Law & Law Enforcement

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Judge Jeanine Howard (Who Is Also The Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month, An Ethics Dunce, And Pretty Much A Blight On The Justice System And American Society In General)

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

judge Howard

“There are rape cases that deserve life. There are rape cases that deserve 20 years. Every now and then you have one of those that deserve probation. This is one of those and I stand by it.”

—-Texas District Judge Jeanine Howard explaining her stunningly lenient sentence of probation and community service—“250 hours of community service at a rape crisis center” !—for a confessed rapist of a 14-year old girl at her school.

The sentence  was not merely lenient but probably illegal, and a it seems likely that the sentence will be altered by another judge. Nonetheless, this kind of result, based on the judge’s assessment that the victim was promiscuous and had been pregnant (which she denies) will certainly make other rape victims think twice before they report the crime. Bobby Villareal, executive director of the Dallas Area Rape Crisis  Center, told reporters…

“This is an example of why people don’t come forward and report their sexual assaults because they are not only victimized at the time but the continuing game of shame and blame. They are put on trial again in the judiciary and the media. The things that were said were outrageous and some of them were actually untrue that were reported.”

Judge Howard seemed to be making up the law and sentencing guidelines on the fly. The rapist, 20-year old Sir Young, never denied that he had raped the girl, or that she hadn’t strenuously told him to stop. “Consent is not an issue and it wasn’t an issue because he admitted he didn’t have her consent,”  prosecutor Andrea Moseley said. “When consent is not an issue, a victim’s past is never appropriate for comment. That’s my problem with it as a woman and as a prosecutor. I was certainly disappointed in the message I think it sends to the community.”

The community can send a message back, as Judge Howard is up for re-election in the fall, but it won’t be easy. A Democrat, she is running unopposed. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel

/ Jack Marshall / 52 Comments

Dustin McDanielSome attorneys general understand the obligation of a state’s highest legal representation, even if the Attorney General of the United States does not.

Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, a Democrat,told the press yesterday that he personally  he supports allowing same-sex couples to marry,  but will nonetheless continue defending his state’s 2004 ban on gay marriages in court.

The news angle, as reported, was that McDaniel, a Democrat serving his final year as the Arkansas AG, is the first statewide official in conservative Arkansas to back same-sex marriage. Ethically, however, the significance is that although he disagrees with the current law of the state that is his client, he will nonetheless do his duty according to the laws he swore he would uphold….as he should, as an ethical and honorable lawyer who is there to serve the public’s interests, not his own conscience. Continue reading →

Are Haunted House Ethics The Same As Murder House Ethics?

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Haunted-Homes2

I spent the wee hours last night watching “Insidious 2” (not as scary as “1,” and too confusing to watch while composing ethics blog posts), and, to fend off nightmares, the Wayans’ “A Haunted House” (sillier, grosser and not as funny as their two “Scary Movie” efforts). Naturally, this set me wondering about the ethics of selling a haunted house to an unaware buyer.

I thought I had covered this problem before here and here, where the topic was whether a property owner had an ethical obligation to divulge that the house in question had been the site of gruesome murders or suicides. The law in most states declares caveat emptor, but that’s only the law. The ethics verdict, in my view (but not everyone’s) is this, which my last comment on the topic, in 2013: Continue reading →

Animal Ethics: Now THIS Is An Unethical Veterinarian

/ Jack Marshall / 116 Comments
Believe it or not, Dean Jones was a NICE vet compared to Dr. Tierce...

Believe it or not, Dean Jones was a NICE vet compared to Dr. Tierce…

Yechh. This story reads like a sick version of “Beethoven,” which, as all you Charles Grodin fans will recall, featured a villainous veterinarian (Dean Jones, no longer cute) who stole pets to use for medical research.

In Fort Worth, Texas, Jamie and Marian Harris took their dog, a 5-year-old Leonberger named Sid, to the well-respected  Camp Bowie Animal Clinic, to be treated for what they thought was a minor health issue. After undergoing treatment,  Sid developed trouble walking and the veterinarian, Dr. Lou Tierce, told the Harrises that  their dog  had an untreatable spinal condition that would get worse, cause him increasing pain, and ultimately cripple him completely. The family was told the best option was to have Sid euthanized. The couple and their young son agreed, said their goodbyes and authorized the clinic to bury Sid on the vet’s farm.

