Law & Law Enforcement

Update On The Uvalde Massacre Extension Of The Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck, Part 4: ‘Don’t Confuse Us With Facts, Our Minds Are Made Up!’ Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Well, I tried again to discuss gun regulation with my next door neighbor following the Uvalde shooting. (The first time was a week before the shooting, discussed here.) We were talking over the proverbial fence about the Uvalde police chief, and her husband said, “Watch: now the whole thing will be blamed on him.” Before I could get out, “Well, not the whole thing, but you have to agree that the police share some resp…,” my neighbor said, “They’ll blame everything but the real cause: there is no reason to allow people to buy automatic weapons.”

“To be completely accurate,” I said cheerily, “you can’t legally buy automatic weapons. That guy in Texas had a semi-automatic.” She literally ignored that distinction. We talked for another 15 minutes, and she kept saying “automatic weapon.” “It’s just the difference between 400 bullets a minute and 300 anyway,” her husband offered. I assume he believes that; when I noted the same distinction between semi-automatic and automatic in a discussion on Facebook, my sister called it “semantics.” It’s not semantics! Moreover, an AR-15 can get off about 40 accurate rounds in the hands of a trained shooter, and about 25 when being used by someone like Ramos. An AK-47, a genuine “assault rifle,” fires about 600 rounds a minute. Hmmm…40 vs. 600. I’d say that’s a material difference. But my neighbor didn’t want to hear it, and didn’t. Continue reading →

What’s This? An Unemotional, Unbiased, Rational Analysis Of The Gun Debate In The Wake Of The Uvalde Shooting?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Indeed. Not surprisingly, it comes from the fertile mind of Prof. Eugene Volokh, proprietor of the esteemed legal scholarship blog The Volokh Conspiracy, now hanging out at Reason, after a brief residency at the Washington Post a long tenure as an independent site. Volokh takes his cue from the recent story, predictably buried by the mainstream media but fortuitously timed in the wake of the tragedy in Texas, of a gun-owning and legally-carrying woman in West Virginia who was attending a party when a man who began firing an AR-15-style rifle into the crowd. She drew her weapon and shot him dead before anyone was wounded.

Volokh asks,

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Law vs Ethics: A SCOTUS Decision Rings Ethics Alarms

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

It’s not surprising that last week’s decision in the Arizona case of Shinn v. Ramirez and Jones didn’t get much coverage outside of the legal media. The decision is procedural rather than substantive, and the majority opinion by Justice Thomas in the 6-3 holding is hard sledding. Nonetheless, it is a classic example of law trumping ethics. The Justice Sotomayor dissent, joined by the other two liberal justices, argues that it trumps law as well.

I would not argue that law must never trump ethics, for law requires consistency and systemic application over the long term to have credibility and integrity. However, Shinn involves a man facing the death penalty, and the decision by the conservative justices chose the virtues of finality over the possibility that the government might be executing an innocent man.

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 5/26/2022: Mug Censorship, A Scientist Is Cancelled, And Happy Birthday Duke!

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

John Wayne was born Marion Robert Morrison on this date in 1907, in Winterset, Iowa. His family eventually moved to Glendale, California, where he grew up and attended USC on a football scholarship. Through a series of events too complex to write about here, Wayne found his way into movies and eventually devoted his career to the mission of creating of an iconic American male hero. That creation, which included some dark elements as well as admirable ones (See “Red River,” “The Searchers” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”) that still has a strong influence, and I believe an overwhelmingly positive one, on the culture.

In this he was assisted by two of the greatest of American film directors, Howard Hawks and John Ford, but creating “John Wayne” was Marion Morrison’s life’s work, to the extent where he refused to shoot a character (who has shot him and was running away) in the back in his final film, “The Shootist,” stating that it would violate the principles “John Wayne” stood for.

The man was not the character and didn’t claim to be. He was well-read, preferred to wear sports jackets and slacks, loved chess and by Hollywood standards—not a high bar admittedly— was an intellectual. Wayne once said that he never though of himself as John Wayne and still had “Marion Morrison” locked in his brain. They called him “Duke” in his pre-Wayne days, so he preferred that name off camera.

There are only five genuine Hollywood icons: Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, Shirley Temple, Fred Astaire and John Wayne, and despite efforts to “cancel” him, Wayne remains the most vibrant, influential, and visible of the group. When I was teaching ethics to lawyers in Mongolia, the judges and lawyers knew virtually nothing about American culture, but they knew (and admired) John Wayne.

Mission accomplished.

