Law & Law Enforcement

The Zumba Instructor’s List and Public Shaming In Maine: Choose Your Ethical System

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

What those Zumba ads never told you…

Kennebunk, Maine’s popular Zumba dance instructor Alexis Wright and her “business partner” are being charged with solicitation and prostitution. Now the Maine Supreme Judicial Court is about to decide whether  Wright’s substantial client list should go on the public record, as it will unless the court agrees to put it and its names under seal.  Defense attorneys will argue that the harm that will result from allowing Wright’s “johns” to be outed to their families, employers and neighbors is too great. “We think there’s a really important principle at stake here: These people are presumed innocent,” defense attorney Stephen Schwartz said. “Once these names are released, they’re all going to have the mark of a scarlet letter, if you will.” Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Vice-President Joe Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

“With regard to the assault on the Catholic Church, let me make it absolutely clear. No religious institution, Catholic or otherwise, including Catholic Social Services, Georgetown Hospital, Mercy — any hospital — none has to either refer contraception. None has to pay for contraception. None has to be a vehicle to get contraception in any insurance policy they provide. That is a fact. That is a fact.”

—– Vice-President Joe Biden, in a rare moment during Wednesday’s Vice Presidential candidates debate when he wasn’t interrupting, mocking, shouting, or otherwise setting new lows for national debate civility and decorum, on the topic of the Administration’s contraception and abortion mandate. The problem: it isn’t a fact. In fact, it isn’t true at all.

I was not going to touch on the substance of any of the debates, because I do not want to play the “fact check” game that has already warped the campaign and given partisan journalists the opportunity to misrepresent any the statement of any politician—usually a Republican—whom they disagree with as “a lie.” Perhaps inspired by this trend, the Obama-Biden campaign’s strategy has devolved into calling Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan “liars” when 1) they may be mistaken, they may be inexact, they may be overstating, and they may be wrong, but are not lying, and 2) President Obama and Vice-President Obama, not to mention other Democrats involved in the campaign, have not set their own bars for accuracy, honesty and fairness any higher than the GOP side. But the refrain of “Liar!” has been so emphatic and repetitive that the fans of the Democratic ticket are adopting it as a rallying cry, usually without the slightest idea of whether there have been any actual lies or not. Meanwhile, the tactic demeans the electoral process and our democracy. Columnist Dan Henniger expressed my feelings on this topic well when he wrote, before Wednesday’s debate: Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “’Miracle Flights’: More Air Travel Cheating”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Frequent commenter Barry Deutsch provides some useful counterweight (as usual) to an Ethics Alarms post, this one regarding fake handicapped flyers in airports. Here is his Comment of the Day, on the recent post, “Miracle Flights”: More Air Travel Cheating”:

“Eh. I’m sure some people do cheat – but I’m also sure that some people who the article implies are cheaters, aren’t doing anything of the sort.

“I’m not usually bothered by the five-minute walk from when I get out of security to my gate in the Portland airport. But standing on the security line is much harder. First of all, it can easily take up to 20 minutes if the airport is crowded, so I’m standing for much longer. And even if it’s only five minutes, standing still (with occasional shuffling) is just much, much harder on me than walking is. My bad knee and heel, normally slight nuisances that I ignore while walking, sometimes scream with pain waiting on line. Continue reading →

“Miracle Flights”: More Air Travel Cheating

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

I wondered about this.

“If you don’t tell anyone that I won a Silver in the Olympic hurdles this summer, there’s 50 bucks in it for you… Deal?”

When I was recovering from a hip replacement, and even before, when it was getting painful to walk, I requested wheel chairs from the airlines when I had to fly. It was wonderful. A nice attendant whisked me in front of the lines and through security, and I was also the first person on the plane. Nobody ever asked me what was the nature of my disability; they just trusted that I wouldn’t engage in such a dastardly act as to fake being hobbled—you know, just like nobody would pretend to be someone else to steal a vote. Never happens—why do anything to  check? The system—I mean the wheelchair system, now, not the voting honor system—seemed ripe for abuse to me, but before today, I had never heard of anyone exploiting it.