Six months later, a veterinarian technician named Mary Brewer, who worked at Camp Bowie, contacted the Harrises to inform them that Sid was alive and being kept alive in a cage, surrounded by his urine and feces, so he could be used for blood transfusions to treat other dogs.
Continue reading →

A Brief Ethics and Culture Lesson For First Amendment Pedants

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

First-Amendment-on-scroll1

Thousands or pundits and web commenters, perhaps hundreds of thousands, in their concerted effort to justify the speech and thought police, (at least as long as the Enforcers are not likely to disapprove of their thoughts and speech), are mocking those who cite the First Amendment as authority for the proposition that the treatment of Donald Sterling, and others, are harmful, sinister, and un-American. The pedants are technically correct, of course. When someone who is fired for posting something offensive on Facebook screams, “My First Amendment right of free speech has been violated!”, that typically speaks of a poor civic education. The Bill of Rights only constrains government action, not private transactions. No rights, which are enumerated and protected from government incursions by the Constitution, have been lost or affected when only private action is involved.

That does not mean, however, that when private action opposes an individual’s Constitutional rights, it is necessarily acceptable, fair, harmless, reasonable or right. Indeed, the government and law serves a crucial function by delineating and encouraging cultural and ethical values. The principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights do not merely constrain government. They form the basis of the ethical values that make the United States a unique culture, and point the way to what Americans, as Americans, regard as right and wrong.

Thus, while searching though a friend’s private e-mail account isn’t a violation of one’s right to privacy under the 10th Amendment, violating a fellow citizen’s privacy is wrong, and the Bill of Rights stands as authority that it is something important to each individual that should be respected. The Constitution and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments won’t and can’t stop Americans like Sterling from being bigots in their private dealings, but they send a clear message that bigotry is not approved by the United States and was not by those who have charted our ethical course. Privately interfering with someone’s right to worship as they please is wrong, and the fact that the government is prevented from doing it tells us so. The First Amendment’s existence also tells us that preserving free speech—open, fearless, speech—is essential to core American values, because it also supports free thought, that which tyrants and dictators fear. Yes, we all have the right to make free speech, thought and discourse costly, difficult and painful, but we should not. We have the right to punish severely the non-conformist, the iconoclast, the rebel, or the citizen who may be a little late, or slow, or reluctant, to accept the conventional wisdom of the moment. We have the right to do it, but it is wrong. It is un-American. The Constitution tells us so.

Addendum: After I wrote the post, I encountered this.

 

Clayton Lockett Is Dead, Right? Then 1) Good! and 2) His Execution Wasn’t “Botched”

/ Jack Marshall / 149 Comments

Capital punishment foes have no shame, and (I know I am a broken record on this, and it cheers me no more than it pleases you), the knee-jerk journalists who have been squarely in their camp for decades refuse to illuminate their constant hypocrisy. In Connecticut, for example, holding that putting to death the monstrous perpetrators of the Petit home invasion was “immoral,” anti-death penalty advocates argued that the extended time it took to handle appeals made the death penalty more expensive than life imprisonment—an added expense for which the advocates themselves are accountable.

A similar dynamic is at work in the aftermath of the execution of convicted murderer and rapist Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma.Witnesses to his execution by lethal injection said Lockett convulsed and writhed on the gurney, sat up and started to speak before officials blocked the witnesses’ view by pulling a curtain. Apparently his vein “blew,” and instead of killing him efficiently,  the new, three-drug “cocktail” arrived at as the means of execution in Oklahoma after extensive study and litigation failed to work as advertised.  Why was there an excessively complex system involving multiple drugs used in this execution? It was the result of cumulative efforts by anti-death penalty zealots to make sure the process was above all, “humane.” Of course, the more complicated a process is, the more moving parts it has, the more likely it is to fail.

Continue reading →

The Maryland Supreme Court Clearly Doesn’t Believe In Signature Significance

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

PeepingTom

But I do.

The Maryland Supreme Court just reinstated a Clayton W. Boulware, a Montgomery County attorney who had been suspended for six months after being convicted of covertly filming up the skirts of two women, one of whom was a minor, in a public place.  Boulware was suspended in September for six months with a three-year probationary period to follow the suspension.

In his defense, Boulware blamed his upskirt peeping on an “open relationship” with a younger woman, introducing him to a “swinging lifestyle” that included filming themselves having sex. But that relationship is over now, the court notes, so, hey, no problem.

The bar disciplinary board noted in its report to the court that it believed  a more lenient approach to punishing Boulware was called for because of those “mitigating circumstances.”  Lawyers are, as everyone knows, putty in the hands of swinging young women, and this always results in them shooting up other women’s skirts.

I feel like I am losing my mind. Continue reading →

Jim Ardis, Mayor of Peoria, Uses The Police To Crush A Social Media Critic, But Never Mind, It’s Not Important Because He’s Not Racist

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

"OK, we know you have tweets in there! We're coming in..."