1. I’m old enough to remember when it was conservatives who were always trying to censor free speech...apparently many triggered Democrats on social media are demanding that the websites that sell this mug be shut down, or that the mug be censored “like those racist Dr. Seuss books.”

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On “Correct Pronouns,” Part I: Roxane Gay

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It tells you pretty much all you need to know about the biases of the New York Times that its workplace ethics column, “Work Friend,” is authored by race-obsessed, radical, and combative gay feminist Roxane Gay. No biases there! She has also been described here as a prolific writer of prose and fiction and a visiting professor at Yale, and that’s all accurate too. However, her biases increasingly poison her advice as thoroughly as they poison her opinion columns.

Her last two of those for the Times were a laborious spin job to make Will Smith’s attack on Chris Rock at the Oscars somehow virtuous (“a rare moment when a Black woman was publicly defended”) and a standard issue rant against the likely Supreme Court ruling striking down Roe.

Ugh. I have to pause a bit here because I have concluded that Gay is too often intellectually and rhetorically dishonest because of her ideological mission, and people like that shouldn’t have regular platforms (or advice columns) in the New York Times. Here is a representative line from that second essay: “[W]e should not live in a world where someone who is raped is forced to carry a pregnancy to term because a minority of Americans believe the unborn are more important than the people who give birth to them.”

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You Didn’t Really Think That It Was Only The Catholic Church That Had This Problem, Did You?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

From the Houston Chronicle:

For 20 years, leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention — including a former president now accused of sexual assault — routinely silenced and disparaged sexual abuse survivors, ignored calls for policies to stop predators, and dismissed reforms that they privately said could protect children but might cost the SBC money if abuse victims later sued…The historic, nearly 400-page report details how a small, insular and influential group of leaders “singularly focused on avoiding liability for the SBC to the exclusion of other considerations” to prevent abuse. The report was published by Guidepost Solutions, an independent firm that conducted 330 interviews and reviewed two decades of internal SBC files in the seven-month investigation….

“Survivors and others who reported abuse were ignored, disbelieved, or met with the constant refrain that the SBC could take no action due to its (structure) — even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation,” Guidepost’s report concluded….

Above are some of the 220 people who, since 1998, worked or volunteered in Southern Baptist churches and were sentenced for sex crimes. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero Vaclev Smil Offers The Truth About Climate Change That The Hysterics Don’t Comprehend And The Biden Administration Ignores

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Finally: a respected, objective scientist who is trying to explain how useless the arguments of climate change hysterics are, and how incompetent and dishonest (or ignorant) the Left’s approach to the problem continues to be.

The scientist is Vaclev Smil. He’s the Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, with interdisciplinary research interests including energy, environmental, food, population, economic, historical and public policy studies. His latest book is “How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going.” The New York Times Magazine made the mistake (from its political agenda’s point of view, anyway) of interviewing him about climate change, and the interviewer, David Marchese, was clearly dismayed at what he heard.

Read the whole thing, but here are some representative snippets:

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Thursday Ethics Theorizing, 5/19/2022: Book Banning, Another George Floyd Victim, And A Lucky 911 Botch

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I don’t put many Ethics Alarms posts on my Facebook page. The bubble there is so overwhelmingly lazy-leftist and Trump-Deranged that the responses just make me sad and depressed about the state of public discourse and my social circle. I posted about Kamala Harris’s “working together” attack, and predictably two (lawyer!) friends immediately defaulted to “but Trump!” The response that really annoyed me, however, was to my link to the tattooed baby story. Two relatives (one is 94, so she gets a pass…kind of) complained that “with all the problems and threats” (you know, like the threat that a spectacularly incompetent performance by the entire Democratic Party might cause voters to look elsewhere for leadership, which, of course, will doom democracy…but I’m just guessing) the nation is facing, why care about a woman using her baby as a self-promoting human canvas? My answer is simple: unethical conduct matters whether it is big or small, and it’s my job to do what I can to explore both. The site is called Ethics Alarms, and alarms are dulled and muffled when so-called “trivial” ethics abuses are shrugged off. (See: the Rationalization List) In addition, almost none of the over 300 friends (I’m slowly paring it down: more than a hundred gone since January) on my list ever bother to read the blog, which would help save their imperiled brain and values if they did. I cover seven to ten issues every day, more than 50 topics a week. There have been over 14,000 posts on Ethics Alarms in about eleven years; I assume that readers would be bored or worn out if we only explored the big stuff, and even if they wouldn’t be, I would.

