Law & Law Enforcement

Baseball and Civil Rights: Doing the Right Thing, Kicking and Screaming

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

“The Biz of Baseball” discusses a historical document proving that even as Jackie Robinson was preparing to make his color barrier-shattering debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1946, an internal committee examining the race issue for Major League Baseball was arguing that integrating the teams at the time would be a mistake. Author Maury Brown concludes:

“As the 1946 steering committee document shows, there were those at the highest level of the sport that saw African-American players as beneath the quality of their White counterparts, and that they saw the influx of African-American fans as something that would lower franchise values. Take that in, as baseball takes credit for being at the front of the Civil Rights movement.”

Major League Baseball is engaged in just such a credit-taking exercise now, as it prepares to host its annual ” Civil Rights Game, “an  exhibition between the Cardinals and Reds in Cincinnati. Continue reading →

Ethics Quilt: Ghosts, Teachers, Facebook, and More

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment
  • Is It Ethical to Censor Someone’s Question You Think Is Unethical?:  Here is a post questioning whether a question can be so offensive that it is unethical to even ask it. The obvious answer: if you refuse to ask it, nobody will have the chance to explain what’s wrong with it.
  • “Yeah, Well, he Probably Deserved it…”:  As mind-blowing as the video of the Texas teacher assaulting and savagely beating a male student are the many, many on-line comments expressing sympathy and even support for her actions. What on earth is going on out there? Yes, teachers are placed in a nearly impossible position by restrictions on class discipline. Yes, there are students whose conduct is outrageous. Yes, I’m sure many teachers have wanted to lash out. Yes, the kid was probably no angel. Neither these or any other factors can possibly justify an adult authority figure resorting to violence against a student, a child, and someone placed in her care by the family and the state. “Where can I contribute to her defense fund?” writes one commenter. Another’s response is that if it were her son, she would come down to the school and beat up the teacher. And people keep asking me why I bother to write about ethics… Continue reading →

Empathy and Ethics Insanity in Hollywood: “CSI New York”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

In this week’s episode of C.S.I. New York, entitled “Unusual Suspects,” a 14-year old is shot and his younger brother intentionally misleads the police regarding the shooter, identifying the wrong suspect who is ultimately chased by the police and fatally hit by a bus while trying to flee. Eventually the truth comes out. The two boys–armed with a gun!—robbed a bank, and the older boy, who engineered the crime, was shot by a man who subsequently took the loot from them.

The boys knocked over the bank because they overheard their mother say that she couldn’t pay the rent. This is apparently sufficient justification for the bank and the District Attorney to decide not to press charges against the little dears. As the show ends, two of the C.S.I. squad look in on the hospital room, misty-eyed. where the wounded boy lies recovering, as his brother and mother sit vigil by his bed.

“There’s a lot of love in that room,” observes one of the officers.

A lot of felons, too. Continue reading →

Next: Paramilitary “Jolly Rancher” Raids?

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

“No tolerance policy” is clearly a misnomer: what it appears to mean in practice is “self-designed trap to expose the incompetence and lack of basic fairness of school personnel. According to that definition, “no tolerance” polices are working extremely well.

For example, an Orchard, Texas third-grader at Brazos Elementary was given a week’s detention for first-degree possession a Jolly Rancher. The school’s principal and superintendent said they were simply complying with a state law that limits junk food in schools. The miscreant, Leighann Adair, 10, was eating lunch  when a teacher saw the candy and confiscated it. Her punishment is that she must be separated from other students during lunch and recess for the rest of the week. Continue reading →

Being Fair to Elena Kagan

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The long knives are already out for Solicitor General Elena Kagan, now the latest Supreme Court nominee. Once, before the late Ted Kennedy shamelessly accused Robert Bork of being a racist, a sexist and a monster to boot, U.S. Presidents were accorded the respect by both parties in the Senate have confirmed whoever they chose for the High Court, unless the choice was so cynical or politically tainted as to demand defeat. No more. Now each nominee has to thoroughly debase herself or himself by denying the political philosophies that produced his or her nomination in the first place. The first casualty of the nomination process is integrity.

