In Allegheny County Pennsylvania, the murder trial of SafonGump ( I swear that’s his real name) ended in a mistrial last week because a juror smoked or vaped marijuana in the jury room during a lunch break and the judge was unable to determine who.
Here I must interject my obligatory “I told you so!” note regarding my long-time insistence that legalizing pot after indoctrinating the public with the false message that it was harmless would prove to be a cultural and societal disaster undermining health, children’s socialization, the family, the economy, the workplace and more. All is unfolding as I foresaw, and it wasn’t all that difficult a prediction to reach either.
The selection of 12 jurors and two alternates had been completed and the jury empaneled as the prosecution called its first two witnesses. The judge adjourned the trial for lunch, but when court staff arrived at the jury room to release the jurors, the smell of marijuana was unmistakable. Smoking and vaping are not allowed in the Allegheny County Courthouse, and worse, all of the jurors had answered the question on their questionnaires about whether they were taking any medications that could impact your ability to sit on the jury had checked “no.”
The judge called each juror into his chambers and asked if he or she had been toking. He even summoned an additional criminal defense attorney to sit in to ensure that the jurors’ Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination would be protected. That was unnecessary, because it had been agreed that no charges would be filed against the pot-puffing juror: everybody just wanted to ensure the integrity of the trial. The defense attorney, however, sounds like a woke, drug-loving jerk. “You have all of these privacy issues you have to worry about,” he told reporters.“The last thing we want to do is embarrass someone.”
Yes, this news made my head explode. I will be picking up pieces of skull and bloody lumps of gray matter for the rest of the day.
Sarah Miller Espinosa, an arbitrator, ordered The Washington Post to rehire anti-white, racist, biased and dishonest opinion columnist Karen Attiah, whom the paper properly fired in September because of her social media posts regarding the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The Post has to compensate her with back pay too.
The Post, Espinosa wrote, “did not have good and sufficient cause” to terminate Attiah and violated its labor agreement. “The Washington Post failed to establish the grievant engaged in gross misconduct,” she concluded.
Oh, really?
In its report on this gob-smacking ruling, the NY Times cites Appiah’s BlueSky post that read, “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is … not the same as violence,” as representative of the offending chain that the columnist issued after Kirk’s assassination. In the EA report on the episode, I focused on this one:
Oooh, damning! Racist! Except that Kirk never said that, despite the fact than Attiah put the statement in quotes. What he said, according to Attiah’s source, The Guardian, was…
“If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
The quote was not about black women at all, but referring to four specific and named black women who Kirk believed had demonstrated that they were not qualified for the positions they occupied. (I’d say that three of the four clearly warrant Kirk’s assessment; I’m not sure about Michelle. I would have used Kamala Harris).
Attiah, then, rewrote the quote to make Kirk seem prejudiced against all black women. She used quotation marks, though what she wrote was not what he said. She intentionally lied to readers to make Kirk’s assassination seem deserved. That’s why she was fired by the Post, and the only point of contention is why, as an anti-white, racist hack with no regard for journalism ethics (not that the Post wins any prizes in that area either), she was working for the paper in the first place.
The Washington Post, in defending Attiah’s sacking, maintained that her rant about Kirk injured “the integrity” of the organization and violated standards requiring employees to use social media with civility and respect. “Karen’s social media feed yesterday and today is beyond the pale, completely unacceptable for someone associated with Opinions,” the Post’s opinion editor wrote after her outburst. The arbitrator disagrees! A columnist lying on a public platform, fabricating a quote and using it to support a racist “opinion” isn’t a black mark on the integrity of the newspaper that employs her. Good to know.
To be fair, the Post was irresponsible to hire the woman in the first place. She should never have been hired, and should have been fired—well, except according to the strange standards of Espinosa—in 2023, when Attiah made as ass of herself by opining that a newly unveiled sculpture (in Boston) celebrating the marriage of Martin Luther King and Coretta “perfectly represents how White America loves to butcher MLK.” Oopsie! The sculptor was black and the commission that approved the design was mostly black. I wrote at the time,
“Appiah is a ridiculously careless and dumb racist. How could someone publish a diatribe like she did without checking to see whether the artist was white? She could because she is such a racist that it never occurred to her that something she objected to wasn’t the fault of whites. This is the apex of racism, its most ugly form. To the KKK, everything wrong with their nation was the fault of blacks, Catholics and immigrants. To Hitler, all of Germany’s ills were attributable to Jews. To people like Attiah—and don’t kid yourself, there are a lot of them—whites are the enemy, evil and a human pathogen on society. That’s bad enough that it should disqualify her from a position of authority and influence at the Washington Post. But she also has exposed herself as frighteningly lacking basic reporting skills and journalistic integrity. She is doubly untrustworthy. No apology, no excuse-making can erase this debacle. I am eager to see if the Post has the courage and professionalism, as well as respect for its readers, to do what has to be done. My guess? No.”
