Law & Law Enforcement

Unethical Quote of the Week (Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck Division): George Zimmerman

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

“I feel like it was all God’s plan…I do wish there was something, anything I could have done that wouldn’t have put me in a position where I would have had to take a life.” 

—–George Zimmerman, shooter of Trayvon Martin, now facing charges of second degree murder, in an interview this week with Sean Hannity on Fox News

In the sage and concise words of frequent commenter and Ethics Alarms critic tgt, who brought this quote to my attention ( the idiocy of a murder defendant submitting to a televised interview was too much for me, and I could not bear to watch it):

“Whether it was murder or self defense, don’t pretend you were just a bystander in the process. You absolutely could have done other things. If you think you made the right choices, defend them. Don’t pretend they were out of your hands.”

And the ethics train wreck rolls on…

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Pointer: tgt

Facts: Orlando Sentinel

Graphic: Without a Peer

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

 

Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck Update: The Unethical “Witness Nine”

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

She looks credible to me!

Now where were we?

When we last left this ongoing orgy of unethical conduct in every corner, Mr. and Mrs. Zimmerman were caught lying to the judge about their financial resources, claiming to be destitute for bail purposes, and trying to hide all the money that had come in through contributions to their website. Now the judge is buying a ticket, and has ordered the release of the tape recordings of a woman only known now as “Witness 9.”

Witness 9 has a story that is old, irrelevant, but certainly calculated to inflame the public and the jury pool against the defendant. She says…

  • Zimmerman began sexually molesting Witness 9 when she was six years old and Zimmerman was about 8.
  • It continued until she when she was 16.
  • The molestation included forced kissing, fondling, groping, and inserting his fingers into her vagina.
  •  “We would all lay in front of the TV” to watch movies, “and he would reach under the blankets and try to do things. … I would try to push him off, but he was bigger and stronger and older.”
  • Zimmerman’s family doesn’t “like black people if they don’t act like white people. They like black people if they act white.”
  •  Zimmerman also does not like blacks, though she personally she had never seen him disparage blacks or act as though he hated blacks.

Let’s see:

1. An allegation of sexual molestation that is decades old, very strange (Uh, why did you keep watching movies under a blanket with a molester for ten years, ma’am?), impossible to substantiate, and 100% irrelevant to the crime Zimmerman is charged with committing..

2. A bizarre allegation about Zimmerman’s family, that is incoherent. So do they “like” blacks, or don’t they? I don’t like whites who act like idiots. Does that make me racist? And what is “not acting like a white person,” anyway? Not listening to Donny Osmond music? Not playing cricket? What? Is wandering around  in the rain and looking like you are casing houses acting white, acting black, or just acting like a crook?

3. An assertion about Zimmerman’s opinions of blacks that the witness can’t support with any statements or conduct…

4. …that is apparently not based on any recent evidence.

In addition, we know nothing about this woman on which to assess her credibility, except that she has a grudge against George Zimmerman.

There is a technical term for testimony like this: garbage. It was no less than malicious to release it, and is proof, as if more was needed, that the prosecution in this case is not interested in justice, but serving the agenda of activists who have threatened social unrest and violence if Zimmerman isn’t summarily sacrificed on the altar of racial politics. Fair trial? Can’t risk that.

I suppose, in an ethics train wreck of six months duration, it shouldn’t be surprising that George Zimmerman is being railroaded.

CORRECTION: In the original version of this post, I wrote that Witness 9’s testimony was released by the prosecution, and laid blame on prosecutor Angela Corey, who has tried to poison the jury pool in this case already. A helpful commenter produced an earlier news report that indicates that both the defense and the prosecution opposed releasing the testimony.

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Source: Slate

Facts: Orlando Sentinel

Graphic: tramthuynh

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

London’s Curfew Fiasco: Sir Paul, The Boss, and Exception Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

It was the stuff of legends, the kind of moment that onlookers would cherish and tell their grandchildren about. American rock icon Bruce Springsteen was on a roll before a huge Hyde Park crowd, and suddenly he was joined on stage by Sir Paul McCartney. The two giants of rock and roll began spontaneously jamming, and then some bureaucrat who worked for the concert organizers pulled the plug, cutting off power because the concert was running over its permit allotment and a local sound curfew.

Good ethics can require knowing when rules and even laws should be stretched, amended, finessed, or even ignored. This takes some skill, of course, and some character. It is much easier, and certainly entails lower risk, to just go by the book, and permit no exceptions. It is also lazy, uncaring, and leads to needless fiascos like this one. Continue reading →

The University of Montana, Campus Rape, and the Penn State Disease

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The Justice Department is investigating this issue, so I am hardly going to get to the bottom of it in a blog post. But there is obviously a rape and sexual assault problem at the University of Montana, and to conclude that the administration is a large part of the problem doesn’t take much of investigation. This certainly appears to be a school suffering from the Penn State disease, in which the values of the institution place public relations, spin and, once again, football above the welfare of past, present and future victims.