Is it too late to go back? Is it too late to be fair? Continue reading →

“The Ethicist” and Helping Illegal Immigrants

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Randy Cohen’s first response in this week’s installment of “The Ethicist” (in the Sunday New York Times Magazine) isn’t exactly unethical, but it isn’t exactly ethical, either, if little things like obeying laws still matter to you. The real value of Cohen’s column this time is to remind those who blithely condemn Arizona’s illegal immigration enforcement statute as “cruel,” “racist” or “un-American” the extent to which the Federal Government’s failure to control our boarders and enforce the immigration laws has corrupted and confused us all.

Stuart Gold, from Brooklyn (and I respect Stuart for making his name public) queries Randy about how he should deal with knowledge that a local supermarket is exploiting some illegal immigrants working there by not meeting the legal requirements for minimum wages and working conditions. Stuart is friendly with the workers and wants to help them, but he doesn’t want to get them fired or deported. Cohen tells him to advise them of their rights if they don’t know them, but to leave any proactive steps to them.

This is reasonable advice, but look at what we have: Continue reading →

Drug War Ethics: THIS Is Excessive Force…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Radley Balko, a senior editor at Reason Magazine, has been following the law enforcement tactic of paramilitary raids on American homes, some of which go horrible wrong, and many of which raise questions of propriety and proportion. One of the worst of these, a February raid on a family’s home in Missouri that featured the invading authorities shooting the family dog in front of a young child, is immortalized on this frightening video. The father was charged with marijuana possession and child endangerment, presumably because he used drugs in the presence of his.

Balko, who, like everyone at Reason, is a libertarian, uses the incident to press his opposition to the illegal status of recreational drugs. “This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years,” he writes… Continue reading →

Twins on Trial: Just Like “The Patty Duke Show”!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Are you old enough to remember “The Patty Duke Show”? You know, with Patty, then a young starlet fresh off her Broadway and film triumphs as Helen Keller, playing “identical cousins” Patty and Cathy (with a British accent)? If you do, you surely remember the disturbingly catchy theme song about “two pairs of matching bookends, different as night and day!” Well, here’s a story about recent “matching bookends” who caused some ethics problems. To introduce it properly, to the melody of Patty Duke’s theme: Continue reading →

The Last Word on “Taser Boy”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Today the New York Times weighed in with an editorial on the Phillies taser incident, not surprisingly siding with the kinder, gentler majority who have argued against the position taken here, sometimes, like my passionate friends over at Popehat, in a not so kind or gentle way. “The best course there [Philadelphia], as anywhere, is smarter, more attentive security in the stands,” the Times said. “Maybe it’s also higher Plexiglas, stiffer trespassing fines, less beer. Force must always be the last resort. Tasering a showboating kid is just plain excessive.”

<sigh!>

Continue reading →

The Fan, the Taser, and Respect for the Law

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

A teenaged fan ran out on the field in the middle of a Philadelphia Phillies game a couple of days ago. This happens many times, too many times, during the baseball season, and it is always followed by a merry chase, sometimes with fans laughing or cheering, featuring over-weight security staff or police trying to capture the fool, and occasionally a featuring a  surprise, like a player intervening and decking the guy. There was a surprise this time, all right: when the fan wouldn’t stop after the pursuing officer told him to, he was shot with a taser. And some fans cheered at that, too.

A tsunami of criticism is now crashing over the security officer, condemning the tasering of 17-year-old Steve Consalvi, sometimes in terms more appropriate to discussing Abu Ghraib. If I were Consalvi’s father, I would counsel him to immediately issue a statement taking full responsibility for the incident and absolving the officer. The teen’s conduct was irresponsible and illegal, and for it to result in any adverse employment action against the security officer who tasered him would only compound the offense. This is especially true because the critics of the officer are dead wrong. They are in the grip of a dangerous, illogical but increasingly popular idea in our culture that submitting to  legitimate police authority is one of those things that we can do or not do without consequences or stigma. The fan on the field is one of the mildest examples of disrespect for the law, but it is a perfectly good place to start getting our ethics unmuddled. Continue reading →