Law & Law Enforcement

As the Biden Campaign Slaps Itself on Its Metaphorical Forehead For Not Thinking of This First…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

We should have seen this coming. Maybe you did.

Pikesville High School’s athletic director Dazhon Darien was arrested yesterday after an investigation revealed that he used AI technology to created the fake audio clip above of the school’s principal, Eric Eiswert, ranting about black students and Jews. Darien, who is black, has been charged with disrupting school activities: of course the audio clip using the principal’s voice “went viral”and Eiswert, who is white, was widely condemned by the Baltimore County community. The school had to add police personnel for security and additional counselors. Here is a typical reaction to the clip:

Darien has also charged been charged with theft, retaliating against a witness and stalking. Good.

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Remove This Judge!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The Dexter Taylor case raises interesting Second Amendment issues to be sure.

A New York jury found Taylor guilty of second-degree criminal possession of a loaded weapon, four counts of third-degree criminal possession of a weapon, five counts of criminal possession of a firearm, second-degree criminal possession of five or more firearms, unlawful possession of pistol ammunition, violation of certificate of registration, prohibition on unfinished frames or receivers. Now Taylor, a 52-year-old African-American software engineer, is on Rikers Island waiting to be sentenced. He became interested in gunsmithing as a hobby years ago, but a joint ATF/NYPD task force discovered he was legally buying gun parts from various companies and began investigating him, leading to a SWAT raid and his arrest. His legal team explains his side of the case here.

That’s not the focus of this post, however. This is: during his trial, Judge Abena Darkeh allegedly said at one point, “Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York.” Darkeh was appointed by New York City’s crypto-communist Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2015.

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The Explanation For Everything That Afflicts Americans of Color Is Systemic Racism, Part II: Botched Executions

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

A report released last week by Reprieve, a human rights group that opposes the death penalty apparently shows that the lethal injections of convicted murderers are botched more than twice as often as the executions of white convicts. Spinning, the New York Times says, “That finding builds on a wealth of research into racial disparities in how the U.S. judicial system administers the death penalty. The proportion of Black people on death rows is far higher than their share of the population as a whole.”

“We know that there’s racism in the criminal justice system,” said Maya Foa, an executive director of Reprieve. “We know it’s there in the capital punishment system, from who gets arrested, who gets sentenced, all of it. This is, though, the first time that it’s been looked at in the context of the execution itself.”

To start with, they don’t “know” that at all. It is a self-perpetuating theory built on other debatable assumptions, such as believing that the disproportionate number of blacks on Death Row, and in the U.S. prison system generally, is because a disproportionate number of blacks commit crimes that legitimately put them there. Second, how exactly does doing a bad job killing a condemned prisoner show racial bias?

More from the Times:

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This Time I WANT to Defend Donald Trump…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The almost unanimous mainstream media mockery of former President Trump briefly snoozing during the kangaroo court “hush money” trial isn’t the most noxious example of biased, hostile news media coverage as the Axis attempts to, again, clothesline the American leader so many of them have pledged to destroy (Hi there, NPR!) , but it’s particularly contrived and ignorant. Attention should be paid: these are the people crippling democracy while claiming that they want to save it.

The idea, of course, is tit-for-tat: Republicans and conservatives (along with anyone with eyes and ears who isn’t so biased they can’t think) have been pointing out the obvious crisis that the man supposedly overseeing our government is failing mentally and physically, unable to keep a full schedule or speak coherently, almost certainly operating with a metaphorical hand shoved up into his suit and head to give the (barely credible illusion) that he is really calling the shots, in thrall to a dangerous far left cabal, and too old to be safely entrusted with the Presidency even if all of the forgoing weren’t true. Therefore the counter argument, juvenile as it is (“So’s your old man!”) is to default to “wahataboutism” (as well as the usual anti-Trump Big Lies). Trump’s too old! Trump’s no more able than Biden!

