Law & Law Enforcement

Now THAT’S An Unethical Lawyer! [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Every December, when I do an end-of-year legal ethics seminar for the D.C. Bar, I discuss the Unethical Lawyer of the Year. It’s only June, but it’s hard to see how anyone, not even Alvin Bragg, can match Jason Kurland this year

Kurland, an attorney who represented lottery winners and was once a partner at the prestigious firm Rivkin Radler, one of the 200 largest firms in the nation, was sentenced last week to 13 years in prison. He had been found guilty of wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, honest services wire fraud, unlawful monetary transactions and a related conspiracy charge.

Fraudulent representations by Kurland and his co-defendants caused his clients to lose more than $80 million. He also lifted $19.5 million from the account of one lottery winner to make an investment for the benefit of himself and his accessories.

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2023’s Most Insulting Made-Up Excuse For Unethical Conduct So Far

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I had assumed this story from last month had wrapped up the prize: A Colorado man was pulled over by police for speeding and swapped seats with his dog so he could claim, or at least try to claim, that the dog was driving.

“The driver attempted to switch places with his dog who was in the passenger seat, as the SPD officer approached and watched the entire process,” the official statement reads. “The male party then exited the passenger side of the vehicle and claimed he was not driving.” The suspect showed “clear signs of intoxication,” and when the officer asked about his alcohol consumption, he tried to run away but was quickly caught.

The dog told the officers that he was grateful for their intervention because he “thought that idiot was going to kill us both.”

OK, I’m kidding about that last part. There have been some really weird ethics stories involving dogs lately. I ultimately decided not to write about this one, the Penn State professor caught having repeated sex with his dog to “blow off steam” because there are so many tasteless—but funny!—jokes that come to mind and I might not be able to resist making some of them.

But I digress. Almost as revolting as that story is the new leader for worst 2023 excuse, Dr Nicholas Chapman, 55, a British general practitioner, who has been convicted of putting his semen into coffee he served to a female acquaintance in September of 2021. The court was told that Chapman was accused of adding his semen to drinks he made for the victim on several occasions. When the woman kept a sample of some of the cofee he had made for her, tests confirmed the secret ingredient and the DNA matched Chapman’s.

The doctor swore he was innocent. He had a rare condition that causes him to ejaculate while urinating, he said, and he just keeps forgetting to wash his hands after finishing up in the loo.

[I used a photo of Porter, the first driving dog, above instead of a picture related to Chapman’s excuse because…well, you know why…]

Trump Indictment Update: The Deceitful Indictment Photos [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

This one should have been obvious, but was so devious that I missed it. I bet you did too.

The indictment says that Trump’s alleged illegal conduct related to 102 classified documents. What you see above are four of six photos the Justice Department included in the indictment, apparently showing Trumps trove of stolen government materials. I don’t know how large the documents were, but assuming that those photos weren’t staged, they must have been taken before the boxes were examined. I’ll believe they contained paper (unlike the very similar piles of boxes in three of the rooms in my home, which also contain, for example, dinosaur models), but it is wildly unlikely that the boxes contain just 102 classified documents.

Never mind: that’s how all of the news sources presented them, and that is why the Justice Department probably included the photos: to poison public opinion against the former President. Poisoning public opinion is also poisoning the jury pool, and as we know, much of the public doesn’t have to be metaphorically poisoned. I realized this open deceit as I read my Facebook friends’ comments mocking the photos as proving how flagrant Trump’s “crime” was. The photos, in fact, prove nothing, except this: 1) the Justice Department lawyers who prepared the indictment violated the ethics rules and 2) it worked, because so many Americans want to believe that Trump is guilty.

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: How Could A Company Not Realize This Was Sexual Harassment?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The mind boggles; my mind, anyway. S&S Activewear, according to a lawsuit, proposed as a class action in 2020 by a group of former employees, pumped loud, “sexually graphic, violently misogynistic music” through at least five speakers across a large warehouse. Artists like Eminem and Lil Wayne were heard performing rap and hip-hop employing vulgar language, often with lyrics that described violence towards women.

One song cited was Eminem’s 2000 hit “Stan,” about an obsessed fan taking the rap star’s music so literally that he kills his pregnant girlfriend and himself by driving off a bridge. Well all righty then! Management shrugged off complaints about this junk being played in the Nevada warehouse according to the suit, in defiance of the company’s own sexual harassment policy. This fostered a hostile work environment environment where employees shared porn videos and made inappropriate remarks and gestures towards female employees. The suit claimed that the company’s HR manager told at least one woman to just ignore the music.

