Law & Law Enforcement

Yes Julea,You Have A Right To Your Beliefs; You Just Don’t Have A Right To A Job That Your Beliefs Won’t Let You Do. Why Is This Not Obvious?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

There are some issues where conservatives are just ethically, logically and legally misguided, and the issue of exercising “religious conscience” in the course of performing specific duties and services is one of them.

Julea Ward was dismissed for failing to meet the requirements of her course when she  refused to counsel a gay student while studying counseling at Eastern Michigan University. Ward later sued, saying that she told her supervisor at EMU she believes homosexuality is immoral and being gay is a choice, and that she could not in good conscience counsel a gay client. A federal court dismissed the case in July, but Ward’s lawyers have asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth District to step in. She claims that her right to worship as she pleases is being infringed. Continue reading →

Read This To Your Mother…or Somebody’s Mother

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Nigerian Prince wants to meet your mother.

As my sister and I try to unravel the details and records of my mother’s nearly 90 years, we both have concluded that she would have been an easy mark for scammers and frauds if she didn’t have two lawyer offspring reviewing her decisions. The number of elderly, mentally-failing Americans who lose their life’s savings to these predators is a national tragedy. They are particularly prominent on the internet. I was very frustrated with my mother’s resistance to e-mail and the Web…now I’m not sure it wasn’t too dangerous for her to navigate.

The F.B.I. has an excellent and informative web page that should be shown, read to, and explained to every senior in your life. From the introduction:

“Senior citizens are most likely to have a “nest egg,” to own their home, and/or to have excellent credit—all of which make them attractive to con artists...People who grew up in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were generally raised to be polite and trusting. Con artists exploit these traits, knowing that it is difficult or impossible for these individuals to say “no” or just hang up the telephone. Older Americans are less likely to report a fraud because they don’t know who to report it to, are too ashamed at having been scammed, or don’t know they have been scammed. Elderly victims may not report crimes, for example, because they are concerned that relatives may think the victims no longer have the mental capacity to take care of their own financial affairs.”

The site goes on to describe how various scams work and how to spot them; indeed, you don’t need to be a senior to be vulnerable. The list is daunting: Continue reading →

The Tears of Keith Ellison

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The grand drama at Rep. Peter King’s Congressional hearings investigating the radicalization of American Muslims last week was provided by Rep. Keith Ellison, who broke down crying while telling the story of a Muslim-American hero, Mohammed Salman Hamdani, who rushed to lower Manhattan on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 to assist in rescue efforts, and died in the collapse of the World Trade Center. Ellison said:

After the tragedy some people tried to smear his character solely because of his Islamic faith. Some people spread false rumors and speculated that he was in league with the attackers only because he was Muslim. It was only when his remains were identified that these lies were fully exposed. Mohammed Salman Hamdani was a fellow American who gave his life for other Americans. His life should not be defined as a member of an ethnic group or a member of a religion, but as an American who gave everything for his fellow citizens.

I found the performance odd and vaguely troubling, and now that I’ve thought about it for a few days, I know why. The statement by Ellison, who converted to Islam, and the tears that accompanied it, raise a few ethical issues, beginning with the Ethics Alarms standard, “What’s going on here?” Continue reading →

She-Hulk Legal Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

One of the most creative websites around, Law and the Multiverse, discusses the legal issues that would arise in a parallel existence in which super-heroes were real. The site finally delved into the topic of legal ethics a couple of weeks ago, and the post is both fun and informative on the issue of lawyer solicitation.

She-Hulk’s alter-ego, Jennifer Walters (who, unlike She-Hulk, is not green) is a practicing attorney. (So is Daredevil, and if anyone knows why they never formed a firm, let me know.) The post involves the propriety of She-Hulk’s soliciting legal business at the scene of a rescue. The issue is pretty straightforward. It does not, however, deal with the question of whether She-Hulk can ethically practice law when she is not Jennifer Walters. Does Walters’ license still apply to She-Hulk, who looks different, sounds different, thinks differently and has a different personality? The question is similar to the issue of whether Dr. Hyde can legally. practice medicine.

Oh well, maybe they’ll take that one up another time. You can read about She-Hulk’s legal ethics problem here.

The Times’ New Ethicist Commits Malpractice

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The new Times "Ethicst" shows her dark side.

Randy Cohen’s replacement as “The Ethicist” in the New York Times Magazine, Ariel Kaminer, had a flawless maiden flight last week, but crashes and burns on her first question this week. As was too often true of Cohen, she messes up in the area of honesty and legal ethics.