1. Remember, the political right is untrustworthy too... After Virginia Beach schools voted two books  from their libraries’ shelves following a school board member’s complaints, Virginia Beach attorney and State Delegate Tim Anderson is representing a client suing Barnes & Noble for making the book accessible to minors, because it is “obscene.” This is just one more sign that if Republicans get the power they crave their most extreme party members will work day and night to make them just as seem just repulsive and fanatic as the Democrats are behaving now. Book banning is as much as an assault on free speech as the current progressive mania, censorship. Book stores are already endangered species: making them responsible for what minors buy there like a 7-11 selling beer will finish them off. Parents should be thrilled that their kids are reading at all. The law suit is a goner, but it will waste a lot of time and money while making the public dumber just by its presence. [Pointer: valkygrrl]

2. Thanks, HBO, but I got my fill of George Carlin while he was alive…“George Carlin’s American Dream” will premiere on HBO this weekend, and my sock-drawer is calling. Carlin is a resurgent hero again among the Woke, which is appropriate. His leftist political comedy was often just as shallow and pandering as what we (when I say “we” I mean “not me”) hear from virtually all comics today who have full membership in the Progressive Propaganda Club. He called golf “racist.” I just heard a spectacularly unfunny environmentalist rant in which he claimed that he rooted for natural disasters because humans deserved them. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Heat-Up, 5/18/2022: More Judicial Review And Lies

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Because I was otherwise obsessed, I missed noting yesterday a true landmark in law and ethics. It was that date in 1954 when a unanimous the  Supreme Court handed down the unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, ruling that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Linda Brown, a young African American girl had been denied admission to her local elementary school in Topeka, Kansas, because of the color of her skin.

Written in 1896 as the KKK roamed the South, the SCOTUS ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson held that “separate but equal” accommodations in railroad cars conformed to the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. Plessy was interpreted as justifying segregation in everything from buses to water fountains to elementary schools. The white school Brown attempted to attend was far superior to her the segregation-mandated alternative and miles closer to her home, so The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People  took up Linda’s cause. Thurgood Marshall led Brown’s legal team, and on May 17, 1954, Plessy was overturned after 58 years as “the law of the land” despite the siren call of stare decisus. The opinion written by Chief Justice Earl Warren declared that “separate but equal” was an unconstitutional doctrine in ringing terms: “We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”  A year later, the Supreme Court published guidelines requiring public school systems to integrate “with all deliberate speed.”

1. Prudent and responsible, if not courageous. Speaking of SCOTUS, newly confirmed Justice-in-Waiting Ketanji Brown Jackson sat for an interview by the Washington Post and was asked about the leak of Justice Alito’s draft opinion in the Dobbs abortion case. Conservative media was triggered by this section:

Q: What was your response when you when you saw the draft leak [of a Supreme Court opinion that would strike down Roe v. Wade]?

A: Everybody who is familiar with the court and the way in which it works was shocked by that. Such a departure from normal order.

Q: Do you think it was a good thing or a bad thing?

A: I can’t answer that.

Q: What do you think about peaceful protests outside of Supreme Court justices’ homes?

A: I don’t have any comment.

Charles Cooke at the National Review writes, “This ranges from somewhere between cowardly and sinister, much like the failure of the justices to issue a joint statement that echoes the chief justice’s condemnation of the leak and statement of determination to identify the leaker, and that condemns the protests, which violate federal law.”

Wrong. SCOTUS justices should not issue opinions on such matters. Her statement that the leak was a breach of the normal order was factual, and breaches of normal order in any institution are unethical. She was right to go no further. As for the demonstrators, some of them may be arrested at some point, and a statement by a Supreme Court Justice regarding their conduct could interfere with a fair trial.

Her responses give me more reason to trust Jackson’s judgment, not less.

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More On Media Disinformation To Confuse The Public About Roe And SCOTUS

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I finally ditched my expensive print subscription to the Times, but old sections and articles are scattered hither and yon. One is an April 10 Sunday Review section that has one of Jamelle Bouie’s columns. It has proven enlightening in the wake of the subsequent freakout over the impending reversal of Roe v. Wade.

Facts Don’t Matter to Bouie, who has toned down his brazen anti-white racism a tad since moving to the Times from Slate, where he was the resident race-baiter. (His Ethics Alarms dossier is here.) Now and then, as in this case, he even writes about something not exclusively racial. His April 10 column included a revealing paragraph in his attack on the concept of judicial review, which, if it were banned as today’s Democrats appear to fervently wish, would allow a sufficiently totalitarian-minded party in control of Congress and the White House to ignore the Constitution and pass laws “for the greater good” that violate it.

Bouie wrote in part,

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