Law & Law Enforcement

NOW Do You Get It, Bachmann Fans?

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Bachmann finally jumped it, as we knew she would!

When I called Rep. Michele Bachmann unethical for her repeated uses of erroneous information in her speeches—announcing that the Battle of Concord occurred in New Hampshire, declaring the Founders spent their lives fighting slavery (and later justifying this whopper by saying that Founding Father’s Son John Quincy Adams qualified as a Founding Father himself), the Bachmanites were furious. “Anyone can make a mistake!” they argued.

Not these kinds of mistakes. As I wrote in July: Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Unethical Quote of the Month: Canadian Judge Joanne Veit”

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

The Comment of the Day, by Eric Monkman, is one of many excellent comments on yesterday’s post on the words of a Canadian judge in allowing a woman who murdered her newborn infant to go free.

There are many threads in the discussion, and I am not caught up. I officially apologize to combatants Eric and tgt especially for not being able to respond in sufficient detail, or in some cases at all, to their thoughtful posts. This an example of the limitations of the blog comment format. I wish I could organize a conference call.

The discussion went into so many directions that the initial post’s point was distorted, in part by me. Here is how I would summarize it:

Judge Veit’s quote, the actual focus of the post, strikes me as ethically offensive because 1) the statement that “many believe” abortion is a less than ideal solution to unprotected sex suggests that abortion is acceptable as a primary method of birth control. The commenters object to my interpretation of the judge’s phrasing to mean that she personally believes the adverse of the statement, that abortion is an ideal solution to unprotected sex. (The ideal solution to unprotected sex is not to have unprotected sex.) OK. I see their point. I still read it differently, and my comments are based upon my reading. At best, it is a sloppy, imprecise statement. 2) The comparison, and equivalency, between grief for the child—who is dead, and who was killed by the person who was most responsible for her welfare—and grief for the murderous mother, who is alive, and who is avoiding legal sanctions for her crime, shows a warped set of ethical values. The implication is that the life of a child is no more important, nor has any more regard from the society, than the emotional comfort of the mother. I know that is the standard in Canada, and in much of the US. It is wrong.

The subsequent discussion about how acceptance of abortion leads to acceptance of infanticide was focused on the U.S., but mistakenly assumed that this was the order of events in Canada. It was not; I think that is affirmatively strange, as one would assume that a human life would not be less valued in a society as it became more viable. It doesn’t change my analysis regarding the U.S., however.

Eric asks some good questions which I will address at the end. Here is his Comment of the Day, on “Unethical Quote of the Month: Canadian Judge Joanne Veit”: Continue reading →

Unethical Business Practices: Online Reputation Services

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Consider this just a polite request to remove that accurate but ucomplimentary post about my client.

The web has created some new business niches, and one that fascinated me was the emergence of online reputation defenders, who purport to make sure that Google searches and web research about individuals and businesses do not turn up negative information that can harm business prospects, career advancement, or reputations generally.

While I can see the appeal and potential profitability of such services, manipulating online content is an ethical gray area. It is as wrong to artificially make someone look good  on the internet as to artificially make them look bad. In general, anyone who has been out and about very long will find both positive and negative information about themselves on the web, of varying accuracy. People who have experience with web research understand this, so the impressions they get from checking out a potential employee or business partner will usually, though not always, be tempered with skepticism.

They can and should apply common sense: What is the source of the negative information? How old is it? Was this one incident or complaint that doesn’t seem representative of the individual or company as a whole? I would rather have all the information available, and be able to make my own decisions, rather than have the most favorable material elevated in visibility and the least favorable made difficult to find or removed altogether. These services promise to “bury” the negative material. Continue reading →

The Worst Humanitarian Award Winner of the Year

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Michael Brown---wife-beater, humanitarian.

Michael Brown founded Houston’s Brown Hand Center, which specializes in the treatment of carpal tunnel syndrome. He is now on trial for assault, after being arrested last year for attacking his his wife, twisting her arm behind her back and, among other things, hurling his 2010 Joanne King Herring Humanitarian Award at her.

I have often thought that those who give out humanitarian awards for specific instances of good conduct have an ethical obligation to make sure that recipients conform to the definition of “humanitarian” in their overall conduct. One of the definitions of humanitarian is “ethical.” Official pronouncements that an individual is ethical can be very effective false advertising for the character of someone who is anything but. Mr. Brown illustrates my concerns.

By 2010, when Brown received his award, he had already pleaded no-contest in 2002 to aggravated assault for beating then-pregnant wife, Darlina Brown, with a bed post. Call me a stickler, but I think there should be an automatic “Beating a pregnant woman with bedpost” disqualification provision for humanitarian awards. Then, in 2006, Dr. Brown’s medical license was revoked after he tested positive for cocaine use. So to summarize, at the time he was deemed worthy of the honor of being the 2010 humanitarian of the year, Brown was already an admitted wife-beater and an ex-doctor found unfit for the continued practice of medicine.

What a guy!

How about a rule that if you try to kill someone with your humanitarian award, it is automatically revoked?

Too strict?

 

Unethical Quote of the Month: Canadian Judge Joanne Veit

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

“…While many Canadians undoubtedly view abortion as a less than ideal solution to unprotected sex and unwanted pregnancy, they generally understand, accept and sympathize with the onerous demands pregnancy and childbirth exact from mothers, especially mothers without support…Naturally, Canadians are grieved by an infant’s death, especially at the hands of the infant’s mother, but Canadians also grieve for the mother.”

