee confirmed yesterday that he will announce the fate of Fulton County’s designated “Stop Trump!” agent Fani Willis some time today. From the moment your friendly neighborhood ethicist heard the basic facts in this annoying story I was convinced that one way or the other she would have to leave the Trump case. One of my legal ethics colleagues emphatically disagrees, arguing that whatever conflicts of interest she created by hiring her illicit boyfriend to help prosecute Trump were matters of legal ethics discipline but irrelevant to the defendants. He also pooh-poohed the “appearance of impropriety” issue, echoing the American Bar Association’s logic when it took that category out of the ethics rules: actual impropriety matters, the mere appearance doesn’t.
Yet Willis is a government attorney, and employees of the state are required to avoid the appearance of impropriety because it erodes the public trust. If there was ever a prosecution that mandated a squeaky clean leader beyond suspicion or reproach, this is it. Instead, Willis has left an odoriferous trail of conflicts, arrogance, hypocrisy, dubious explanations and likely lies, all supported by her obnoxious reliance on race-baiting. I have been certain that she would eventually go down for all of this, and that my learned friend–who is apolitical— as well as the my myriad partisan-biased colleagues in the legal ethics association I belong to are wrong.
Well, we shall see . If you see Fredo (“I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everybody says!”) leading off a post today, you’ll know I was right.
Meanwhile, talk about whatever interests you in the Wonderful World of Ethics.
I am immediately torn, because every Kamala Harris head-exploding utterance raises a Julie Principle issue: OK, an elected official who has conclusively proven herself to be dumb, irresponsible and ethically inert says something that is dumb, irresponsible and ethically alert. Why is that worth complaining about or criticizing? Nevertheless, some of Harris’s outbursts are just too despicable to be ignored. Like this one, today, as she visited abortion providers and staff members at a clinic in St. Paul, Minnesota to cheer on women putting the unborn to death for the crime of complicating their mothers’ lives:
“These attacks against an individual’s right to make decisions about their own body are outrageous and, in many instances, just plain old immoral,” she thundered. “How dare these elected leaders believe they are in a better position to tell women what they need, to tell women what is in their best interest. We have to be a nation that trusts women.”
Nice. Kamala had previously used the “How dare they!” stunt to condemn the U.S. Supreme Court for daring to do their jobs, which includes striking down bad decisions that made up constitutional rights that didn’t exist. The abortion-fanatic’s dishonest defense has always relied on pretending that only one life is involved in an abortion, though the state has a valid interest in protecting all lives, including unborn humans who their mothers want to kill. When does an abortion in Harris’s world suddenly involve more than just the woman’s body? Six weeks? 15 weeks? 9 months? Never, if her words mean what they appear to mean. “Plain old immoral” has always included “Thou shalt not kill”: what weird definition of “immoral” is Harris alluding to? It must be really old; Sumarian, maybe? Ancient Aztec?
I’m assuming there is nobody reading this post who believes the following conduct is ethical, or that it isn’t justification for being fired.
The Nashville-based hardcore band Llorona ( named after a ghost in Mexican folklore who is said to roam near bodies of water mourning the children she drowned in a jealous rage) announced that it had fired its lead singer Diego after he admitted putting estrogen in the protein powder used by the band’s bass-player Sixx before his work-outs. This caused him to begin suffering various physical problems such as stomach ulcers, weight loss, muscle weakness and fatigue, as well as “notable mental changes” and other developments that Sixx described as too disgusting to describe. Worst of all, he began annoying his band mates by describing himself as “they.”
Okay, I made up that last part. Actually, the band members already used “they” to describe the bassplayer.
I guess the first step is admitting that it’s untrustworthy. [ I guarantee the 2022 level of trust represented above has declined.]
Out of Colorado comes the disturbing news that Yvonne “Missy” Woods, a Colorado Bureau of Investigation DNA scientist, breached standard testing protocols, manipulated data in the DNA testing process and posted incomplete test results in a staggering 652 cases.The agency called it “an unprecedented breach of trust.” I’m not so sure about the “unprecedented” part, but it certainly doesn’t encourage the trust of the public, or perhaps more importantly, juries. The affected cases occurred between 2008 through 2023, but there may be more: an investigation is reviewing Missy’s work dating back to 1994. She worked for the lab for 29 years, but the CBIonly became aware of irregularities in her work last September. She was placed on administrative in early October and retired a month later. [Pointer: valkygrrl]
My chosen profession of legal ethics has not been covering itself with glory lately.