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[Pssst! Missouri State University Trustees! You Really Are Ethically Obligate To Fire MSU President Clif Smart And There’s No Getting Around It

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The Equal Protection Project (EqualProtect.org) of the Legal Insurrection Foundation asked the Missouri Attorney General to investigate a “business boot camp” at Missouri State University that specifically excluded white males. The story began getting media coverage—mostly from conservative news media, of course, since the rest regards this as “good” discrimination as an extension of the DEI fad. Caught red- or at least pink-handed, MSU cried “Never mind!” and announced that future business boot camps would be open to everyone, even evil white males. However, the school’s oxymoronically-named president Clif Smart really and truly said this:

“Frankly, I still don’t think we did anything wrong … given that we have multiple cohorts of this going on and this was just one cohort that was limited. We won’t do that. We’ll do a better job on the marketing and information (and) dissemination side and review the process to make sure that everyone has a chance to participate, but we’re not going to exclude people.”

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Update: More Ethics Observations On The Trump Indictment [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

For the record, I am royally sick of this topic already, and it’s just starting, with more than a year to go. I’m sick of Trump, I’m sick of the Democrats’ “destroy the village to save it” obsession with stopping Trump without just winning elections fairly and squarely, and I’m sick of the hypocrisy on all sides, and I’m really sick of reading obnoxious comments in moderation from single-minded ignoramuses who won’t even try to examine all sides of a complex issue, probably because they aren’t capable of it.

Sure, I’ll double down. I wrote on Friday that the decision to indict Trump was wildly irresponsible (if you didn’t discern that from my comparison to cloning dinosaurs, maybe you need to find another blog to hang out at) and was a utilitarian botch of existential proportions, and the tsunami is already developing, as that tweet above from a generally perceptive conservative Twitter wag indicates. Also predictably, gloating Democrats are tossing more of the afore-mentioned jet fuel on the fire, like this asshole:

Yecchhh. But let’s dig in…

1. The last post on this matter has surpassed the number of comments that allow normal people to read them all, so I’ll be overlapping a bit. For example, Alan Dershowitz also framed the indictment as I did, writing in Newsweek that it was “The Most Dangerous Indictment in History,” and saying in part,

This moment portends a massive change in the norms of this nation that all Americans who care about the neutral rule of law should pay close attention to, for it raises the specter of the partisan weaponization of the criminal justice system—not just by the Democrats targeting Trump but by Republicans who will certainly retaliate when they regain control of the criminal charging process.

That is how a large proportion of the public will regard it, and the evidence is irrelevant. Dershowitz also reminded me of Big Lie #6, “Trump’s Defiance Of Norms Is A Threat To Democracy.”

Remember? Democrats are hoping you won’t, but throughout the Trump Presidency, the accusation from the “resistance”/Democratic Party/mainstream media alliance (The Axis of Unethical Conduct) was that Trump was undermining democracy by not following unwritten “norms”—you know, like not using impeachment as a partisan tactic, not attempting to de-legitimatize the President, his election, and the Supreme Court, not weaponizing a health emergency to justify loosening election integrity measures, not intentionally violating the Constitution with Executive Orders like the one requiring Federal workers to be vaccinated, not giving a national speech declaring anyone who opposes his policies of being fascists and dangers to democracy…wait, I’m sorry! Those were some of the norms Democrats chose to defy; I get confused sometimes. My point is that the hypocrisy is staggering. There is a reason no former President or current major Presidential constender has ever been arrested or indicted by the rival party: it reeks of Third World dictatorships, and almost guarantees dangerous national division. This is why Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon.

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On Senator Hawley’s Unethical Questioning Of Judge Loren AliKhan

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I hate this stuff; I condemn it frequently in my legal ethics seminars as a sign of the public’s ignorance regarding the function of lawyers, and when practiced by political parties and the news media, it is particularly disgusting. And here comes supposed GOP star, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo), to pull this despicable stunt in a hearing on the qualifications of Judge Loren AliKhan, nominated for a federal district court judgeship by President Biden.

Hawley’s “gotcha!” employed to discredit AliKhan was that in 2020, when she served as Washington, D.C. Solicitor General, she defended the city in court after the Capitol Hill Baptist Church sued D.C. Mayor Bowser for religious discrimination. Bowser (who, as I’ve already mentioned once today, is one of the worst major city mayors) shut down church events to protect public health during the pandemic freak-out, but encouraged and allowed mass Black Lives Matter protests. A federal judge ruled in Capitol Hill Baptist’s favor, and the city did not appeal because as almost everyone with any legal literacy knew at the outset that Bowser’s double standard was pretty much indefensible.

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Ethics Alarms Challenge! Provide A Sincere, Persuasive Ethical Argument Why This Isn’t An Epic Example Of ‘The Great Stupid’

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

(Yes, it made my head explode.)

