Law & Law Enforcement

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:

***

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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That Arizona Abortion Decision…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This story is straightforward and ethically simple. Apparently neither Republicans, nor Democrats, nor abortion activists, nor the President, not the news media is capable or willing to say so. I guess that leaves it up to me.

When the constantly legislating Supreme Court of the Sixties and Seventies illegally made up a Constitutional right that didn’t exist—the right to have an abortion limited only by the Supreme Court’s arbitrary limit based on that decade’s belief regarding “viability”,””— in its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, it stole away the power to make laws regulating abortion in the states. This, in turn rendered unenforceable a law in Arizona dating from its days as a territory in 1864 (Arizona didn’t become a state until 1912) that almost completely banned abortion. The law was still valid in 1973; laws passed by the territorial government were all grandfathered into the state statute book, and nobody disputed that they had to be treated like any other law until such laws were amended or repealed.

When the Supreme Court correctly if ridiculously tardily declared Roe to be the bad law, bad theory and irresponsible power grab by SCOTUS that it was in the Dobbs decision overturning it, that Arizona law was, as Dr. Frankenstein would say, “Alive! It’s alive!” And so it was. The beginning of the majority opinion in Planned Parenthood et al v Kristin Mayes/Mayes Hazelrigg tells you pretty much all you need to know, though reading the whole opinion and its dissents in the 4-2 ruling is worth the time. The opinion begins,

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Rueful Observations on a Former O.J. Juror’s 2016 Admission

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

O.J. Simpson’s death this week brought back lots of bad memories—I can’t think of a good one—and a lot of familiar spin and dubious exclamations. One disturbing moment it brought back into the spotlight was the moment above, when in 2016, the ESPN series “O.J.: Made in America” showed Carrie Bess, one of the Simpson jurors, stating that her jury voted to acquit O.J. not because the jury didn’t think he was guilty, but because they sought “payback” for the police beating of Rodney King.

The whole exchange after the interviewer asks, “Do you think there are members of the jury that voted to acquit OJ because of Rodney King?”

Bess: Yes.
Interviewer: You do?
Bess: Yes.
Interviewer: How many of you do you think felt that way?
Bess: Oh, probably 90% of them.
Interviewer: 90 %! Did you feel that way?
Bess: Yes.
Interviewer: That was payback.
Bess: Uh-huh.
Interviewer: Do you think that’s right?

And the ex-juror shrugs.

Nice.

Observations:

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More Naming Ethics: Oakland’s Airport

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Among the eight posts on Ethics Alarms officially filed under “naming ethics” controversies there are four children (“Hades,” “Adolf,” a suicide in the family…), college buildings, helicopters, a mountain, and a law school. To that select group we now add an airport, and this case looks suspiciously like deliberate mischief if one is conspiratorially inclined.

I am not, of course.

Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland that “There is no there there,” and apparently the Port of Oakland Commission wants to embrace that description. It is preparing to rename the Oakland airport, currently “Oakland International Airport,” to “San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport.” This would seem to intentionally encourage confusion with the better-known (and more heavily used) San Francisco International Airport, just across the bridge and 25 miles away. Before it started falling apart in chunks thanks to being nearly at Grand Zero in The Great Stupid, San Francisco was the glamorous, popular, golden girl on campus and poor Oakland was her fat, homely girlfriend.

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This Lawyer’s Incredible Ignorance Prompts Me to Propose a New Standard For Disbarment

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

That’s the outspoken, racist, Dunning-Kruger suffering lawyer on “The View,” Sunny Hostin, saying out loud and on national TV that climate change causes eclipses (yes, also earthquakes, but we’ve already heard public figures make fools of themselves on that topic, like here and here…). This was so bad that even Whoopie felt compelled to correct her: Whoopie’s problem is that she’s uneducated, but she’s still easily the smartest lady on “The View,” which admittedly is faint praise.

We could have an entertaining debate over whose statement is more idiotic, Rep. Jackson Lee’s claim that the moon is “mostly gas,” of this head-exploder from Hostin. But that’s not the point of this post.

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