According to a recent report, a lot of people do. Continue reading →

What’s Wrong With The Anti-Jihad Ads?

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Mona Eltahawy, as police infringe on her exercise of the rarely invoked Eleventeenth Amendment, which protects a citizen’s right to spray any message she doesn’t want others to see with pink. paint.

The controversial ads went up in DC Metro stations today, after efforts by the city to have them blocked were declared, properly, to be unconstitutional by a sane and objective judge. The ads read,

“In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”

The controversy over the subway ads started heating up in the wake of the “Innocence of Muslims” debacle, when a crude internet trailer for a crude anti-Islam movie was used by extremists and fanatics around the world as an excuse to demonstrate against or attack U.S. embassies. The Obama Administration’s less-than-ringing defense of free speech in its efforts to minimize the violence had the undesired effect of emboldening domestic censors, among them  Mona Eltahawy, a free-lance Egypt-born journalist, who spray-painted one of the anti-jihad ads, the creation of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, in a New York subway station where it had been hung on September 24. She argued, as she sprayed, that censoring someone else’s protected speech was her First Amendment right. No, it’s not. A 2011 naturalized citizen, she needs to bone up on her American Constitution before she speaks at any more college campuses. She was arrested. Good. Continue reading →

ARRGH! “The Good Wife” Did It AGAIN!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

For God’s sake, Will! A) You just got off one suspension for unethical conduct—what are you DOING? B) They had to have taught you better than this at Georgetown Law!

“It” is misleading Americans who may be in litigation requiring settlement and who don’t know that lawyers cannot, must not and largely do not agree to financial settlement terms without getting the approval of their clients. I have dubbed this “The Hollywood Lawyer Fallacy,” and Will (Josh Charles) just did it again.

I know—every lawyer TV drama skips this part, as does virtually every movie about lawyers. Yes, I know it is done for pacing and dramatic purposes, that having a scene where the lawyers asks her client, “They’ve offered this amount, and I think we should take it, OK?” and the client says, “Sounds great!” just slows things down. But here is what repeatedly watching this inaccurate portrayal of  lawyers breaking one of the cardinal rules of the profession does: it sets up clients of incompetent lawyers to be misled, manipulated, and cheated. As I wrote the last time the otherwise ethically astute CBS drama did this while I was watching:  Continue reading →

The Times Square Kiss, and Feminist Blogs’ Fanatic Crime Against Joy

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

The blog posts at issue make me angry. Usually it is silly to be angry about mere opinions, I know. However, the opinion registered by “Lori” on the blog Feministing, taking her cue from another feminist blogger, is a symptom, a symptom of the scourge of pernicious, political-correctness zealots, who refuse to recognize the important distinctions between malice and human beings being human, and seek to wipe out that distinction by distortion, sophistry, historical revisionism and bullying.

The bloggers’ target is an iconic photograph from the heart of American history: LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt’s shot of an American sailor kissing a nurse on August 14, 1945, in a moment of jubilation on Victory over Japan Day in the heart of New York City. Ah, but all is not as innocent and blissful as it would appear. Some historians think they have finally confirmed the identities of the mysterious couple (the photographer never identified his subjects) as Greta Zimmer Friedman, a dental nurse at the time, and George Mendonsa, a sailor. [Despite the assertions of the bloggers and the historians, we can never know for sure. There were apparently many similar pairings that day, and several couples have credibly claimed to be those kissing through the decades.] Greta was recently interviewed, and noted that that she was just grabbed by a sailor she didn’t know and kissed. “That man was very strong. I wasn’t kissing him. He was kissing me,” Greta told interviewers.

Ah HA! declare the feminist bloggers. Don’t you see, you addled, male-culture dominated, female-subjugating fools? This wasn’t a pure expression of joy in the long-awaited  end of a world conflict that had killed millions and laid waste to much of the planet! Oh, no! The famous photo was something dark and sinister: Continue reading →

One For The “Innocent Until Proven Guilty” Crowd

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Stop scaring my dog!