Hot on the heels of the news this week that owners of the 1,921-room Hilton San Francisco Union Square, San Francisco’s largest hotel, occupying an entire city block, is being abandoned by its owners because that woke city has become such a hopeless hell-hole that they can’t see the convention and tourism business rebounding comes New York City’s health officials installing the city’s first free drug paraphernalia vending machine in Brooklyn. It features all sorts of goodies for users and addicts, like crack pipes, “Safer Sniffing” kits, drug testing kits and the anti-overdose medication Naloxone. The vending machine also has hygiene kits for the special problems addicts face (like cracked lips) and safe sex kits. Anyone with a New York City ZIP code can claim any of the contents for no charge. The Brooklyn vending machine is the first of four machines that will be installed in neighborhoods that were hit hardest by the opioid crisis.

Wow, what a great idea. I think it’s a great idea. Don’t you think it’s a great idea?

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An Ethics Alarms Comment Of The Day Spectacular: “Ethics Quiz: The Rehabilitated Manson Cult Murderer”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

It’s a conundrum: the more comments a post attracts, the more optimistic I am that I’m not wasting my time. But once the number of comments tops about 20, the chances of them being read diminishes rapidly. Generally I am a poor judge of which posts will generate the most dialogue; this time, I wasn’t surprised. The question of whether one of the Manson cult murders should be paroled raises ethics issues general and specific, including some that have caused arguments for centuries. Not only has it sparked 87 comments to date, the topic inspired so many Comment of the Day-worthy posts that if I posted them individually they would swallow the blog.

So, in order both to facilitate reading the highlights of the discussion and to give the best of the best exposure to a larger audience, what follows are the Comments of the Day by on the post “Ethics Quiz: The Rehabilitated Manson Cult Murderer,” by Steve-O-in NJ, Steve Witherspoon, Humble Talent, Ryan Harkins, Tim Levier, Alicia, Extradiminsional Cephalopod and Tom P. though I recommend reading all 87, even if they include two esteemed EA commenters taking shots at each other like the Earps and the Clantons. (You might want to read the original post, too.)

First up is Steve-O-in NJ:

Life in prison should mean life in prison. Some crimes are just so bad that the person who committed them should never be allowed to rejoin society. I think Charles Manson is the most undeserving recipient of the mercy that came with the temporary abolition of the death penalty whoever existed. I also think his followers, who, young as they might have been, we’re still old enough to be responsible for their actions deserved the same fate.

Don’t get me wrong, 54 years in prison is a damn long time. It’s longer than I’ve been alive, and the idea of spending all that time staring at concrete is very unpleasant. However, the families of those victims who were butchered should not have to see this person walking around free. Too often the victims and their families get forgotten in all of this. The victims here did not a thing. It isn’t as though they had bad blood with the offenders or had done something to the offenders. This is a case of someone who is as close to evil as any human ever was working his spell over other humans who let him work his spell on them and using that control to destroy lives who he really had nothing to do with and no reason to destroy. This is also a case of individuals who could still tell the difference between right and wrong choosing to go as wrong as any human possibly could. I say let this woman rot in prison for the rest of her days, I believe she should only be released if she is in the throes of a terminal disease and doesn’t have very long to live. Then by all means, release her to die.

Now Steve Witherspoon…

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Exhibit A On How Academia And The Public Sector Corrupt Each Other: The Berkeley-Chesa Boudin Affair

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

What is most amazing about this story is how transparent U. Cal at Berkeley is, even proud, about it. Amazing and alarming. The American far left is so confident now that it doesn’t attempt to disguise its most radical and destructive impulses.

Here’s the short version: the most radically progressive city in the country essentially fired its even more progressive district attorney for allowing the city to begin a death spiral into lawlessness. So despite that failure—indeed perhaps because of it— he was just named the founding executive director of the new Criminal Law and Justice Center at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law.

The city is San Francisco, and the former DA is Chesa Boudin. Boudin, who has been discussed here before, is really an antimatter prosecutor: he doesn’t believe in prosecution, law enforcement, or laws, really. The son of Sixties radicals, members of the violent Weathermen group, his mission in life is to “dismantle the system,” as they used to say (and are now saying again) on college campuses. Among all the so-called “Soros prosecutors” allowing cities to decline into urban hellscapes where shoplifting is considered a right and police are hesitant to police, Boudin was the worst by far. Imagine what it says about our elite educational institutions that one of them, after seeing him removed for placing his ideological delusions above his duty, said, “Hey! This is the perfect guy to head up our new criminal justice center in our law school!”

It boggles the mind, or would, if we had not already observed the rapid and so-far unimpeded ethics rot in academia. Here’s part of Berkeley’s announcement:

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