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Ethics Observations on the Trump “Hush Money” Trial

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Last week Jonathan Turley issued a thorough indictment of the trial in Manhattan, which he described as “a clear example of the weaponization of the criminal justice system.” The George Washington University law professor has been saying this from the beginning about Alvin Bragg’s partisan prosecution, and it should be self-evident: a criminal case relying on the slimier-than-slime, convicted perjurer and disbarred lawyer Michael Cohen as an essential witness should never be pursued, and it is a violation of prosecutorial ethics to do so.

I was surfing between various news networks’ analyses of the case, and only the usually silly “Fox and Friends” crew stated the most important conclusion that the others carefully avoided. It’s a political prosecution, and the purpose is to get a conviction by any means possible, even one tainted and sure to be overturned, so the Democrats can run against Trump as a “convicted felon.” Justice has nothing to do with it, as Turley’s careful assessment makes clear.

The other purpose is to interfere with the certain Republican candidate’s ability to campaign, because he otherwise has the energy and ability to campaign, while his Democratic opposition does not. Yes, the Democrats are interfering with the 2024 election and attempting to rig it even as in other prosecutions and in campaign attacks, they claim Trump is an existential danger to democracy and that his claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” are “baseless.” The unethical conduct of the Democrats in prosecutions like the “hush money” trial is itself a rebuttal of that statement. If I had to define “hypocrisy,” I couldn’t come up with a better example than that.

The question this week was whether it is fair to try Donald Trump in New York City. That’s easy: no. All of the lawfare cases are calculated to go to trial in communities extremely hostile to Trump: New York, D.C., and Fulton County, Georgia, the solid Blue heart of a mostly conservative state. Given the stakes and the defendant, judges should move all of the cases, just as the trial of Derek Chuavin and the three other cops implicated in George Floyd’s death should have been moved out of the Twin Cities, if the objective had been a fair trial rather than to mollify Black Lives Matters.

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In Brazil, Life Imitates Really Stupid Art: “Weekend at Bernie’s”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

One of the dumbest popular movies ever was 1989’s “Weekend at Bernie’s,” in which two guys haul around their dead boss pretending he’s alive—it isn’t worth my time to explain why they do this. I have a fertile dark sense of humor, but I couldn’t finish watching the thing. It’s a ridiculous premise (Terry Kiser, playing the dead Bernie, steals the movie, which should tell you something), but somehow this junk it clicked with audiences. (The sequel not so much, a perfect example of going to the well once too often). But who suspected that the movie would inspire a Brazilian scamster?

Police say that Erika de Souza Vieira Nunes wheeled a corpse into a Rio de Janeiro bank this month claiming that the late 68-year-old Paulo Roberto Braga was her uncle and in need of a bank loan. Nunes had to support Braga’s lolling head with her hand to keep it from tipping to the side as he showed no signs of life (I can’t find out if Paulo was wearing sunglasses). The staff expressed their concerns about him, but Nunes just said her uncle was quiet by nature.

“Uncle, are you listening? You need to sign. If you don’t sign it, there’s no way,” she was heard telling the wheelchair-bound corpse. “I can’t sign for you, what I can do I’ll do. Sign here, same as the document. Sign so you don’t give me any more headaches.” Then: “Uncle, are you feeling something? He doesn’t say anything, that’s just how he is…If you’re not okay, I’m going to take you to the hospital. Do you want to go to the Emergency Room  again?” But one of the tellers had called the police, and the responding officers placed Nunes under arrest when they arrived. Sure enough, Brazilian Bernie was dead, and had been dead for hours, medical personnel determined. Using a body this way isn’t just unethical, it’s illegal. (But funny!… or at least funnier than the movie.)

She wasn’t his niece, either.

