Law & Law Enforcement

The Murderer and the Governor

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

When a politician announces that he is taking a "moral stand," watch out.

Guess who has more integrity: Gary Haugen, the convicted double murderer whose scheduled execution in Oregon had been scheduled for next week, or Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber, who blocked his execution?

It’s Haugen. The resident of Oregon’s death row had waived his appeals and was voluntarily submitting to his court-decreed fate when Kitzhaber stepped in, declaring his moral objections to capital punishment. But like many politicians’ objections to that other divisive social policy issue, abortion, Kitzhaber’s supposedly moral stand has more fine print than a gym membership. He didn’t commute Haugen’s sentence, or end the death sentences of the other men who have been condemned. The Governor went half way, essentially staying the executions for the term of his governorship, and pledging to seek reforms of what he called a “broken system” in 2013. Why 2013? It’s after the election, of course. Continue reading →

Now THIS Is What They Used To Call “Appearance of Impropriety”…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

"So, Miss Scarlet!! At last you confess your guilt in this heinous crime! Now that that's over with, would you care to join me for dinner tonight?"

The prohibition against attorneys engaging in conduct that creates “the appearance of impropriety” was eliminated from the legal ethics rules (though not the judicial ethics rules) a long time ago, almost 30 years.  Periodically a case will arise in which its absence is felt. The nice thing about the appearance of impropriety category is that it was flexible enough to use to sanction lawyers who figured out ways to make the profession look slimy without running squarely afoul of other rules…like  San Diego prosecutor Ernie Marugg.

Marugg, it is alleged, used his defendants list as his little black book…seeking romantic relationships with the women he prosecuted after their trials were over. His habit was investigated one, but no specific ethical violation could be found. What would it be? Was he too easy on the women he was duty bound to prosecute zealously? One woman who pleaded guilty when Marugg prosecuted her  is now suing him, claiming that his personal  interest in her  caused him to be biased against her. Huh? How does that work? “You always hurt the one you love,” as the old song says? Continue reading →

Now Here’s A Terrible Idea: Mandated Disclosures for Photoshopped Images of Celebrities!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

And if you look real closely at the lower left corner, you'll read, "The model for Venus was a short, middle-aged bald man named Gino. His appearance was altered by the painter in the creation of this painting."

Here is another candidate for enshrinement in the Pantheon of Well- Intentioned But Terrible Ideas.

In an article published Monday in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” Dartmouth researchers Hany Farid, a professor of computer science, and Eric Kee, a doctoral student, propose a rating system of publicly displayed photographs of models, actors and celebrities to let viewers know exactly how and how much an image has been altered by photoshopping, airbrushing or other means.

“Impossibly thin, tall, and wrinkle- and blemish-free models are routinely splashed onto billboards, advertisements and magazine covers,” the two write. “The ubiquity of these unrealistic and highly idealized images has been linked to eating disorders and body-image dissatisfaction in men, women, and children.” In the interest of limiting the damage caused by unrealistic images of human beauty, the researchers argue that graphic images should include labels that disclose  “geometric adjustments” such as slimming legs, hips and arms, as well as adjusting facial symmetry—reducing a nose in size, or slightly enlarging eyes.  Users of such photos should also flag photometric adjustments that change the appearance of skin tone, blemishes and texture, such as wrinkles, dark circles under the eyes or cellulite, say the researchers.

Please, for the love of God, nobody introduce these guys to Sarah Deming and her lawyer, who are suing the distributers of the film “Drive” because the trailer was more exciting than the movie. And let us all remember this proposal when we are tempted to pooh-pooh accusations that the government is regulating creativity, commerce, art and enterprise right out of existence, and with them, individual liberty as well.The tea parties should use Farid and Kee’s article for recruitment. Continue reading →

Obamacare Recusal Wars: Right and Left Are Equally Deluded

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Note to Drudge: Cheering your boss's victories is not unethical. It's not unusual. It is not even meaningful. It's called "smart."

