Julianna Margulies’ latest attempt to find another hit series after “ER” is a lawyer drama, “The Good Wife.” It tells of the travails and trials of a former litigator who returns to law firm practice after her prosecutor husband, played by “Mr. Big” Chris Noth, is sent to the slammer in a scandal that also involved marital infidelity. As lawyer dramas go, “The Good Wife” is fairly good about not distorting the legal ethics rules. It still slips up, however, as this week’s episode showed. Continue reading
Law & Law Enforcement
Lobbyist Ventriloquism and the Abysmal State of Congressional Ethics
When Washington, D.C. attorney Robert Trout delivered his closing argument in the trial of former Rep. William Jefferson (now known as “Inmate CB476881”) for, among other things, accepting a large cash bribe that was later found in his office freezer, he told the jury that the prosecution was hypocritical and unfair. After all, he said, “If seeking political help was a crime, you could lock up half of metropolitan Washington, D.C.” Jefferson’s actions may have been unethical, and they were certainly a mistake, but really now: isn’t this just what all Congressmen do? Jefferson, Trout argued, just got a little bit carried away.
Jefferson was convicted, so there is some distance left for our faith in our elected representatives to fall before it hits rock bottom. The argument was still ethically disturbing in two respects. First of all, Trout’s pitch amounted to a jury nullification plea, a defense in which a jury is encouraged to ignore the law, and that is unethical lawyering.
Second, Trout may well have been right. Continue reading
The Case of the Exaggerating Juror
From Bucks Count Pennsylvania comes a cautionary tale with an important lesson for drama queens, hypochondriacs, and people who just have a tendency toward hyperbole:
Exaggerating is the same as lying. Continue reading
I Almost Wish He Had Tasered the Mother…
The “Smoking Gun” is reporting an astonishing story from Arkansas, undoubtedly destined for cable news immortality. A policeman was summoned to a home by a mother who couldn’t control her 10-year-old daughter, who was having some kind of an emotional meltdown. When the officer was unable to stop the girl from “screaming and kicking,” he used a taser on her, a tactic suggested and approved by the mother. Continue reading
Ethics Tip To President Obama Regarding the Mohammed Trial: Please Shut Up!
This is something of an addendum to the previous post, which should probably be read first.
Politico reports that in response to a question from NBC’s Chuck Todd about those who find it offensive that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the terrorist mastermind, will receive the same rights accorded to U.S. citizens when they are charged with a crime, President Obama said,
“I don’t think it will be offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him.” Continue reading
Un-American Values in the Terrorist’s Trial
One of the arguments being put forth by the Obama administration to support its (Pick One: strange; risky; confusing; dangerous; insane; brave) decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a New York Federal Court is that it will highlight American values and the integrity of our justice system. Indeed, this was about the only rationale that Administration ally Senator Jack Reed (D-RI.) could muster in his appearance with Fox News’ Chris Wallace: Continue reading
Sally Harpold, Chaos, and the Ethics of Law-making
As we contemplate a House health care reform bill that is over 2,000 pages long, it might be a good time to revisit the cautionary tale of Indiana grandmother Sally Harpold, and its lessons about law, fairness, responsibility, and Chaos Theory, not to mention ethics. Continue reading
Race, Eleven Bodies, and the Media’s Disgrace
They are finding decomposed bodies in the Cleveland home of Anthony Sowell, eleven lat last count. Police had visited the house before the discovery and noticed the smell, but never followed up, even though they knew the owner was a violent sex offender. No ethics controversies so far: the police were obviously careless and incompetent, and Sowell was, well, a serial killer. There are no ethical serial killers.
The ethics issue that screams to me in this story, however, is all about the women: all missing for months or years, all young, from poor families, and black. Did you see any national media stories about them when they were missing persons and not abused corpses? I didn’t. Continue reading
Government Lawyer No-No’s
Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, two Environmental Protection Agency attorneys based in California, posted a YouTube video criticizing the Obama administration’s climate change policy, citing a Washington Post op-ed piece. When the EPA told them to either take down the video or edit out references to their work with the EPA, some organizations cried “censorship.” Continue reading
The Death Penalty At Its Best
Virginia executed the D.C. Sniper tonight, and I am not sorry. Apparently not very many others are either: in stark contrast to past executions, like that of Gary Gilmore, anti-death penalty protests regarding the execution of John Muhammad have been minimal.
A responsible society is obligated to have a death penalty to set an appropriate upper limit for state imposed punishment. Without such a ceiling, the punishment for every other crime must be ratcheted down, and this tends to lower the penalty for capital crimes as well. The Lockerbie Bomber would never have been released after a short prison term in the U.S., as he was by Scotland; in all likelihood, he would have been executed. As with Ted Bundy, Timothy McVeigh, and Muhammad, it would have been a case of the punishment fitting the crime. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 