But based on this arbitrator’s ruling, there is literally nothing Attiah could write that would disqualify her from having a platform for her hate, ignorance, dishonesty and stupidity on the opinion pages of the Washington Post. The mind boggles: Castrate all men! Put the Jews in camps! Kill Trump! “I am Marie of Romania!” Attiah’s lawyer called the decision “a landmark victory for one of our nation’s crusading journalists.”
Over the past year, I have been professionally involved in several cases involving arbitration. In too many of them (and one is too many), the arbitrator’s decision was incomprehensible and incompetent. Many arbitrators are ancient retired judges; others are incapacitated by unstated biases. Arbitration clauses exist to save the immense costs of litigation, but when the result is a howler like this one, it demonstrates a triumph of finances over logic.
I also want to mention that almost all of the Times readers who commented on this declaration that no columnist’s opinions are so repulsive and biased that they are grounds for firing for cause thought it was wonderful.
There has been so much weird, impulsive, counter-intuitive and counter-factual support for frauds, knaves and evil-doers on the ideological left that I have had a hard time keeping up with it—or maybe my brain is just rejecting what it regards as bad juju. An astounding number of young Democratic-Socialists lionize Luigi Mangione, who shot an insurance exec in the back in an alley. Hasan Piker, who campaigned with Abdul El-Sayed, now the Michigan Democratic Party candidate for the U.S. Senate, has repeatedly expressed his approval of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I have several Trump-Deranged friends who would have sent metaphorical flowers of thanks to any of the recent failed assassins whose target was President Trump. The support for Jason Arday and his sanctification as a victim is also part of the trend.
But this latest example is special. Hundreds of women, dressed in pink, protested last week outside Plymouth Superior Court in Massachusetts to show their support for Lindsay Clancy, the former nurse being tried for the murder of her three young children.
The mob wore shirts reading “Believe,” “She Needed Help” and “Peace for Lindsay.” Clancy, 36, pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her children—Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, in January 2023. Her defense now is that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and severe mental illness and therefore should not be held criminally responsible. Okay. That’s the defense’s job in a case like this, and surely any mother who would murder her own kids, or any children for that matter, has a strong argument that she was legally insane. However, in 1994 when Susan Smith was convicted of murdering her two sons, three-year-old Michael and one-year-old Alexander, by strapping them in their car seats, and rolling her car into a lake, there was no such public sympathy for her. The defense’s insanity defense was rejected by the jury.
Social media, of course, is part of the difference, and the Clancy episode may stand as a perfect example of how the internet warps values, perception and ethics. The murderous mother’s sympathizers have followed the livestreamed trial daily, often analyzing witness testimony in real time. TikTok has viral videos with legends like “I Am Lindsay Clancy,” often showing the poster holding her own infant. (I would think such videos justify visist from child protective services.) “I Stand With Lindsay” merchandise—shirts, hats, stickers, mugs, socks and bags —-are being sold on line. A GoFundMe established for Clancy’s parents had 31,000 contributions by the end of last week, raising over a million dollars.
This woman murdered her children, remember, and there is evidence that she planned it; she didn’t just “snap.”
So Ethics Alarms has to ask the threshold question to begin an inquiry into so many ethics problems: “What’s going on here?”
[Note of correction: Sloppily, carelessly and unforgivably, I stated in the post that Floyd was convicted of first degree murder, and he was not. Chauvin was convicted of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder (which is manslaughter), and second-degree manslaughter and convicted on all of the charges, resulting in a 22.5 year prison sentence. That result is still unconscionable given the facts and equivocal evidence. But let’s get the facts right. My apologies.]
Derek Chauvin, who was convicted of murdering George Floyd for many reasons, none fair, valid or based on justice or civil rights, once again has a chance to see his kangaroo court conviction thrown out.