I hadn’t written about the dual efforts to knock Justice Kagan and Justice Thomas off the Supreme Court panel considering the constitutionality of Obamacare’s individual mandate, because it is so obviously politics masquerading as ethics. I also though they would stop soon, since there is no chance either Justice will recuse at this point, and neither should.

The controversy is still occupying newspapers, blogs and talking heads, however, so I suppose it is worth discussing, especially to make this point: what concerns those seeking recusal is that they know, or think they know, how each Justice will vote on the issue, and they want to rig the process by finding a technicality that will prevent one or the other from participating. Does anyone really think that Kagan’s previous work as Solicitor General under Obama will bias her already liberal leanings? No. Does anyone really believe that Clarence Thomas would vote for an interpretation of the Constitution that opens that door for Congress to demand that we buy whatever it tells us to, were he not trying to please his conservative wife? Tell me another. Both recusal arguments are intellectually dishonest attempts to interfere with full judicial consideration of a politically explosive matter. Continue reading →

The SAT Cheating Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Over at Curmudgeon Central, Rick Jones appropriately eviscerates the Educational Testing Service for its role—the role being negligent facilitator–in an unfolding scandal involving students cheating on their SATs by having surrogates take their tests. 20 people have been arrested thus far as either the fake test-taker of the fraudulent scholar paying for said test-taker, and Rick’s guess that there must be a hundred times the ETS’s estimate of 150 incidents of cheating on the SATs  is extremely conservative. The problem is that the SATs are taken under incredibly lax  security, and Rick reveals something I never would have suspected: if someone is caught cheating after the SAT service investigates, he or she is given a refund and allowed to take the test again—and no college is ever notified! Rick writes…

“…in a just universe, the cretinous yahoos at the CB/ETS who decided on this policy would lose their jobs, have “unethical moron” branded into their foreheads, and be publicly pilloried. Preferably literally.” Continue reading →

Ethical Quote of the Month: Newt Gingrich

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Good Newt (newtus virtuous), once believe to be extinct, was sighted in D.C.

“I do not believe that the people of the United States are going to take people who have been here a quarter century, who have children and grandchildren, who are members of the community, who may have done something 25 years ago, separate them from their families, and expel them. I do believe if you’ve been here recently and have no ties to the U.S., we should deport you. I do believe we should control the border. I do believe we should have very severe penalties for employers… I don’t see how  the party that says it’s the party of the family is going to adopt an immigration policy which destroys families that have been here a quarter century. And I’m prepared to take the heat for saying, let’s be humane in enforcing the law without giving them citizenship but by finding a way to create legality so that they are not separated from their families.”

—-GOP Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, telling CNN debate moderator Wolf “Blitz” Blitzer his approach to illegal immigration, and spitting into the wind of Tea Party and and conservative Republican ideology on the subject.

Continue reading →

Margaret Ann Haring Would Have Sent Elliot To Guantanamo Bay

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Quick...call 911!

Luckily, when Elliot had that weird mind-link thing with E.T. while the little alien was watching “The Quiet Man” on TV, and not only let all the frogs loose in his biology class but planted a major league lipper on a pre-teen classmate played by Erika Eleniak (later to prove Elliot’s exquisite taste by becoming a “Baywatch” pin-up) when the Duke smooched Maureen O’Hara, it was before the days of “no-tolerance” policies, and Ms. Haring wasn’t his teacher.