“OK, we know you have tweets in there! We’re coming in…”

This story is obviously trivial, because the news media doesn’t think it’s worth getting upset about. After all, it doesn’t involve race:

“PEORIA — Police searched a West Bluff house Tuesday and seized phones and computers in an effort to unmask the author of a parody Twitter account that purported to be Mayor Jim Ardis. The account — known as @Peoriamayor on the popular social media service that limits entries to 140 characters — already had been suspended for several weeks when up to seven plainclothes police officers executed a search warrant about 5:20 p.m. at 1220 N. University St. Three people at the home were taken to the Peoria Police Department for questioning. Two other residents were picked up at their places of employment and taken to the station, as well. One resident — 36-year-old Jacob L. Elliott — was booked into the Peoria County Jail on charges of possessing 30 to 500 grams of marijuana and possessing drug paraphernalia, but no arrests were made in connection with the Twitter account.”

The Twitter account was obviously a parody, if not an especially deft or clever one. After all, one would have to be a hopeless doofus, and an unusually dim one at that, to believe that the mayor of any city, even Toronto’s ridiculous Rob Ford, would happily tweet about his own drug use, crimes and corruption like the Twitter avatar of the Peoria mayor did.

Yet here was Mayor Ardis’s justification to reporters for his jaw-dropping abuse of power:

“I still maintain my right to protect my identity is my right. Are there no boundaries on what you can say, when you can say it, who you can say it to? You can’t say (those tweets) on behalf of me. That’s my problem. This guy took away my freedom of speech.”

Uh-huh. Show me a how “this guy” broke any law that justifies a police raid, you unbelievably arrogant, incompetent fascist.

Some observations: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Republican Governors Association…And An Integrity Test For Chris Christie

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

This ugly beast keeps raising its head out of the muck, and it is the duty of every citizen, Republican or Democrat, who believes in justice and due process under law to beat it back with heavy clubs.

The Republican Governors Association is defending one of its own, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, with a series of ads attacking state Sen. Vincent Sheheen, an attorney who is her Democratic opposition in the gubernatorial race. The message of the ad, as summarized by  a voice-over, is that “Sheheen defended violent criminals who abused women and went to work setting them free.”

False. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

“Shouldn’t we be equally angered by the fact that his private, intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media? Didn’t we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen’s privacy in such an un-American way? Although the impact is similar to Mitt Romney’s comments that were secretly taped, the difference is that Romney was giving a public speech. The making and release of this tape is so sleazy that just listening to it makes me feel like an accomplice to the crime. We didn’t steal the cake but we’re all gorging ourselves on it. So, if we’re all going to be outraged…Let’s be outraged that private conversations between people in an intimate relationship are recorded and publicly played. Let’s be outraged that whoever did the betraying will probably get a book deal, a sitcom, trade recipes with Hoda and Kathie Lee, and soon appear on “Celebrity Apprentice” and “Dancing with the Stars.”‘

–—Basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, in an essay pointing out some of  hypocrisies and excesses in the reactions to the Donald Sterling saga.

"Gotcha! He's screwed now...but he's a racist scumbag, so it's perfectly OK."

“Gotcha! He’s screwed now…but he’s a racist scumbag, so it’s perfectly OK.”

Good for Kareem. I was just about to make this point myself, and preparing to be pilloried for making excuses for a racist. Kareem is a lot bigger than I am, and I’m happy to stand behind him.

I watched two African-American lawyers on CNN today erupt in over-the-top outrage that has become the norm in the “finger-wagging Olympics” that Abdul-Jabbar decries in the rest of his article. One of the lawyers called Sterling’s remarks defamatory—“defamatory?” Sterling didn’t say a word that was negative about blacks; he just said he didn’t want his girl friend taking photos with them. His comments constitute smoking gun proof of racial bias, sure, but they aren’t “defamatory.” The other lawyer called them “the most vile, disgusting...” on and on and on, comments that he had ever heard.  Really? I doubt that. You know, once you award the prize to Sterling’s racist comments, you have no more superlatives left  for really horrible racist remarks. The two sportswriters, Christine Brennan and Bill Rhoden, who preceded my commentary on NPR today, did the same thing. It was a contest over who could express the most outrage.

It is a small surprise, then, in this hyper-charged atmosphere, that the conduct of V. Stiviano is getting an ethics pass, as if betrayal doesn’t matter as long as the betrayed party is despicable, and what she did was justified because she exposed a racist to the world. It’s not justified. The ends don’t justify the means, when the means are betrayal and mean-spirited vengeance, and when the methods used threaten to become a social norm, turning American homes and bedrooms into Stalinesque trap where no secret is safe. We’ve seen this practice before and I’ve condemned it before: the Harvard Law student turned into a campus pariah by a jealous rival circulating a private e-mail to the people most likely to be offended by it; Alec Baldwin’s daughter releasing private communications with her intemperate father to harm his reputation; Mel Gibson’s girlfriend doing the same; e-mail jokes being intercepted and sent to political enemies as a tool of personal destruction; clumsy suitors having their fumbles turned into national ridicule by the objects of their affection. Continue reading →