—- Canadian Judge Joanne Viet, announcing that Katrina Effert, who strangled her newborn child and threw the body over a fence into the neighbor’s yard when she was 19, will serve a three-year suspended sentence with no jail time for the murder, reflecting a “fair compromise of all the interests involved.”

This is a cautionary ethics tale indeed for those who deny that a callous attitude toward human lives in the womb, giving them no standing against a mother’s desires and convenience, will gradually, inevitably, coarsen and warp a culture’s respect for life and its comprehension of wrong. [Addition: Many commenters have pointed out that Canada had designated infanticide as a relatively minor crime before fully legalizing abortion. That is a strange progression, though once infanticide had been declared “understandable,” abortions days were numbered. In the US, the gradual de-valuing of young life is moving in the more obvious way, from younger to older. The process, however, is the same.] Continue reading →

When Ethics Hero Meets Ethics Dunce: Alan Ehrlich and the Spirit of Citizenship vs. South Pasadena Police Chief Joe Payne and Official Arrogance

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

"Step away from the intersection, sir! You are not permitted to make my officers look bad by doing the essential jobs they cannot."

When a traffic light in South Pasadena went out during the morning rush hour, citizen Alan Ehrlich stepped into the breach and began directing traffic at the major intersection.

“I grabbed a bright orange shirt that I have and a couple of orange safety flags. I took it upon myself to help get motorists through that intersection faster,” said Ehrlich. Before he took action, traffic was backed up for more than a mile, as vehicles took more than a half hour to maneuver through the intersection.

“It was just kind of chaos of cars . . . there were stop signs up. But people were challenging each other to get through the intersection,” said a witness  who works at an office nearby. He reported that Ehrlich’s stint as volunteer traffic cop had traffic flowing within ten minutes.

South Pasadena police then responded to the scene, ordered Ehrlich to stop, and issued him a ticket, but refused to direct traffic at the intersection themselves. South Pasadena Police Chief Joe Payne explained that he did not have the man power needed to staff officers when lights fail, and that Ehrlich should have just allowed traffic to back up. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Nutrition Advocate Marion Nestle

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

"First the came for the Frankenberry, and I said nothing..."

“The intent of the First Amendment was to protect political and religious speech. I cannot believe that the intent of the First Amendment was to protect the right of food companies to market junk foods to kids.”

—- Nutrition advocate, NYU professor and blogger Marion Nestle, arguing that the government should censor advertising “aimed directly at children,” in the interests of public health.

I should not need to lay out the slippery slope perils of accepting a definition of the First Amendment’s free speech guaranty that limits its protection only to “political and religious speech.” For a professor at a prestigious university to advocate this because it would make her own pet crusade easier should send chills up the spines of every citizen. Let’s see…what kind of speech isn’t political or religious? Commercial speech…artistic speech…workplace speech…academic speech… To zealots like Prof. Nestle, all of this, as well as the liberty it bolsters, should be put at risk in the pursuit of skinnier children, by designating the government to assume the parental function of teaching good eating habits. Continue reading →

CREW and the Problem With Partisan “Non-Partisan Watchdog Groups”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

There is a new website called “CREW Exposed,” which is pretty brief and to the point: it highlights statistics showing the degree to which Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a government ethics watchdog that does not identify any partisan or ideological allegiances in its materials, concentrates its criticism, investigations, formal complaints and ethical exposes on Republicans and conservatives rather than Democrats and liberals at a ratio of about 5 to 1.

Continue reading →

Flying the Confederate Flag: Protected Speech? Of Course. Unethical? Absolutely.

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Honor them for their valor if you must, but there was nothing honorable about their cause or their flag.

Once again, emerging from under-ground like a the seven-year locust, a controversy over the flying of the Confederate Flag is raging, this time in Lexington, Virginia, burial place of two Confederate heroes, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. A proposed city ordinance would prohibit the flying of the Confederate banner on downtown poles, and some Southern heritage buffs as well as Jackson and Lee fans are upset. “By all means [Jackson and Lee] should be honored,” said Brandon Dorsey, commander of Camp 1296 of the Stonewall Brigade of the Confederate Veterans. “I look at the flag as honoring the veterans.”

The problem is, Brandon, that a large number of Americans look at that same flag as honoring slavery and racism, and for good and historical reasons. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero Emeritus: Stetson Kennedy (1916-2011)

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

And he gave his book to Superman...

Author and folklorist Stetson Kennedy, who died this week,  is another important and courageous American that most of us never heard of. Let’s try to catch up.

After a back injury kept him out of World War II, Kennedy began a lifetime career of crusading against bigotry and what he called “homegrown racial terrorists.” He served as director of fact-finding for the southeastern office of the Anti-Defamation League and as director of the Anti-Nazi League of New York.

In his 1954 book “I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan,” Kennedy wrote that he gained entrance to the Klan by posing as an encyclopedia salesman and using the name of an uncle who was a Klan member. While posing as a member, he learned many Klan secrets that he put to use undermining the organization’s reputation and support. With evidence he snatched from the Grand Dragon’s wastebasket, he gave the Internal Revenue Service what it needed to collect an outstanding $685,000 tax lien from the Klan in 1944, and he helped draft the brief used by the state of Georgia to revoke the Klan’s national corporate charter in 1947. He also testified in other Klan-related cases. Continue reading →