Let us just begin with this salient fact:  and President Royce Engstrom still has his job. In February, a student who was a Saudi national was accused in two campus incidents, one involving a rape, and another involving sexual assault. Records show that the first action taken by the administration, in the person of now-retired UM Dean of Students Charles Couture, was to alert the accused, advise him, and suggest that he get out of Dodge before he could be arrested—which he did, fleeing to Saudi Arabia. The police didn’t learn about the complaints for a week, and by then the alleged student rapist was long gone. Then Engstrom had the jaw-dropping gall to tell the press that this was a good thing, and that his staff had acted in a “timely” and “appropriate” fashion. “We can let people know we have dealt with these (alleged assaults) and that particular perpetrator is gone,” Engstrom said.

In a word, unbelievable. Continue reading →

“Walking While Female”: What’s The Matter With Men, Anyway?

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

I just finished reading some of the posts on a Washington, D.C. site called Collective Action for Safe Spaces, and found myself simultaneously amazed, shocked, repulsed and depressed. Based on the posts from female victims of random acts in broad daylight raging from harassment to sexual assault, the unethical male treatment of women like prime grade beef on the hoof is far, far more common than I assumed, and raises a genuine question about what kind of values our culture teaches its men.

What would ever lead a man to decide that it was acceptable to pinch a woman’s derriere in a crowd? Or a cyclist to shove his hand up a woman’s skirt as he zipped by? Or a photographer to aim his zoom lens camera at multiple women’s busts in public? Apparently this conduct is so commonplace that many, even most, women don’t bother to report it, reasoning that the police have better things to do.

You know what? They don’t. Either the police have to enforce a woman’s right to enjoy life and appear in public without being sexually molested, or we need to pass laws the allow  anti-harassment enforcement by women and the men, if there are any, who possess a sense of decency and are willing to act decisively to stop the predators—and by that I mean breaking their faces. I cannot imagine anything more important than maintaining the cultural standard that harassing women, touching them without permission and making unwanted and unasked for sexual remarks to them is not merely rude and boorish, but a violation of basic human rights.

If this nation is really raising a bumper crop of men who think otherwise, and we seem to be, it is time for women and men alike to be vigorously non-partisan in rejecting and shunning writers, public figures, entertainers and next door neighbors who make it obvious in their speech and conduct that they believe women exist on earth for their denigration and pleasure. To pick the obvious example, Bill Maher has repeatedly referred to women on his HBO show “Real Time” as cunts, twats, bitches, and other misogynist terms. What message does is send that he keeps getting nominated for a Emmy? Why have Dan Rather, Charles M. Blow, Paul Begala, Andrew Sullivan, Catherine Crier, Michael Steele, and Eliot Spitzer—wait, scratch Eliot; I know the answer in his case—-appeared on Maher’s show, licked his boots, and endorsed his sick frat boy attitudes toward women and giving spiritual nourishment to our rising young rapists?

We have no ethical standards unless we are willing to stand up for them, enforce them, and refuse to tolerate anything less. It is dangerous to “walk while female” because both men and women do tolerate such despicable, primitive, joy obliterating conduct.

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Facts: Collective Action

Source:Washington Post

Graphic: Parterre

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

Unethical Quote of the Week: Tia Skinner

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Tia wonders why her family has abandoned her. Uh,…Tia? Aren’t you forgetting something?

“It’s been rough. It’s hard losing your whole family in a blink of an eye. It’s tough because that’s my family; they’re supposed to stay by you through thick and thin.”

—– Tia Skinner, a teenager serving life in prison for plotting a home invasion attack  that killed her father and seriously injured her mother, who was stabbed 25 times.

That’s right, Tia: it’s your family’s fault.

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Pointer: James Taranto

Facts and Graphic: Detroit Free Press

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

Ethics Train Wreck In A Little Teapot

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I don’t understand this story at all.*

Not THAT Larry Storch! That Larry Storch made sense to me.

Larry Storch is no relation to the late comedian of “F Troop” fame, but is a defiant, uncivil 89-year-old scofflaw who insists on driving around his North Carolina community with his sound system at eardrum-popping levels. “They’ve been giving me noise tickets for years,” Storch said. “I guess they thought their tickets would deter me, but every time I paid off a ticket I’d stop by the speaker place on the way home and add a little more boom to my zoom.” Good for you, Larry; by the way, you’re an asshole. His latest arrest for breaking noise ordinances brought him before a judge who was ready to throw the book at Storch, but who had a peculiar way of doing it. Lenoir County District Judge Robert T. Ironside—who is no relation to the wheelchair-bound Robert T. Ironside played by post- “Perry Mason” Raymond Burr in a CBS detective show—told him:

“You’ve come before this court many times over the years Mr. Storch. In the past I’ve fined you, sentenced you to community service, and at one point even forced you to watch the fourth hour of the ‘Today Show.’ Since none of those punishments have done anything to curb your jackassory behavior, I’ve decided to get medieval on where your butt — if you had one — would be.” Continue reading →

