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
Law & Law Enforcement
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
NEVER the Sinner?
The AP reports that there is a computer virus that causes one’s computer to independently visit child pornography sites and download material. This has caused innocent people to be prosecuted, fired from their jobs, humiliated and ruined.
I would like the conduct of a person who would create and release such a virus explained to me. I would like the explainers to be those who will describe any bad act , no matter how heinous, as “one mistake,” and who resolutely maintain that engaging in wrongful conduct, no matter how destructive and cruel, doesn’t mean an individual is personally rotten to the core. “Hate the sin, never the sinner,” Clarence Darrow said. Darrow was one of the most persuasive and articulate people who ever lived. I wonder if he could have reconciled this with his convictions.
Now I’m going to check my computer.
And my faith in human nature.
Showdown at Brookstone: An Ethics Train Wreck
Thanks to the enterprising employees at Brookstone, that odd chain that sells expensive gadgets for tasks that aren’t that important anyway, Ethics Alarms now encounters what has all the signs of a genuine Ethics Train Wreck. Ethics Train Wrecks are situations where one unethical act sets off a chain reaction of bad judgment and rash behavior, and by the time all the carnage is over, anyone who was near the event, and those who tried to make sense out of it or clean it up, end up looking bad and arguing with each other. Recent Ethics Train Wrecks include the Valerie Plame affair and the Prof. Gates arrest. President Obama won’t get involved in this one (I hope!), but it has it all: gender, religion, workplace relations, law, Fox News. Continue reading
The Card-counting Conundrum
There is a terrific thread going on over at the Volohk Conspiracy, consistently one of the most erudite and thought-provoking blogs there is. Noting that a Indiana court has declared that the state’s casinos are prohibited from throwing blackjack players who count cards out of their establishment, Prof. Volokh, who has a libertarian streak, opined that casinos should be able to toss out the card counters, and that the case was wrong. Well, all hell broke out after that, and as usual for that blog (and, some golden day, for this one), there has been a flood of comments from every kind of authority from legal experts to card counters themselves. They show what an odd and ethically topsy-turvy matter the controversy over card-counting is. Continue reading
Age and the Judge
U.S. District Senior Judge Malcolm Muir recently turned 95. Many articles in the media celebrated his long and distinguished career, but none made the observation that should be as obvious as it is indelicate. Judge Muir should not be on the bench. He should probably not have been on the bench for the past decade. It is irresponsible for him to continue to be a federal judge. Continue reading
The Price of American Principles
As everyone knows by now, Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, a 39-year-old Arlington-born Army psychiatrist, shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, wounding many more. Although he originally told the Army that he was not especially religious, Hasan had become a devout Muslim in recent years. You didn’t have to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict what the combination of a Muslim soldier and a shooting spree would spark from some voices on the Right: immediate “I told you so’s” about how politically correct squeamishness prevent sensible profiling that could prevent such tragedies. Continue reading
Ethics Quote of the Week
“If you find yourself chewing the memory card in your cellphone to destroy any record of your misconduct, something has gone terribly wrong with your character.”–Robert S. Khuzami, S.E.C. enforcement director.
[ Wall Street trader Zvi Goffer was arrested today and accused of being the mastermind of the latest insider-trading scandal, a tipping-and-trading ring that involved confidential sources from many places that should know better, like the prominent law firm of Ropes and Gray. Arthur J. Cutillo, a lawyer at the firm, was accused of sharing secret information with Goffer on deals the law firm was handling for clients. Prosecutors say, according to the New York Times story, Goffer insisted his confederates communicate through disposable cellphones, just like drug dealers.
When the illegal trading was complete, Goffer destroyed his phone records by biting the phone’s SIM card in half with his teeth.]
The Difference Between Law and Ethics
[This essay was originally published on The Ethics Scoreboard in 2004, and has been one of the most read and discussed of all the posts there. Ethics Alarms will periodically republished pieces from that site, sometimes updated and re-edited, sometimes not. This one is unchanged.]
In the instructive category of “Lawsuits that demonstrate the distinction between law and ethics,” we have the Massachusetts case of Conley v. Romeri.
Ms. Conley met Mr. Romeri when they were both in their 40s and divorced. As romance beckoned, Ms. Conley told her swain that she was childless, and wanted to begin a family before her biological clock struck midnight. The defendant, who had sired four children already, told her “not to worry.” He had seen a fortune-teller who had predicted that he would increase his number of children from four to six.
That held Ms. Conley for seven months. Then he told her that he had been vasectomized years ago.
Ms. Conley sued the bastard, claiming that her now ex-boyfriend had fraudulently misled her into believing he could father little Conleys in order to prolong the relationship, and that his actions had thrown her into emotional distress and depression.
Let us pause here and say that Mr. Romeri is a cur. Knowing that Ms. Conley was desperate for children and running out of time, he nonetheless deceived her for his own purposes, costing her perhaps her only chance to have the family she desired. For the fans of Bill Clinton out there, he was also clearly adept at Clintonesque deceit: he said “don’t worry” about having children, not that he was capable of creating them; he said a fortune- teller has assured him that he would have more kids, but never said her prediction was plausible. Mr. Romeri, like millions of deceitful people before him, probably doesn’t think he really lied. But of course he did.
The Massachusetts Appeals Court, however, found that while Mr. Romeri may have behaved abominably, it was not the place of the law to punish him.
Such claims, the judges said, “arise from conduct so intensely private that the courts should not be asked to resolve them….It does not lie within the power of any judicial system to remedy all human wrongs. Many wrongs which in themselves are flagrant–ingratitude, avarice, broken faith, brutal words and heartless disregard–are beyond any effective remedy.”
Our hearts go out to Ms. Conley. But the law will never succeed in making people be honest, caring, and fair. Only we can do that, by creating a society in which boys grow to manhood knowing that behavior like Mr. Romeri’s is wrong, and at the same time, a society where women take responsibility for their own welfare, without seeking government remedies for every challenge.
Ethics Hero: Peter Shellem (1960-2009)
Newspapers are on the ropes these days, and sometimes I am not sorry. Even the best of them are too often sloppy, superficial, biased and incompetent. If they go down for the count, however, we will dearly miss the likes of Peter Shellem, an old-fashioned gum-shoe reporter who used his professional skills not only to find the truth, but to save lives in the process.
If you were not a regular reader of the Harrisburg, PA Patriot-News, the odds are that you never heard of Shellem. I hadn’t, until I read his New York Times’ obituary this morning. His passion was investigating the cases and prosecutions of convicted prisoners when something about their guilt didn’t seem quite right to him. The Times notes that Defense attorney Barry Scheck called Shellem ” a one man journalism innocence project.” Shellem’s investigations freed five wrongly convicted Americans, one of them who had been in jail 28 years, since he was fourteen.
A colleague at the Patriot-Ledger, in a remembrance, writes that Shellem did what he did because he was genuinely offended that our justice system could be so unjust. In this he was ahead of his time, for only recently, in the wake of the Duke lacrosse scandal, has the extent and impact of prosecutorial excesses begun to inspire the media and law enforcement to scrutinize past convictions and current prosecutions with due skepticism. There are more innocent people behind bars than we once believed, as well as many guilty prisoners who did not receive the rights guaranteed them as citizens. Peter Shellem didn’t help all of them directly, but his work did.
It appears that Peter Shellem committed suicide. Though he was apparently dissatisfied with his life, we should not be. His work was meaningful; his impact on the lives of others was profound, and his work set high ethical standards for us all. His credo: If you see a wrong, fix it. If you recognize injustice, expose it. If you detect corruption, stop it.
We should all aspire to follow his example.
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