A new court filing by Chauvin’s lawyer, the third aimed at getting Chauvin’s indefensible murder conviction reversed, alleges, among other things, ‘illegal’ and ‘fraudulent’ conduct by Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office.” Greg Joseph contends that there were serious breaches of proper procedure and due process by authorities because the Black Lives Matter mob was so determined to use George Floyd’s death as a righteous rallying point to advance a social and political agenda.
Ya think?
Joseph contends that a grand jury was never convened to review the evidence behind the charges, because, as he rightly concludes, “Hennepin County’s unlawful charges against Mr. Chauvin were not severe enough for the mob.” Governor Tim Walz instead “referred the case to (Minnesota Attorney General and confirmed anti-white racist) Keith Ellison, who signed and e-filed a second unfounded complaint against Derek Chauvin that included the murder charge.”
Is anyone surprised that they did everything possible to cut corners to destroy Chauvin, and justice be damned? Not me.
That chart represents the relative number of employees, including lawyers, in the largest U.S. firms to contribute to Republicans. I have written several posts about the “ideological capture” of major U.S. professions and institution, and opined that the extreme progressive bias in the legal profession is among the most threatening to U.S. society and democracy itself. Two examples are here and here.
Right now the D.C. Bar is fighting with the Justice Department over the Trump administration requiring some major law firms to demonstrate that they are not biased against the President and his policies, an effort the Axis (and the D.C. Bar’s staff) calls making them “bend a knee.” The major law firms are biased against this President and his administration, and are increasingly willing to show it. The civil justice system will not work if the legal profession is politicized. Increasingly, it is.
The reason is pretty clear: the vast majority of law schools have almost no conservatives or Republican on their faculties, and my alma mater, Georgetown University Law Center, is typical of the top tier law schools. You can peruse GULC’s disturbing EA dossier here.
Who would have thought that Bert from “Mary Poppins” might have had a career in law firm marketing?
Trantolo & Trantolo, a small law firm in Hartford, Connecticut that also has offices in New York and Massachusetts, has been cited for more than a dozen “unauthorized sidewalk advertisements.” Put on the pavement using either power-washing or temporary chalk over stencils, the firm legal services marketing innovation violated a city ordinance that banned such messages without written consent. Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam told the media that the city has discovered at least 15 sidewalk messages promoting the firm. Unauthorized law firm promotion from the firm also appeared on 24 Hartford crosswalks before the West Hartford Department of Public Works powerwashed them into oblivion. I bet it looked sort-of -like at the end of the Chalk World sequence where Bert, Mary and the kids ride on merry-go-round horses, participate in a fox hunt and sing “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” and then the rain washes Bert’s pictures away.
One message with the firm’s name attached said, “Look both ways before you cross.” Who could object to that public service message? But the firm has “an angle.” As Bing Crosby told Rosemary Clooney in “White Christmas,” everyone has an angle. Well, lawyers and law firms, anyway. Trantolo & Trantolo explained that one by explaining that Hartford “has a serious road safety problem.”
“Working with an outdoor advertising company that has executed similar temporary sidewalk campaigns in cities across the country, Trantolo & Trantolo recently placed a series of temporary stencils throughout Hartford and West Hartford highlighting important local and statewide safety statistics,” says the firm. Trantolo & Trantolo also promised that it would remove all the messages ” at the end of its campaign.”
You have to give the firm’s marketing department credit for creativity. However, the stunt violates the Kantian ethics test of considering what the world would be like if everybody did it, or even every law firm. Thank goodness this stunt didn’t occur to Morgan and Morgan.
Again, I don’t know how any thoughtful, ethical person could question the outcome in this case. Apparently the “intended parents” refused to agree that they would seek appropriate medical care for the child after he was born with a serious but medically correctable heart problem. Having been unsuccessful in their efforts to have the child aborted late term, these ghouls were going to get custody of the child and perhaps have a hospital administer “palliative care”…that is, let the baby die. Pleasantly, of course,
A legal battle, at least regarding the life of the child, was averted when the child was born ahead of the September 3 due date.
As with some of the other cases discussed in Part 1, how could a typical pro-abortion advocate who uses the standard pro-abortion rhetoric about women’s “bodily autonomy” argue that the parents could force the surrogate to undergo an abortion? Yet abortion activists are apparently immune to integrity, logic, and decency. The main thing is to get the unborn child disposed of.