The inquirer, an applicant for law school, had asked a former professor to write a recommendation.  The professor, an apparent creep, said she was too busy—Honestly: writing recommendations for students applying to graduate students is part of her job, and how long does it take?—but if that if the student would write it, she would gladly “edit as needed” and submit it under her own name. Ariel’s inquirer felt uncomfortable writing her own letter of recommendation, but did not “wish to jeopardize my chances of being accepted into my top-choice school by being overly conscientious.” Ariel’s question to answer: is it ethical to draft the letter? Continue reading →

Why NPR’s Wrongs Don’t Make James O’Keefe Right

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

James O'Keefe, Ethics Corrupter

And the NPR Ethics Train Wreck continues…

Between union hysteria in Wisconsin, carnage in Libya, and tsunamis, the fact that James O’Keefe’s fake Muslim billionaire act exposed more NPR integrity issues was drowned out by shouting, gun shots and water. In fact, the second victim of O’Keefe’s sting may have taught us more about NPR than the first.

In the surreptitious audiotape of  NPR’s continued encounters with the fake potential big bucks donor, NPR’s director of institutional giving, Betsy Liley, is heard advising the supposedly wealthy Muslim donor how the network could help “shield” his group from a government audit if it accepted the $5 million he was offering. It seems pretty clear from the tape that this was not what the sting was set up to prove: what the “Muslim donor” really wants is to get a promise from NPR that it will slant the news content the his way if the gift is big enough. Liley stood her ground on this core journalistic principle admirably—so much for the claim that George Soros bought NPR’s advocacy with his recent gift—but fell into another trap of her own making.

NPR spokeswoman Dana Davis Rehm said in a statement that Liley’s comments on the tape “regarding the possibility of making an anonymous gift that would remain invisible to tax authorities is factually inaccurate and not reflective of NPR’s gift practices. All donations—anonymous and named—are fully reported to the IRS. NPR complies with all financial, tax, and disclosure regulations.” That’s undoubtedly correct; Liley was not merely ethically wrong but also literally wrong, for what she was suggesting almost certainly couldn’t happen. However, the fact that she would say such a thing believing it could happen, or think it was acceptable if it did happen, or try to acquire a large donation by persuading a donor to believe it could happen, all point to the one conclusion: NPR’s culture is ethically compromised, and the organization’s leadership has failed to meet its obligations to create an ethical culture  there. The sting is more disturbing than the earlier one that caught an outgoing NPR executive taking extreme partisan positions that belied NPR’s position that it is objective and unbiased. The comments of Ron Schiller just confirmed what many, including me, thought was already apparent in the tone of NPR’s work. I had also always assumed, however, that the place was professionally and ethically run (excepting the tendency to fire employees for expressing politically incorrect opinions on Fox News).

So this settles it, right? O’Keefe is a hero?

No, he’s not. James O’Keefe, in fact, is an ethics corrupter, an individual who weakens the public’s ethics by encouraging it to accept his dubious values. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: The Delaware State Human Relations Commission, et al.

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Justice finally prevailed in a disturbing Delaware case that took hyper-sensitivity to racial bias to absurd extremes. You can read the court opinion here. In essence, the Delaware State Human Relations Commission found that a theater manager who supplemented an on-screen request for patrons to turn off their cell phones, not talk during the film and not mill around in the theater with his personal announcement to the same effect was engaged in racial discrimination, because most of the audience was black and some felt that his tone was condescending. Continue reading →

Illinois’s Death Penalty Ban: Defensible Decision, Indefensible Reasoning

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Justice.

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn  signed legislation abolishing capital punishment in the state and commuted the sentences of the 15 inmates still on death row to life in prison without parole.

I disagree with the decision, and have stated my reasons for not abolishing the death penalty here and here. Never mind: this is a topic on which ethical and reasonable people can disagree with honor. But if one is going to abolish an important law enforcement tool, the official justification for it ought to be coherent and persuasive, and not just facile rhetoric. That, unfortunately, is what Gov. Quinn gave us.

Here is the relevant segment of Quinn’s statement after signing the bill into law during a private ceremony: Continue reading →

Wisconsin Wars: The Democrats’ Unethical Ethics Complaint

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Wisconsin Democrats have filed an ethics complaint against Governor Scott Walker.

The complaint, and the filing of it, are unethical. Really, really, really unethical. Here’s why. Continue reading →

The NPR Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Ethics train wreck scholars take note: when an organization’s image and existence is based on multiple lies, an ETW is inevitable.

Oh NO! It's another Ethics Train Wreck!

National Public Radio is now in the middle of a massive, six-months long ethics train wreck that began with the hypocritical firing of Juan Williams on a trumped-up ethics violation. The disaster exposes the culture of dishonesty and entitlement at the heart of NPR, and by extension, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. To the extent that their supporters blame anyone else, it is evidence of denial. This is a train wreck, however, and the ethics violators drawn into the wreckage are many: Continue reading →