The Iowa Supreme Court suspended 68-year-old lawyer David L. Leitner as explained in a discouraging story in the Iowa Capital Dispatch. He’s out of the practice of law for two years: I would have disbarred him. First, Leitner represented an Iowa seed dealer who was convicted of bankruptcy fraud in 2007 after the lawyer helped him hide assets. Leitner created a company for the seed dealer with himself the company’s manager , allowing the seed dealer to send part of his income to the company while hiding it from the government, which the dealer owed about $71,000. (Can’t help clients try to defraud the government. Can’t go into fake businesses with clients designed to cheat on taxes. Pretty basic legal ethics.)
But you know and I know an awful lot of people, including elected officials, educators and journalists, who wish this could happen here, will do what they can to see that it does happen here, and regard themselves as enlightened and virtuous for believing this.
[Aside: I first (and last) heard that Mothers of Invention riff when I was a freshman in college. I made me laugh then, and it just made me laugh now. Yes, I am looking for things that will make me laugh.]
Sam Melia is an activist who was recenly sentenced to two years in prison for making and distributing offensive stickers, including thos saying,
“It’s OK to be White”
“White Lives Matter”
“Love your Nation”
“Stop Anti-White Rape Gangs”
“Stop mass immigration”
“Reject white guilt”
“They seek conquest, not asylum”
Other stickers are unquestionably racist or anti-Semitic. One asked: “Why are Jews censoring free speech?,” for example. He’s a member of neo-fascist Patriotic Alternative, and is clearly an asshole, distributing printable stickers and encouraged his followers to download them and sick them them up in public places. In January, at Leeds Crown Court, Melia was found guilty of distributing material “intended to stir up racial hatred” and “encouraging racially aggravated criminal damage,” though there was no such damage. Last week he received his sentence of two years in jail, and British progressives are just thrilled about it.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) says that when Melia was arrested in April 2021, police “found in his wallet” stickers that expressed “views of a nationalist nature.” When police searched Melia’s home, they “discovered a book by Oswald Mosley” and other evidence “of Melia’s ideology.” Yes, in Great Britain, home of the Magna Carta, Locke and W.S. Gilbert, you can now be imprisoned for what you believe and what opinions you express.
Thanks to the First Amendment, the U.S. has been spared that step into totalitarianism so far, but the double standards applied to the January 6 morons and the George Floyd marauders show that the potential for erosion is strong.
“We need to trust ourselves more to confront hateful thinking and to ensure our communities are safe for everyone, rather than inviting officialdom to restrict and punish ideas we don’t like. Censorship both expands the state’s jurisdiction over theindividual’s mind and weakens social solidarity by discouraging the public from directly confronting bigotry in preference for asking the government to cover our eyes and ears. The impact this has on the free society is devastating.
Even some liberal campaigners might feel uncomfortable defending the free-speech rights of a bigot like Melia. They need to get over themselves. As the American essayist HL Mencken said: ‘The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped atthe beginning if it is to be stopped at all.’
And that is exactly why our aspiring censors—in the Congress, in the White House, in the news media, in universities, in DA offices—need to be stopped now. Immediately. This year.
All to see, that is, except those whose eyes have been so jaundiced by hate, indoctrination and lies that they are blind.
A 9-0 decision by an ideologically fractured U.S. Supreme Court, rejecting a cherished partisan fantasy devised to hold on to power that one party has empathically shown that it is unfit to possess, should logically result in frank admissions of error, bias, foolishness and confusion by those who insisted that the tactic thus condemned was correct, legal and wise. But today’s progressives are not logical, nor are they self-aware or particularly smart. The reactions from pundits, left-warped lawyers and others (what are the creatures on “The View”?) really should be viewed as a gift. They are telling us what they are, admitting what they are. It’s ironic: the first post of the day was titled, “Will the Disastrous Results of The Great Stupid Result in Learning, So Behavior Changes, or Will the Fools Responsible Keep Trying To Govern On Dreams Rather Than Reality?,” but it wasn’t about the Trump-Deranged learning from their absurd and intellectually indefensible embrace of the 14 Amendment Trump disqualification plot. The SCOTUS decision hadn’t come down yet. Nevertheless, the headline is apt in the aftermath of the decision and the Axis’s embarrassing tantrums. They won’t learn because they can’t learn, even though refusing to admit their mistakes makes them ridiculous, untrustworthy and unpersuasive.
Here are the kinds of people who have been running our government, journalism, entertainment, law schools and universities:
Ethics Alarms 