Ethics and Columbo’s First Name

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

This goes into the Maslow’s Hammer file, as in “If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

I have been watching all the original “Columbo” episodes, first because they’re still worth watching, second because Grace and I used to watch them when picking something else was too much trouble and we couldn’t agree, third because Spuds likes Columbo’s dog (a Basset Hound), and fourth, because they usually distract me from stuff I don’t want to think about and leave me relaxed for a while, unlike, say, watching the Red Sox. As I finished the seven seasons, I wondered if I had ever heard Peter Falk’s character called anything but “Columbo” or “Lieutenant” on the show. My research revealed that I had not: the character’s creators Richard Levinson and William Link deliberately kept the eccentric sleuth’s first name a secret as one of the show’s quirks, and were adamant: nobody should ever speak his first name.

This raises the question of whether a character who only exists in television episodes where his first name is never mentioned has a first name, but that’s not an ethical question. However, the saga of Columbo’s first name did tick a few ethics boxes.

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Never Mind NPR: No One Should Trust the New York Times After Its “Get Trump!” Editorial

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Ethics Villain? “Bias makes you stupid”? “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!”? Unethical Quote of the Month? Oh, let’s start with that one:

“Donald Trump, who relentlessly undermined the justice system while in office and since, is enjoying the same protections and guarantees of fairness and due process before the law that he sought to deny to others during his term.”

—-The New York Times editorial board, in yesterday’s biased, manipulative, Trump-Deranged misinformation-fest titled, “Donald Trump and American Justice”

This is no more and no less that a “WE HATE YOU TRUMP! HATE HATE HATE!” statement. As President, Trump never did anything to “deny fairness and due process” to “others.” The claim to the contrary not journalism and it’s not punditry. It is just hurling accusations without support. Yet the Times editorial board never protested when President Obama used his “bully pulpit” to suggest that American citizens were guilty of crimes before they had been tried or even charged, as in the case of George Zimmerman. The editorial provides no examples or evidence to support the statement, because there aren’t any.

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Comment of the Day: “A Tragedy in the Czech Republic Reveals the Pro-Abortion Hypocrisy”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

This excellent Comment of the Day (which I happen to agree with completely, though that is never a requirement for COTDs) was sparked by a statement by esteemed EA squid, Extradimensional Cephalopod. This seem like a propitious time to salute EC, who is very thoughtful on this classic ethics conflict issue, for alerting me to a Zoom debate on abortion held by his group, Braver Angels (“leading the nation’s largest cross-partisan, volunteer-led movement to bridge the partisan divide…”).

Here is jeffguinn’s Comment of the Day on the post, “A Tragedy in the Czech Republic Reveals the Pro-Abortion Hypocrisy,” which appeared here on April 10:

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Extradimensional Cephalopod said: It sounds like you’re presupposing the existence of a person who is killed in that situation. I think it’s simple enough to understand that people live in human brains, and if a human body hasn’t developed a brain, that means a person cannot yet have started to live in that body. Does that make sense? 

Presuming the concept of personhood is morally relevant, then it makes sense. That presumption is the entire basis upon which the pro-choice point of view rests. 

Accept as presented the assumption that personhood is an objectively definable state before which there is no ethical alarm set off by choosing an abortion.

Even granting without dissent that most essential assumption gains nothing.

Existence preceding personhood — the interval between achieving that status and conception — still has precisely two ways of ending: natural cause, or homicide. There is no other option.

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Apparently the News Media Has Decided That It Was Time For Another Ferguson-Style Phony Racist Police Story

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This kind of journalism goes well beyond unethical to near evil.

Here are the bare facts about the death of 26-year-old Dexter Reed on March 21, 2024, after his car was pulled over by Chicago police. He had been arrested on July 13, 2023 and charged with felony aggravated unlawful use of a weapon. Reed had also been arrested on April 20, 2023 and charged with retail theft. After Reed was stopped on March 21 of this year, he refused to obey officers’ commands, and then started shooting. One shot wounded a Chicago police officer. Four officers returned fire, and Reed died in the exchange.

Now here is how the Washington Post began telling the story, in reports this week with these headlines: “Videos show Chicago police fired nearly 100 shots over 41 seconds during fatal traffic stop,” and “Police fire 96 shots in 41 seconds, killing Black man during traffic stop.”

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