Law & Law Enforcement

Ethics Dunces: Rolling Stone, and Everyone Else Who Thinks Assaulting Law Enforcement Is OK As Long As the Missile Is Funny

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The Justice Department has fired employee Sean Charles Dunn after video showed him throwing a submarine sandwich at the chest of an law enforcement officer as a gesture of defiance against President Trump’s entirely legal executive take-over of crime control in the District of Columbia. He hurled the sandwich at the officer’s chest and tried to run away. When Dunn was apprehended, he told police: “I did it. I threw a sandwich.”

FBI Director Kash Patel announced that Dunn had indeed been “charged with felony assault on a federal officer.” Attorney General Pam Bondi noted on social media that “if you touch any law enforcement officer, we will come after you.” And he was fired.

The arrest, the charge and the employment action were all appropriate, but the Axis news media decided to weigh in as a fan of interfering with law enforcement and subjecting officers to thrown items, although doing so, whatever the missile, is pure assault and also battery (if the thrown item connects with its target).

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Ethics Quiz: Teaching Constitutional Law

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This is a bit different from the usual Ethics Alarms quiz.

Over at Dorf on Law, a site I had forgotten about, Eric Segal poses twenty questions about how Constitutional Law should be taught from this point going forward. They are:

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I’m Shocked…SHOCKED!…That Major League Baseball Is Facing a Gambling Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Cleveland Guardians (you know, the Indians?) pitcher Emmanuel Clase has been placed on non-disciplinary administrative leave through August 31 as part of Major League Baseball’s ongoing investigation into gambling. Clase’s teammate, pitcher Luis Ortiz, was the first player placed on leave under the ongoing investigation.

“The Guardians have been notified by Major League Baseball that as part of their sports betting investigation Emmanuel Clase has been placed on non-disciplinary paid leave per an agreement with the Players Association,” the team said yesterday in a statement. “We have been informed that no additional players or Club personnel are expected to be impacted. The Guardians are not permitted to comment further at this time, and will respect the league’s confidential investigative process as we continue to fully cooperate.”

Clase, an elite closer (the relief pitcher who pitches in the 9th inning when his team is ahead) signed a five-year, $20 million extension in April 2022. He’s being paid $4.5 million this year and has a $6 million guarantee for the 2026 season under the terms of that contract. Why would anyone making that much money risk it all to get involved with gambling in a sport where doing so guarantees banning from the game? That’s easy: professional athletes are not, as a rule, very bright, but are greedy,and have the ethics alarms of 12-year-olds.

I covered this issue in a longer post in February. I was right, the professional sports leagues are wrong, any fool could see it (but these organizations are not run ny just any fools, but very special fools), and the result is unavoidable. The embrace of gambling by sports organizations is going to be a disaster. It is hypocritical, incompetent and irresponsible.

Finally! “The Ethicist” Handles a Genuinely Difficult Ethics Query

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Kwame Anthony Appiah, who has been the The New York Times Magazine’s Ethicist columnist since 2015 and teaches philosophy at NYU, has been in a rut for months, choosing queries to answer from the Woke and Wonderful like “My mother likes Trump; should we be mean to her?” This time “The Ethicist responds to an ethical dilemma I have had to face myself: “Is it right to accept a job when I know the company discriminated against another candidate?”

The question:

I have been out of work for four months. I recently had an interview for a management-level position in my field, during which the interviewer asked a number of questions regarding my marital status, parental status and spouse’s occupation. I’ve spent most of my career in management, and the questions are clearly inappropriate and at odds with civil rights protections. I answered the questions, because I knew the responses would be in my favor: I’m a middle-aged guy whose spouse works remotely and son is in college. I’m aware of an internal candidate for the job, a younger mother of two school-age children, and the interviewer made comments about divided responsibilities and time commitments.

I kind of need the job, which raises two scenarios. In the first, I withdraw from the process. Should I notify the internal candidate of the legal violation, because I suspect (although have not confirmed) that the same questions were asked of her? In the second, I accept the position. How should I deal with the other candidate, who would be my subordinate, knowing that a likely E.E.O.C. violation tainted my hire? And additionally, should I notify the E.E.O.C. myself, regardless of whether I continue with this company?

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July Send-Off Ethics Round-Up, 7/27/2025

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The fact that my leg appears to be rotting off seriously impeded my Ethics Alarms activity this entire week, so a round-up of lingering ethics tales is desperately needed. The stupid wound, complete with a giant blood-blister the size and color of an eggplant, isn’t going to hurt any worse if I sit at my desk a bit longer, so here we go…

1. That painting above, “American Progress” by John Gast in 1872, was posted on the Homeland Security Facebook page with the message, “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” Right, and right. Some Americans weak in citizenship are apparently offended by the statement and the painting. What’s wrong with them, and how did they get this way? The U.S.’s saga is objectively an inspiring one. I do not blame Native Americans for being bitter about how things worked out for them, but a Stone Age civilization was going to fail eventually one way or another, and the resulting culture, society, government and civilization has been a blessing to humanity. My only cavil with the painting is that it might be deliberate trolling. I think government departments and agencies shouldn’t troll. Neither should Presidents.