The Difference Between Unemployed Scientists and Unemployed Lawyers

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

A front page story in today’s Washington Post casts interesting perspective on an Ethics Alarms rumble that broke out here a couple of weeks ago. One of the many websites where underemployed, over-indebted law grads hang out to commiserate—sites with pathetic names like “butidideverythingrightorsoithought”—discovered a post from the days when people were taking Occupy Wall Street seriously, in which I chided a protester whose sign blamed his law school  for his failure to  find a job, without giving due weight to the fact that sitting in a park whining about his plight wasn’t doing him any good either. Suddenly Ethics Alarms experienced an avalanche of indignant and often personally insulting comments introducing me to the strange world of the JD conspiracy theorists, who maintain that law schools engaged in an intentional conspiracy or “scam” to gull naive college grads into believing that a law degree was a sure-thing ticket to Easy Street and six-figure starting salaries.

In the Post’s report, we learn that other advanced degree-holders, namely PhDs in scientific fields, are also unable to find work or toiling in fields unrelated to their degrees. The Post says:

“Traditional academic jobs are scarcer than ever. Once a primary career path, only 14 percent of those with a PhD in biology and the life sciences now land a coveted academic position within five years, according to a 2009 NSF survey. That figure has been steadily declining since the 1970s, said Paula Stephan, an economist at Georgia State University who studies the scientific workforce. The reason: The supply of scientists has grown far faster than the number of academic positions.”

Sounds a lot like the legal market to me! Continue reading →

Unethical Column of the Century: CNN’s L.Z. Granderson

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

OK, maybe I’m exaggerating.

But not much.

L.Z. Granderson’s role model. I’m not kidding.

In a horrifying opinion column, the regular CNN political pundit L.Z. Granderson evoked the virtues of public apathy and unchecked government conduct with warped logic and unethical rationalizations, to make the case that the public should merely shrug off scandals like “Fast and Furious.” I was only able to finish reading it without retching it by imagining Granderson’s motives for writing such mind- and culture-poisoning swill. At least, as an African-American journalist, a liberal and a Obama supporter (I know I repeat myself), he has the self-respect, fairness and integrity not to claim that critics of Attorney General Holder’s Waterloo are being racist. Like the race-baiters, however, he is in denial, and willing to throw principle to the wolves to protect the first African-American Attorney General, though far from the first corrupt and incompetent one.

In a column with the descriptive and idiotic title, “Don’t be nosy about Fast and Furious,” Granderson argues…

“…Times have changed. Yet, not everything is our business. And in the political arena, there are things that should be and need to be kept quiet…..there comes a point where the public’s right to know needs to take a back seat to matters like national security and diplomacy. Heads should roll because of the Fast and Furious debacle. We don’t need every detail of that operation to be made public in order for that to happen. If it were an isolated sting, maybe. But it is at least the third incarnation of a gun-running scheme stretching across two administrations, which means we could be pressing to open Pandora’s Box. We do not want to open Pandora’s Box, not about this and certainly not about a bunch of other potentially scandalous things the federal government has been involved with.” Continue reading →

Comment of the Day on “Ethics Quiz: Jury Nullification For A Molestation Victim”

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Here is the Comment of the Day, Eeyoure’s deliciously indignant dressing-down of the jury whose verdict was discussed in today’s post, “Ethics Quiz: Jury Nullification For A Molestation Victim”:

“The jury’s verdict was absolutely perverse.  The jury ignored truth about specific law for which they were responsible for finding guilt or innocence, where evidence existed beyond reasonable doubt that the law was broken.  Simultaneously, the jury concluded that irrelevant evidence, plus the defendant’s testimony, proved guilt beyond doubt of a person who was not charged, not on trial, for breaking of law for which the jury was not responsible for finding guilt or innocence.

“The jury’s verdict was the culmination of an orgy of medieval reparations-groupthink, a determined seizing of lowest available ground in the terrain of societal unrest.  The members of the jury made themselves a proud, self-serving, self-satisfying gang of “justice”-dolers, caught-up in extolling the glories of vengeance.  This was a jury that obviously considered with the utmost gravitas (that is sarcasm) the notion that “justice delayed is justice denied.”  No matter how long was delayed the justice THEY felt was due, they saw it as their sovereign right to determine that such justice would not be denied, and to determine who would deliver (that is, who did deliver) that justice, blameless.  (more sarcasm coming) What a shining moment in jury-rigged righting of historical wrongs! (end sarcasm)

“Well, chances are rather high that none of the jurors will ever read here.  So, they can just each go their merry way, keep marching merrily along as ignorantly and unthoughtfully as ever, proud of the “justice” they have served.  Without ever taking the simplest, tiny, extra step of considering, for example, by their own jury-“reasoning,” how their verdict thoroughly justifies any friends, allies, or sympathizers of the old man who was beaten in the retirement home stalking THEM (the jury members and their hero) for the rest of THEIR (the jurors’ and hero’s) days – then suddenly, at a convenient and opportune moment, beating every one of THEM every bit as savagely as was beaten the man by the assailant whom they let off the hook.

“With “justice” like this jury has upheld, who needs to hold a stinkin’ court?”