Law & Law Enforcement

More Capitol Riot Roshomon…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Three videos from January 6…

What’s going on here? It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?

The three videos are conclusive proof that there was no “insurrection” in the Capitol on January 6, 2021. You remember reading all of those French Revolution history accounts about how some of the peasants attacking the Bastille just peacefully wandered around the place, not bothering anyone, as the guards stood by, don’t you? You don’t? That’s because it didn’t happen. In an insurrection, everyone is attacking from the beginning. The January 6 incident was an ugly riot that grew spontaneously out of a demonstration.

This is why Liz Cheney’s video and the other cherry-picked videos showing the worst of the rioting are deceitful, like the entire corrupt hearings her committee inflicted on a gullible public. Republican cherry-picked videos showing peaceful demonstrators do not disprove the existence of the riot, but they do make the repeated mantra that this was an “insurrection” look like the partisan misinformation it was and continues to be.

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The Rest Of The Story: The Mother Of That Six-Year-Old Who Shot His Teacher Is In Prison. GOOD!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

But some conservative pundits have a problem with that.

Ethics Alarms covered the revolting tale of the Newport News, Virginia second-grader who shot his teacher in a January post. The position here is and has always been that when children get their hands on guns and shoot anyone, including themselves, parents who own the guns should be held strictly responsible, and should go to jail. Amusingly, some commenters here thought I was jumping to conclusions assuming that parents were at fault in the Newport News case. “What happened to waiting for facts before making a judgement?” caviled one. MIA Ethics Alarms gadfly P.M. Lawrence (where have you been, P.M.?) offered several unlikely scenarios that didn’t involve parental misconduct. I was confident that Occam’s Razor applied, and that this was res ipsa loquitor: if a second grader shoots his teacher, the parents of that second grader are almost certainly at fault.

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Ethics Quiz: This…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This resurfaced video of the Senate Majority Leader gleefully tripping the light fantastic with the New York Democratic Attorney General, one of the party’s several prosecutors engaged in an effort to use the criminal justice system to hamstring Donald Trump before the 2024 election, raises several ethics questions, but I’ll focus on just one.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is participating in this public spectacle ethical conduct for a prosecutor?

Before I comment, let me just say…Ick.

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Breaking! The Supreme Court Finally Issues Its Own Code of Judicial Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This is a rarity: genuine breaking ethics news. The U.S. Supreme Court just released a SCOTUS code of conduct, signed by all nine justices. I have already read that the code “largely follows an existing code for other federal judges.” That code is here. I disagree. The new SCOTUS Code is significantly more detailed, with special emphasis on family conflicts (no doubt prompted by the criticism of Justice Thomas’s wife, a conservative activist.)  I find it fascinating, after decades of arguing that the general precepts of judicial ethics were to be presumed in the very core of our nation’s most powerful judges, when they finally codified their ethics, it yielded the most specific and extensive judicial ethics requirements in existence.

I want to flag two important features. First, the word used in all of the five Canons is “should,” not “shall.”  That makes these best practice guidelines, but not absolute requirements. Second, the code does not include any mechanism for enforcement, discipline, or public oversight. Presumably the Court is still  entirely self-policing.

Here is what was released today; I apologize for the funky formatting. WordPress made a lot of strange changes when I copied and pasted, and I had the patience to fix only the worst of them… Continue reading →

Today’s Unethical NYT Headline: “Democrats, No Longer Squeamish on Abortion, Lean Into Searing Personal Ads”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

What an infuriating, despicable headline, though the story is equally bad. If abortion supporters—yes, it’s the Democratic Party exploiting the issue—weren’t “squeamish” about what they so indignantly and self-righteously support they wouldn’t have spent the past 70 years trying to figure out ways to avoid directly admitting what they are advocating. “Baby? What baby?”

The argument for abortion, that is, terminating a developing unique human life distinct from that of its mother before it can grow to be born and go on to experience life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, has been, and still is, deliberately clouded by misleadng rhetoric about “choice” and “reproductive care,” the current dodge. Wait, how is that other human life in the equation assisted with his or her “reproduction”? Is it “care” to have that life’s own chances of reproducing taken away from it?