A commenter recently pulled out the hoary and almost always misused “innocent until proven guilty” line, which reliably makes me scream, frightening the dog and the neighbors. Thus I was happy to see this September 28 ruling by the Louisiana Supreme Court, which found that Philip Pilie, a 2007 University of Georgia School of Law  who passed the bar examination in 2009, lacked the character and fitness to be admitted to practice in the state, despite the fact that he was not convicted of the crime that resulted in his disqualification.

Why? Because he did it, that’s why. Pilie contacted what he thought was a 15-year-old girl online and arranged to have sex. She was, unfortunately for Pilie, really a big, hairy, middle-aged man looking for predators who like to have sex with under-age girls. Pilie  was arrested at the planned rendezvous and charged with two  felonies,  computer-aided solicitation of a minor and attempted indecent behavior with a minor.

Pilie negotiated a deal with the district attorney to avoid prosecution. He completed a pre-trial diversion program including counseling, and all charges  were dropped. Pilie took and passed the bar exam, but was informed  in March 2009 that he lacked the character and fitness for admission to practice, because he trolled on computers for young girls to have sex with, by his own admission. His appeal to Louisiana’s highest court failed, twice.

In the latest decision, the court said that Pilie’s lack of a criminal conviction made no difference in its reasoning. “Had petitioner been a practicing attorney at the time of his misconduct, it is very likely he would have been permanently disbarred,” it wrote. “Given this fact, we can conceive of no circumstance under which we would ever admit petitioner to the practice of law.” Pilie was permanently barred from ever again seeking admission, without ever being “convicted in a court of law.” Continue reading →

Jury Summation: 20 Conclusions Regarding Elizabeth Warren’s Law License Controversy

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

1. Elizabeth Warren may have engaged in the unauthorized practice of law in Massachusetts at various times.

2. It is not as clear that she has done so as her primary accuser, Prof. Jacobson, appears to believe, nor is it as certain that she has not done so as her reflexive defenders assert.

3. If she did practice Massachusetts law without a license, it is very unlikely that she did so intentionally.

4. It is also likely that at this moment, she herself is unsure whether she did or not.

5. I very much doubt that if she did as Prof. Jacobson asserts,  that would lead to discipline by the Massachusetts Bar. The discussion of the issues surrounding Warren’s situation make it clear that a) the whole area of unauthorized practice when it involves state and Federal law is relatively unresolved and murky, with even  legal ethics experts in disagreement, b) it would be impossible to separate the professional regulation of the matter from its political content, and 3) any time members of the disciplinary committee slap their foreheads and say, “Damned if I know!” when the discussion turns to what the rules require, discipline is unlikely, and properly so.

6. The fact that Warren may have blundered into UPL between the varying requirements of her two bar memberships and her intermittent practice in Massachusetts does not make her unfit to practice law.

7. It may, combined with her unwillingness to candidly and thoroughly reveal all documents that bear on the issue, call into question her fitness to be a U.S. Senator, especially one running on the proposition that regulations on another profession (the financial sector) need to be strictly followed and tightly enforced. It definitely is worth exploring and explaining to voters, which the mainstream media clearly does not intend to do. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Is This A Trustworthy Lawyer?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“Your Honor! I object!”

Sarah Naughton, for 8 years a Cook County (Chicago) prosecutor, was arrested and charged after she and a male companion caused a disturbance in an adult store when they were asked to leave ( they appear to have been bombed). After banging on the windows and calling out obscenities, the two got in a tussle with the store’s employees, and Sarah allegedly bit one of them on the leg.  She also apparently pulled the infamous, “Do you know who I am?” card, to which I guess I would have answered, “Lindsay Lohan?”

Here is video of the aftermath: the prosecutor is the one wailing and insulting the officers as she sits handcuffed on the pavement.

She has been placed on administrative leave for now.

I know: we all have our bad days and nights, and some of us don’t handle liquor very well. Naughton apparently hasn’t done anything like this before; on the other hand, her conduct does not exactly burnish the reputation of Chicago Law enforcement. Your Ethics Quiz, as we head into an ethically challenging weekend (as they all are):

Does this unfortunate private behavior in this one incident show that she lacks sufficient trustworthiness and professionalism to represent the Cook County prosecutor’s office? Continue reading →