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Little League Ethics: A Bat Flip Controversy Goes To Court

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Little Leaguer Marco Rocco of Haddonfield, N.J., 12-years-old, hit a majestic home run in a Little League tournament game against a team from Harrison last week. Marco emulated what many big league players do in similar moments of triumph: he flipped his bat into the air to celebrate as he began to circle the bases. His homer put his team up 8-0 and a step closer to the Little League World Series.

But Marco was ejected from the game, and, by the Little League rules, the ejection included a one-game suspension for the next game too. Marco’s innocent bat flip meant he would would be barred from playing in a showdown against Elmora Township, with a the New Jersey state Little League title on the line. Marco’s father was told that in the umpire’s judgment, his son broke a rule that “At no time should ‘horseplay’ be permitted on the playing field.” No rule mentions bat-flipping.

So Mr. Rocco, who is a lawyer, filed a motion asking a New Jersey court for a temporary restraining order, and got it. The judge that Marco could play, in the next game, which took place yesterday, holding that “Little League is enjoined from enforcing its suspension.”

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Now THESE Are Unethical Doctors….

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Bart Writer, 56, died shortly after undergoing cataract surgery at Colorado’s InSight Surgery Center on February 3, 2023. The reason? The two doctors performing the operation were distracted by playing “music bingo” and failed to notice that he had stopped breathing.

A lawsuit filed by his widow claimed that the “the distraction of the music bingo game … contributed to the operating room staff’s failure to monitor Mr. Writer’s vital signs during the procedure” and ultimately led to his death. The game involved listening to ’70s and ’80s songs and linking band names to the letters B-I-N-G-O. Dr. Carl Stark Johnson, the surgeon, and Dr. Michael Urban, the anesthesiologist, regularly played the game during operations and admitted this in their depositions.

The lawsuit was settled, but now the two doctors swear the distraction had nothing to do with their patient’s death. Well, to be more specific, the two doctors are blaming each other. Johnson, who has performed over 25,000 cataract surgeries, blames Urban for silencing critical monitoring alarms without informing the surgical team. “I know that he wasn’t paying attention to the vital signs and doing his job,” he said. Urban, who is now practicing in Oregon, stands by his care and disputes Johnson’s version of events.

Writer, meanwhile, like Generalissimo Francisco Franco, is still dead.

Questions: Why is that surgery center still treating patients? Why hasn’t it been razed for a parking lot?

_________________

Pointer: JutGory

The Gabbard Files

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The big news in last ten days—I mean other than the allegation that Donald Trump wrote a raunchy birthday card (maybe) to Jeffrey Epstein once—was a newly declassified report released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that fingers former DNI James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey among others in the Obama Administration, and later in the Trump Administration, as having deliberately “manipulated and withheld” key intelligence from the public in order to advance the hoax that there was Russian interference in the 2016 election with the collusion of Donald Trump.

Gabbard said she would provide all related documents to the Justice Department “to deliver the accountability that President [Donald] Trump, his family, and the American people deserve…No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to ensure nothing like this ever happens again.” She said she was releasing information that showed a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” by top Obama administration officials, including Obama.

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One More Reason To Despise The Unethical American Bar Association…

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative pubic interest law firm, commissioned research that demonstrated how the American Bar Association pressures law schools to adopt race- and sex-based hiring and admissions preferences using the threat of withholding its accreditation. The ABA oversees U.S. law school accreditation—this should stop—and abuses its power and woke biases to dictate law school discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity and gender in violation of Title VI and the U.S. Constitution. The report is titled,“Unconstitutional Accreditation Pressures Force Law Schools to Discriminate against Faculty and Students.”

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An Incomplete Preview of Coming Attractions (Or Upheavals, or Reforms, Depending on One’s Point of View…)

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I have hinted here at various times recently of a major ethics project that I am working on relating to a growing and so far barely recognized scandal in the civil justice system. It is time to reveal a few details.

There are corrupt tactics and practices in the legal world centering on the litigation of mass torts. They are responsible for losses totaling billions of dollars inflicted on the victims of injury, plaintiffs, corporate shareholders, and taxpayers. These have metastasized over the last decade, spread by the opportunities created by too-loosely regulated law firms being allowed to include non-lawyer partners (in D.C., Arizona, and Utah), the rapid explosion of litigation financing provided directly to lawyers and law firms after a century of being regarded as an unethical practice to be avoided, and a tsunami of unethical and deceptive maneuvers that have been largely ignored by or unreported to the legal profession’s ethics watchdogs.

Quite by accident, I became aware of these practices in my legal ethics practice, frequently by being retained by lawyers and law firms who were the victims of them, and whose clients were at risk as a result. I was stunned at the depth of ignorance of this scandal among most lawyers, which, of course, is one major reason why it continues unabated. I began having regular discussions with legal ethics authorities, and, upon finding a whistleblower who had been an architect of many of these practices, began assembling a coalition, still growing, to expose the bad actors, tighten up the laws, regulations and legal ethics rules that have allowed them to thrive, and to overhaul the system itself that is neither trustworthy nor safe.

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