And what choice does the victim of an abortion have?

If Democrats weren’t “squeamish” about having to deal with those questions, they wouldn’t be trying (and, tragically, thanks to the abysmal level of attention, critical thought and ethical competence of the average American, largely succeeding) to avoid them.

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Comment Of The Day: Regarding The Ohio Right To Abortion Amendment [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

In HBO’s “Six Feet Under,” a character in the midst of trying to persuade his fiance to abort their unplanned pregnancy is visited in a nightmare by his three previous aborted offspring at the age they would have been if they had been permitted to live…

I have another abortion-related post gnawing on the inside of my skull, but just as I was about to get the thing down in print, I remembered Ryan Harkin’s deft comment from two days ago, responding to Here’s Johnny’s argument that “given that we concede to government the right, in limited circumstances, to end innocent human life when a greater good is perceived (by some), why cannot we cede that right to women, in limited circumstances when a greater good is perceived?“ I had been prepared to point out that Kant (as usual, dismissing special circumstances) holds that it is never ethically acceptable to sacrifice a life “for the greater good,” and that the aborted human life would certainly have a different perspective on that conclusion. Ryan Harkins, however, had more and better to say, and did, in this Comment of the Day on “Regarding the Ohio Right to Abortion Amendment”:

[Notice of Correction: For some reason, I attributed this COTD to Null Pointer, who promptly alerted me to the mistake. My apologies to Ryan.]

***

In general, the answer to this is that government and individuals have different roles. Government exists to set the boundaries, enforce the boundaries, and exact penalties for the failure to comply with those boundaries regarding interpersonal interaction. Individuals cede that responsibility to the government so that there is an agreed upon entity to handle those interpersonal disputes, for otherwise everything becomes vigilante justice. Whoever is stronger wins.

The view of government we have is that because the strong and the powerful can impinge on the rights of weaker individuals, government intervenes to protect the rights of the weak. I know there are other forms of government out there, ones that favor the strong and crush the weak, or favor the clan at the expense of outsiders, and so on. But here we formed a government of the people, by the people, for the people, with the thought that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, which include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We profess that the government exists to ensure that the enumerated rights of the weak are protected against the strong. To turn and delegate the decision making to the individual returns the power to the strong to crush the weak as they see fit. It is anathema to what our nation stands for.

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Technology Ethics Fail: Self-Checkout

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

I am happy to say that I foresaw this mess the first time I encountered these things, in a local Home Depot, if I recall correctly. even if they worked reliably and were user friendly—and they don’t and aren’t—it was obvious from the very dawn of the era that they would allow retailers to reduce staff while making the shopping experience less pleasant for consumers. And so it has. But it wasn’t sold that way, and, as usual, much of the public was ovine in its acceptance. Sure, long checkout lines would be a thing of the past! Now you wouldn’t have to deal with the underlings who man the registers. Store employees would be free and able to answer inquiries! Wunderbar!

Right. You still have to wait in line. The checkout kiosks are persnickety if you, for example, fail to set a purchase down in the right spot. Scanning items doesn’t always work, and its easy to scanned an item more than once. Problems and glitches arise so frequently that counter staff are constantly called on to deal with them, meaning that customers who wisely eschewed the delightful self-checkout adventure are stranded in line. Heaven forfend that you try to self-checkout a product with some kind of purchase restriction. Meanwhile, a lot of self-checkout machines break down, and because it’s expensive to fix them, often sit useless for a while, causing more back-ups.

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Regarding The Ohio Right To Abortion Amendment

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Last night, Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment that guarantees the right to abortion. The tally wasn’t close: 2,186, 962 favored the measure, or 56.6%, while only 1,675, 72, or 43%, opposed putting a right to abortions in the state constitution.

The first point to understand is that this is not a rejection of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs over-ruling Roe v. Wade, but the exact result the Supreme Court ruled the Constitution intended. It is and always whould have been the states’ call: abortion is not a federal issue, and the national Constitution is silent on it, despite the political and ideological dishonesty of Roe. What Ohio did is exactly what the Supreme Court ruled it should do: let voters, not courts, decide the issue.