The surrogate’s contract contained a clause obligating her to submit to an abortion if the “intended parents” demanded it. The lawyers who drafted that contract should be sued for legal malpractice, and there are arguable ethical violations as well. I am wondering how common such contracts are, and how often they are enforced. For human beings cannot sell themselves into slavery or otherwise contract away their “unalienable rights.” That contract provision is unenforceable as against public policy, and should be made illegal by statute.
Republicans should pass the bill in the House and make Democrats show their lack decency when they vote it down.
I have two simple questions for pro-abortion (or perhaps “pro mothers and doctors being able to kill viable infants at will” is a more accurate label…a bit long, I admit) advocates.
How can you honestly and sincerely defend the new Massachusetts abortion law? If you can, how do you look yourself in the mirror or sleep at night?
Abortion will now be allowed at any time before birth in Massachusetts after Governor Maura Healey (D, or course: what other party would do this?) eliminated the state’s abortion limits yesterday. Previously, the Bay State had allowed abortion only up until 24 weeks. Now a fully developed unborn infant can be killed any time during the 40-week gestation cycle, even second before birth. That means that the child could be delivered via C-section and instantly be protected by law as a living human being, but an unborn infant at the exact same state of development and fully viable can be murdered in the womb after the mother’s water has broken and contractions have begun.
To be fair, now, the home of my birth and happy childhood isn’t the only barbaric state with such an immoral law. Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and the District of Columbia of course, also believe that being able to kill living and viable infants in the womb is a human “right.” Peter Singer, the Princeton ethics professor, once caused an uproar when he said that as long as we were allowing abortions up to birth, why not let the mother see her baby first after it is born and then have the option to kill it? He was right: morally and ethically, either homicide is exactly the same. The distinction between born and unborn at that point is arbitrary and a legal fiction, created to let mothers feel better about a monstrous act.
Here is how National Public Radio reported those statistics on D.C. crime on the one-year anniversary of President Trump ordering the National Guard to patrol the National Capital.
“Multiple studies have since found that the National Guard presence in D.C. has had no effect on violent crime, although there has been a decrease in opportunistic crimes like petty theft and vehicle break-ins.”
When I read that [Aside: NPR had the gall to send me a solicitation for a contribution via email, signed by the NPR host who blackballed me as its ethics commentator for telling the truth about late-hit sexual harassment complaints, because I “seemed to be defending Donald Trump.] this morning I was genuinely puzzled. When I surfed past Fox News last night, Laura Ingraham was declaring that the statistics proved that Trump’s use of the National Guard was prudent and has been a great success. Two completely divergent news reports. This is why our journalism has become untrustworthy and dangerous. This is why civil discourse is nearly impossible, with citizens operating under competing distortions of reality.
And this is why President Trump was and is right to call our news media “enemies of the people.”
However, NPR’s distortion and deceit qualifies the network as a media Ethics Villain and an Ethics Corrupter. Note the chart above from the D.C. police site. A 32% decrease in murder is not “no effect” on violent crime. That isn’t just spin or bias, that’s a lie. NPR also plays language games, because that’s the Left’s specialty. “Opportunistic crimes like petty theft and vehicle break-ins” is the euphemism this nauseating excuse for a news organization uses to describe the following crimes that have decreased significantly in the past year in the District:
I love it when, completely by accident, a day’s posts sync up. Today began with two posts about my assertion that until very recently the dominant template for the American Presidency was the “blue-eyed white guy with an American-sounding name,” which had the unintended consequences of making it nearly impossible for anti-Americans like Mayor Mamdani, Rep. Omar, and and Michigan Senatorial hopeful Abdul El-Sayed to gain power. Stating that fact got me accused of racism right here on my own blog.
Next came the tale of how an autobiography about to be published and authored by a disgraced Cambridge professor has already been pretty thoroughly shown to be fantasy, with the Left and the lying, now ex-prof, claiming that he is the victim of racism like every other person “of color” on the planet. This latest post is about a black criminal on “the fringes of hip-hop” standing trial for murder because he self-published a book that said he was involved in one. His defense: he made it all up.
Thus comes the fascinating legal conundrum raised by the prosecution of Duane Davis, who wrote in 2019 that he was part of the plot to murder the rapper Tupac Shakur. The 215 page book, published with a co-author (actually a ghostwriter who authored all of it), was largely ignored until a detective with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department started working on the cold case, discovered “Compton Street Legend,” and used it as his primary evidence to persuade a grand jury to indict Davis on one count of murder in the famous rapper’s killing. Davis, now 63, has pleaded not guilty and denies guilt.