Not so lucky was the female student in a real life elementary school, who impulsively kissed a boy during a physical education class at Orange River Elementary School in Fort Myers, Florida. Haring saw her student’s vicious sexual assault, and called child welfare officials, who, rather than telling her she was out of her frickin’ mind, directed her to contact the sheriff. The school then reported the pre-teen moment of passion as a possible sex crime, according to the Lee County Sheriff’s Office. Continue reading →

Now THIS Really IS a Frivolous Lawsuit…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I have written here before that the legal ethics breach of filing a frivolous lawsuit (prohibited by Rule 3.1 in most state Rules of Professional Conduct) is almost impossible to accomplish, because it requires a lawyer to lack a good faith belief that the suit can prevail. Since bizarre and attenuated theories sometime do prevail, a law suit really has show no merit at all to prompt sanctions. Like this one, for instance. I quote from the Illinois Institute of Continuing Education’s summary:

“The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, acting sua sponte, found that the appeal filed by three attorneys in Gallop v. Cheney…, claiming that White House and military officials conspired to cover up government involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks was frivolous in that it was “brought without the slightest chance of success>’…The court found that the appeal contained a “comprehensive compilation of every rumor, report, statement, and anecdote that may reveal an inconsistency or omission” in official reports….The court stated that the misconduct was compounded by the filing of a motion to recuse the entire panel that was “peppered with disdainful and unsubstantiated conclusions about the panel members’ emotional stability and competence to serve objectively.” The motion accused the judges of having “severe bias, based in active personal emotions arising from the 9/11 attack . . . leading to a categorical prejudgment totally rejecting [Gallop’s] Complaint, out of hand and with palpable animus.”

“The court found the three attorneys jointly and severally liable for $15,000 in fines and ordered them to pay double the government’s costs for both the frivolous appeal and the recusal motion. The court also ruled that whenever one of the attorneys appears before any tribunal in the Second Circuit within the next year, he must alert the court to the sanctions.

“The court declined to sanction the appellant herself because she relied heavily on her lawyers and did not labor under the same legal and ethical obligations to the court as her attorneys.” 

Yup!!!!

 

The case is Gallop v. Cheney, 642 F.3d 364, 370 (2d Cir. 2011)

 

The Pepper Spray Chronicles: So What’s the Ethical Way to Remove Protesters?

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

The flagging Occupy movement is gleefully—yes, gleefully—exploiting the University of California pepper spray incident for all it’s worth, which is fine. This is the game demonstrators play, and when their objective is, say, to overthrow a brutal dictatorship, the time-tested tactic of provoking authorities into apparent abuse is a wonderful way to attract support to a worthy cause. When the objective is to, uh, like say things aren’t as good as they might be and argue that the people working hard to make a living on Wall Street have too much and need to give more to the ones who spend all day drumming in parks, there lingers a legitimate question of whether the end justifies the means.

But I digress.

The police who pepper sprayed the passive squatters at UC Davis have been placed on leave, and you can bet that they will be defended to the hilt by the police union, which will try to show that they were following the book. “Heh! Heh! Gotcha!” chuckle the Occupiers. It’s a good gotcha, to be sure.
The police over-reacted, regardless of what you are hearing from some experts. No doubt: it is a delicate situation, and no doubt (in my mind, at least), the protesters almost certainly were going to make the police do something that would look bad on TV, even when it was justified. But this wasn’t. Continue reading →

“Walking Dead” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

American Movie Classics’ excellent, if harrowing, zombie apocalypse drama “the Walking Dead” finally raised the ethical issue looming like a zombie Woolly Mammoth over all zombie films: Is it ethical to kill zombies? Are they still human beings?

Nobody seriously disputes that killing a zombie who is about to eat you or your compatriots is self-defense, justifying deadly force. But what about the common practice in every George Romero-inspired zombie epic: shooting the shambling things (or the sprinting variety, as featured in the re-make of “Dawn of the Dead”) on sight—in the head, naturally? Is it murder? Euthanasia?

The issue was raised in this Sunday’s episode of “The Walking Dead,” as it was revealed that the prickly doctor who presides over the remote farm where our zombie-fleeing heroes are currently taking refuge keeps a batch of captive “walkers,” including his rotting wife, locked in a barn. He feeds them chickens, which are presumably finger-lickin’ good. The doctor regards zombie killing as an atrocity, the equivalent of killing a sick person. “They are humans,” he says. Continue reading →