Logically, this decision should take abortion out of the 2024 election in Ohio, and if Republicans are smart <cough> that’s what they should say. “It’s in the constitution now, and we’ll follow the law. I still believe abortion is wrong in most cases, and I will work toward making that clear enough that Ohioans change the law, but right now, the decision has been made.”

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Update: “The New York Times Legal Expert Doesn’t Understand The Constitution”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Well, what do I know….

At least in the view of the New York Times SCOTUS reporter Adam Liptak, the course of the Supreme Court oral argument in United States v. Rahimi indicates that the Court is likely to over-rule the Fifth Circuit and let the law discussed her in this post stand. Just call me “Fredo”: I was certain that the Court would agree that the law is unconstitutional, and I’m still certain it should be so ruled.

Based on the story, the Justices are persuaded by the fact that Rahimi, after the law was imposed on him, proved he was in fact a danger to society and should not have access to a gun.

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The New York Times Legal Expert Doesn’t Understand The Constitution

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Well that’s a kick in the head! Actually, the expert in question is Linda Greenhouse, the Supreme Court reporter for The Times from 1978 to 2008 and once a regular participant in those Sunday Morning network “round tables” when a talk show wanted to pretend it had a balanced and non-partisan array. Greenhouse is a strongly left-biased Democrat legal analyst, often a dishonest one, and her latest column for the Times proves again that it is propaganda and woke advocacy, not legal enlightenment, that she serves.

Once again, I wish “A Friend,” formerly our resident Times apologist, was still allowed here so I could read his tortured defense of the paper for printing this sinister crap.

Do read “Will the Supreme Court Toss Out a Gun Law Meant to Protect Women?” I wouldn’t bother to quote it if the Times didn’t make you pay for the privilege of rolling your eyes, but I will, a bit. The headline says it all, though, and by “all” I mean anti-rights, anti-due process totalitarian cant. You know, Democratic Party/progressive/ “Do Something!” stuff.

If the Constitution contains an enumerated right in its Bill of Rights, the fact that a law directly violating that right may, in the eyes of some, have some beneficial effects is irrelevant unless there is a massive, existential justification for an exception. Otherwise, the law is unconstitutional. Current progressives and Democrats don’t believe that, or rather, object to the principle. The believe that if speech “hurts” someone by making them feel bad, expresses taboo opinions or makes a sanctified group member feel “unsafe,” laws blocking or punishing that speech shouldn’t be seen as a First Amendment violation, though, in fact, they are. If the right to a fair trial has to be ignored to make sure that a cop whose knee inadvertently triggered nationwide riots and DEI craziness ends up in prison for life, well, reasons the Left, you gotta break some eggs to make a metaphorical omelette, the eggs being the Bill of Rights.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, following SCOTUS’s long-delayed and essential 2022 ruling in Bruen that the Second Amendment means what it says and is about the human right to bear arms and not militias, declared a federal law unconstitutional that prohibited a person subject to a court-issued restraining order for domestic violence from owning a gun. It was and is obviously the right decision except to anti-gun zealots who believe in pre-crime laws, red flag laws, and anything along the slippery slope to outright Second Amendment repeal. The Supreme Court is obviously going to uphold the Fifth Circuit, because its ruling was correct. The only question is whether any of the three far-left ladies on the Court will have the integrity to follow the law. I have some hope for Justice Kagan.

But to read Greenhouse, one would think, and by “one” I mean a typical American who doesn’t read SCOTUS opinions, couldn’t name five of the first ten Amendments and doesn’t comprehend what the Supreme Court’s job is, that the fact that an invalid law has good intentions should be sufficient reason to let it stand. (I doubt the law at issue even had good intentions.)

What the law allows in domestic abuse restraining orders is for judges to issue them solely on the testimony of the complainant, and that act will ban an individual from exercising his right to bear arms. Evidentiary standards are minimal; judges are inclined to grant requests for restraining orders because if there is violence against a complainant after the judge finds no cause—moral luck lurks! —the judge is going to be crucified. The other party doesn’t have a right to be present at the hearing, so the result of the law struck down would be that individuals could lose a core enumerated right without due process of law, based solely on the word of an adverse party.

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